The charming Welsh village of Hay on Wye has a castle and a clock tower or war memorial (we drove too fast for me to see). Little clothes and book boutiques and tea shops are up and down narrow streets. Our coach had to negotiate a corner carefully.
The loads of bookshops include both secondhand and new books in the castle and cinema. The conversion of huge numbers of empty building into bookshops, made Hay so famous that book villages and book festivals are now all over the world, including South Africa and India.
I've visited Hay several times because a free excursion goes there from the University of Wales, Caerleon campus, if you are booked into the Writers' Holiday (see their website). If you can buy books new and second hand at Hay anyway, and get books signed at Writers' Holiday, what extras do you find at the Festival?
Those who go every year usually book tickets to hear particular authors. I was too late. A fortnight before the date when I planned to attend the fair, tickets for the authors who appealed were already sold out.
So what do you get by going along without buying tickets? Entry is free and you can spend your entertainment budget on buying books. Immediately after their talk the authors do signing in the big bookshop tent. (The whole place is a set of white marquees on a grassy field, linked by an undercover boardwalk, with a couple ofile:///Users/angelasharot/Pictures/iPhoto%20Library/Modified/2009/Hay%20on%20Wye,%20Wales/Image269.jpgf cafes and a toilet block.) The map on the board is a very interesting design, and like computers can probably be interpreted instantly by most children under seven but takes the over fifties two days to decipher. The first day we parked in the main car park near the castle, paying £2.50 to park and £1 each for the shuttle bus. The weather was raining and windy with some cheerful bright spells. My best decisions were flat shoes and a warm hooded jacket. Most people were dressed for a hike rather than a fashion show. What chance is there of talking to an author if you haven' booked any shows? In the shows apparently the audience can be as many as what looks like several hundred people so your chance of even asking a question from the floor are small. I saw the author of a book about Vermeer's hat doing signings. So I bought his book and managed to follow him to the queue to pay for books where I got to ask a question about where he lived. He was a Canadian from Vancouver. Some authors fly in and out the same day. . Apparently a helicopter in and out visitor was comedian Barry Humphries who plays Edna Everage.
So we were told by the couple who had to share out small round table in the coffee and sandwiches area. the secret to beating queues is to buy your drinks and sandwiches nearer noon than one pm. Between 1 and 2 pm an increasingly lively a form of Welsh rugby is played by people using sandwiches as balls and chairs and tables as goals. (In case any of my Mandarin speaking pupils are reading this slowly with the aid of a dictionary, that was a joke.)
So I bought books, lots of books. Couldn't I have done that in a bookshop or shopping centre nearer home?
Apparently this year's dramatic event was not an authors' fight but the peace between Naipaul and another author, arranged by a kind or canny go-between.
Book shopping and shopping for book bric a brac. Bags with the name of the festival were free if you bought a copy of the sponsoring national newspaper, The Telegraph. The bargain was a tee-shirt for a fiver in the Festival ticket box office. Why so cheap? The printing commemorated a previous festival.
You want to know what we bought? A pair of Penguin espresso cups with a penguin in the centre of the saucer and an orange book cover showing the word Black Mischief. Five pounds each cup and saucer set. If I'd had an unlimited budget I'd also have bought a jigsaw of Wales and a deckchair with a Penguin books design and a set of book ends.
The Oxfam stand was doing a bustling trade in books, music CDs (I bought John Denver, Rod Stewart, and pianist Myra Hess. I also liked the postcards of quotations. A stand promoting red squirrels was offering free nibbles of their organic (fruit - berries? and nut?, and cereal? and yogurt?) bars. A drop of whisky or a drop of juice were also given out in tiny quantities in thimbles of the giant see-through variety.
As we passed through Hay again on the shuttle I was sorry to see that the cartoonist shop had gone. I'm glad I had the chance to take a lesson in drawing caricatures while the elderly artist was still there.
We stayed two nights, visiting for a chunk of the morning and afternoon on a Saturday, then the Sunday morning before driving back to London.
The off-motorway route we chose was not the Severn Bridge route I normally follow using the AA and RAC route guides. This time we used both the Michelin guide and satnav. We managed to see a ring of stones like Stonehenge - large numbers of stones, and we stopped for tea at a Brasserie Gerard in Marlborough, a quaint little town.
Wales is so very green in May that we could not resist constantly muttering the book title How Green Was My Valley on the way down. On the way back I was impressed by the way the grey stone buildings had been edged with yellow bricks. So different from redbrick London. Lots of thatch too.
We had been wondering how easy it would be to get accommodation. We drew a circle around the destination of Hay and looked for hotels with Michelin commendations for either accommodation or restaurants.
On the way down on Friday night we stopped at a modernised extension to an old pub. Excellent duck in a 'rissole?' = more like a pate, with pastry edging and a plum or soy or mixture of the two in a sauce. Wonderful.
I asked to see the bedrooms which were modern. Along the bedroom corridor was a series of caricatures of famous people with a caption showing pun on their names which were then illustrated.
Our hotel The Lake was a delight. the lake itself had swans. It was really two or more lakes. The house, a former hunting lodge and spa (all those town called Wells had wells of medicinal water). I swam in the pool and then sat in the outdoor Jacuzzi overlooking the ground. Although the spa bath was outdoors it was just a step out of the gym and was covered by a roof although open-sided and the water was warm. The ladies changing room was convenient with keys in the locks, no messing about looking for a pound coin you don't have.
The Penguin stand had a good though pricey selection of souvenirs.
