Awaydays at Hay

I have just come home from visiting the literary festival at Hay-on-Wye. It is one of the highlights of my year because I go with two lovely friends and we see fascinating people talking about their lives. It is a perfect combination. The speakers at Hay are truly an impressive bunch: they have launched world-changing campaigns, written Booker-prize winners, travelled the world on perilous adventures or simply given joy to millions of people by making them laugh. I am in awe of what these people have achieved and it does force me to look at my own life with newly critical eyes. Still, we can’t all be Margaret Atwood, can we?

I’m fortunate to have seen Margaret Atwood twice now and I couldn’t admire her more. Surely there can’t be anyone else blessed with such a whirling brain, quick wit, intellectual confidence, flowing eloquence and far-reaching wisdom. And such honesty. She told us that on long-distance flights, even though she has her laptop open with the intention of doing some work, she gets distracted and ends up watching children’s films.  And it wasn’t presented as a guilty pleasure, merely an interesting insight into what she did on planes. In fact, Margaret Atwood was so engrossed in watching the Captain Underpants movie on a recent flight that she left her laptop on the plane. I’m sure she’d have been equally unapologetic if she’d been watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or re-runs of Sex and the City. What a woman.

We also saw Susie Dent, who is an etymologist (not an entomologist like Margaret Atwood’s father), and has an infectious passion for words. There is so much to like about her: she is brilliant, but modest, informative and funny, but also incredibly open-minded about the English language. She’s obviously delighted that no-one tries to govern English (the way that the Académie française tries to control French), with the result that it’s a wonderfully accepting, evolving, surprising, changing, amusing and rich language. In her view, no one owns it – English is the property of everyone who speaks it and they can do what they like with it.  I think that’s a wonderfully democratic view.

The only problem with watching Susie Dent being interviewed is that she has so much of interest to say that I really could have done with a transcript. She’s on a mission to revive useful words that have fallen out of favour. One of my favourites is confelicity, which means pleasure in the happiness of others – the opposite of schadenfreude, which we use with far too much glee. She also introduced us to ultracrepidarian, which describes “one who loves to give their opinion on matters they know nothing about.” Apparently, it’s from the Latin ultra crepidam, meaning “beyond the sole of a shoe,” and derives from an ancient Greek story in which an artist overhears a cobbler’s criticism of his work and tells him to confine his opinions to his own area of expertise. Shoes.

I can think of many ultracrepidarians (myself included), but definitely not Susie Dent or Margaret Atwood. Rather than aspiring to Hay Literary Festival greatness, perhaps I should just aim to confine my opinions to matters I know something about. But then what would I talk about?