MORAL HYDRAULICS AT HAY

Hay 25 Draws to a Close

Last weekend I was perched, high up, on a plastic seat in a big tent listening to someone talking about 'moral hydraulics.'  And interesting it seemed too.  Yes, it could only be the Hay Literary Festival, whose 25th anniversary fell this year, and to which we make an annual pilgrimage to rub shoulders with the great and the good and spend a day eating over-priced grub and drinking wine whose cost makes you quite wilt at the knees.  Nevertheless, as I said to J, when you have to ship everything in to what is, in effect, a field and then ship everything out again and hire temporary staff - with all those modern regulations to trip you up -  the prices start to look quite reasonable.  Given the price of tents.


'Moral Hydraulics' - who on earth might be rabbiting about moral hydraulics and keeping a straight face, or at least a contented smiling face that makes him look as though he has just received a noble commission to go back to Columbia University and become King?  Yes it was  Simon 'Hi class!  I hope you are all in good form this morning and feeling bright because there'll be questions afterwards' - Schama, who with us is always a must-go-to-see.  His lecture last weekend, on Victorian England's search for some spiritual purpose and their consequent expeditions through the Holy Land to uncover the archaeology of the Bible and in the process equip Jerusalem with clean water (the 'Moral Hydraulics' of my title) had me literally on the edge of my seat.

For the first time in goodness how many years I actually felt alive and could feel the ideas whizzing around in the cortex.  My brain became a pinball machine with this idea, this memory, this connection, this 'wow' - all bouncing off each other and ringing bells.  I may have been missing my lunch but this felt like being back at university before the dreary business of examinations got in the way of education and one could luxuriate simply in the hot shower of ideas cascading upon one's head.  An hour, pretty much, of erudition, delivered pacily and without notes - a real tour de force.

Still reeling, we skedaddled out of Simon's lecture and made our way to meet William Boyd, being interviewed about his latest book 'Waiting for Sunrise'  of which he read us an extract.  Since reading 'Any Human Heart' - his novel cleverly written in the form of extracts from an 'intimate journal' - I have read several of his books and stories.  I like the style and sentiments and the way in which his own, defiant but slightly regretful voice, comes through his various protagonists. As he finished in good time for questions I thought I'd ask one and was disconcerted to find the television camera focusing on me and my torso projected on a giant screen.  It's true what they say, I thought: television does make you look a stone heavier. I wonder why? Maybe it is something to do with hydraulics.

The question I'd have asked Boyd if ever I had found myself next to him in a bar would have been whether he had actually tried skipping an evening meal in favour of red wine and crisps, which is what Logan Mountstuart,  the writer of the 'intimate journal' above,  does in his declining years in his house in France.  I suppose he has.  Come to think of it so have I, though not in France.  It seems such a remarkably civilised thing to do - a bottle of good burgundy, an entertaining book, a pencil and paper to make notes, a dog and perhaps a cat too.  And some good handmade crisps.  One could go to bed happy thinking that the evening had not been entirely wasted.  But only if one were dining alone.

But that would have been a question for the bar.  Instead I asked him what I thought was an interesting question about how in this, the two hundredth centenary of Dickens' birth, he thought that the profession of novelist had changed.  A question, I reckoned, that might have provided all sorts of avenues down which he might happily have charged - technological, abolition of censorship, competitive pressures, niche markets - and so on.  Instead he probably thought I was just some smart-arse and, perhaps caught off guard and having, perhaps again, like me, the type of slow brain that needs time to consider propositions properly, he simply floundered with the sort of answer that would hardly have got him into Columbia or anywhere else.

He would have thought me even more of a smart-arse, too, I suspect had I been able to carry through my intention to get him to sign a copy of 'Waiting for Sunrise' not William Boyd but Logan Gonzales Mountstuart.  Well, I thought it would make a change, given the number of copies there must be signed 'William Boyd.'  But it was not to be.  The queue was long and I was nowhere near the front and he seemed to be taking his time to talk to people.

Moreover, I realised suddenly that the next show was very soon to begin and I was supposed to be meeting others in the hospitality tent before hand.  My emquiries into Logan Gonzales Mountstuart (it is a feature of Boyd's writing that he chooses outrageous names) and his red wine and crisps habit will have to wait for another day.

So then an interesting presentation  on the ethical dilemmas of humanitarian medicine from the director of MSF in the UK.  Should you treat a diseased child prostitute brought to the clinic by her pimp knowing that she will simply be returned unwillingly to prostitution when she is cured?  Are you as a medical resource, simply providing a free medical service that the brothel might otherwise need to pay for?  Are you colluding with the pimp?

Profound questions indeed, but then it was time for a change of ideas and pace.  Our last show was Simon Callow - the actor - who wandered on to the stage in front of a thousand people and talked for an hour, again without so much as a note or a picture, about Charles Dickens who he has studied and read and played and has now written a book about.

We were expecting readings from Dickens but instead we got a biography that focused on Dickens' relationship with the theatre.  Absolutely fascinating! And delivered with an actor's panache.  Callow seemed to warm to the audience as he went along and while he started in a fairly pedestrian manner talking about some early comical experiences in playing 'A Christmas Carol,' he seemed to gather strength as he went on so that when he finished the applause rolled on and on and on.  A thousand people or so all applauding eagerly.  He seemed quite overcome and gave a very theatrical bow.  So  apart from managing somewhere to have a glass of bubbly in the sponsors tent that was that for this year.  But we shall be back next no doubt.

It usually rains at Hay, but we were fortunate in not seeing rain until the time came to depart. It had not rained then for two days and by then most of the mud had dried up.  The Macmillan nurses car park where we left our car was still open and conditions were almost civilised. We reached our car dry shod as the final Hay audiences were being entertained.

JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS

CADS In Holy Cross Church

 

 

 

 

 It has been a busy weekend full of Jubilee celebrations, marking Elizabeth II's 60 years on the throne. not something that we, or she, will see again.  It is quite remarkable when you think of it, 60 years of listening to and advising Prime Ministers from Winston Churchill to David Cameron, sixty years (and four children) of good times and bad times but she has come through it, elegant, graceful and smiling.  We have a lot to be grateful for.  I can never understand what the republicans think we should gain from abandoning an institution that works so well, which unifies the nation as no other institution does, which is above politics, which provides dignity to the office of head of state and above all which earns the country so much in tourist revenue.  Besides it is fun to celebrate from time to time.

Not Our Beacon

This isn't our beacon on top of  St Hilary Down, it's actually a representation of something in 1588 when the Spanish Armada threatened to make England a Spanish province.  Our beacon was very similar and would have been instantly recognizable to those folk of long ago, though they might have wondered why we made so many double barred squares out of planks of wood (pallets) and wondered just what they were for.  This enormous tower of wood was built in the middle of a field and some 300-400 people gathered around it in a big and happy circle.  Behind came a small army of officials (some with 2 way radios) ambulance men, firemen, a steelband man and a seller of hotdogs. The way itself was lighted by paper carrier bags filled with sand in each of which burned a nightlight. The beacon itself was ignited with firebrands made from a fierce, smoking pitch of the sort you see in Robin Hood films. (These, in fact, would have been a considerable improvement on the febrile Olympic specimens). The fire was to be lit at 10.15pm  We counted down the seconds 45, 44, 43, chanting in the darkness.

Cowbridge's Jubilee Queen

The whole scene then was medieval, the people gathered in their encompassing circle around the fire and singing - in this case, the National Anthem - as the flames curled and danced, high on a shower of sparks, far into the night, their faces glowing in the reflected glory of the flames. On the distant hills across the water,  pricks of light, glowed orange and showed where others were engaged in a similar activity. Most impressive, most impressive indeed. I met a couple of friends with a Thermos and we toasted HM's health in tepid coffee. I will have to request a hip flask for Christmas.

It was as well it didn't rain, not that it would have mattered to the bonfire but it would have mattered to we who toasted the Queen's good health and wished here, should it be possible, yet another 60 years and if not then long life for her children and grandchildren. But it did rain the next day, the day scheduled for street parties and maypole dancing, for the eating of cake and the performing of spectacles.

Children Dancing Round the (Indoor) Maypole

The King and Queen Process Through The Church

King and Queen Watch the Party

We produced our own reigning monarchs and King and a Queen and a little Prince and Princess. They moved among us encouraging the troops.  But if they reigned their rule did not extend to the heavens for the rain came down thick and heavy and continuous and the entertainments and festivities had to be moved inside, first to the Holy Cross Church - a fortified medieval construction built sometime in the fifteenth century on a much older site.  There the Cowbridge Amateur Dramatic Society had a stall to beguile likely souls into trying their hand at drama and their feet on the boards.

Later we repaired to a large function room where bands played and the children skipped and hopped around an indoor maypole, entwining each other about with ribbons, while their fond parents ate cake and drank tea from enormous urns, amid a sea of bunting and flags and general red, white and blueness.  We - folk from CADS - also put on a little show on the History of Cowbridge.  The children were still dancing much later when we delved into the recesses of this fine old medieval pub - much older than its patron the Duke of Wellington (of Waterloo fame) to find something a little stronger in which to toast the Queen's good health until it was then time to come home again and to put away our own noble Union Jack that has been doing service at Jubilees and Royal Weddings and the like ever since the first World War.  It was made somewhere in Lancashire of some traditional mixture of cotton or linen and the colours are softer and less garish than much that the modern world is offered from the factories of Guandong Province. 

COMING HOME

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

We are coming home tomorrow all being well.  After many adventures. We've had a delightful time.  Exotic weather. Hot, yet cool in the shade of the enchanted trees.  As ever I have eaten and drunk more than I should.  Our marvellous hosts hosted marvellously.

Our Shakespeare show, performed 'pour les voisins' went well enough.  We could have had a bigger audience, but it is not every day that you will find Shakespeare performed in 'La France Profonde' in front of the Deputy Mayor who is a proper mayor, though naturally with no chain.  There is no formality:  everyone kisses everyone else.  We drink rosé wine and eat smoked salmon sandwiches on the Mill lawn.  Under the walnut trees again.

We did the St Crispin's Day speech from Henry V and also some bits from 'As You Like It' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'  for which I had a fantastically painted face thanks to one of our friends here who is a face painter.  Our French audience applauded dutifully.  We provided translations.   The Scottish play figured too.

We've been in the medieval town of  Figeac today.  It was Market day and we heard someone from a far-off country playing jazz on a piano in the Place Champollion. Then he switched to Bach.  Prelude and Fugue number 1.  Absolutely beautiful.  We set ourselves to walk around the town, to snap the ancient buildings teetering over their alleyways, but tiring we sat down to lunch - for me a tough steak better suited to shoe leather.  But the chips and salad were agreeable. Then over to our friends in Lessal, a forgotten hamlet nestling in a forgotten departement. They have a swimming pool but I didn't swim because the water was only 26 degrees. My delicate skin needs 30: not to feel cold. Instead we watched a Redstart feeding her chicks and drank china tea and contemplated why Buzzards ride the thermals.  Their house is on top of a hill whereas the Mill is at the bottom of a valley - so it is hotter and more humid here.

There are wild boar around, we see their tracks and where they have dug for roots along the walking trails we have cut on past visits. But they make no noise and the place is silent apart from the eternal chuckling river and the birdsong and the drilling of the cicadas in the uncut hayfields.

Sadly the Mill is sold so we may never stay here again, indeed may not even see it again, so there will only be memories and photographs.  It feels like a death.  The trees will grow on without me. The tractor will rust. I drank a glass of Sancerre under the walnut trees this evening to say goodbye.

The others are watching Miss Marple on the television, but I am out here on the terrace, typing away.  How quickly a week passes and we have done very little.  Reading, a very little writing and learning lines, even less cooking.  But still it has been relaxing but I could do perhaps with another week and then perhaps another.  I asked our friends whether they didn't miss the madding crowd of social life back home and they looked out over the rolling hills and said 'no.'

We went to see a neighbour's house. A tiny house of two rooms and a kitchen - no bathroom.  Unlocked.  Tiny windows.  The whole place black with smoke from the fire.  The only concession to modernity an electric cooker shoved into the grand inglenook and a stainless steel sink in the galley kitchen But it must have looked much the same two hundred years ago, with the drain running out of the wall and into a clump of nettles.  Dark, oppressive and dirty; a hanging shelf in the middle of the room to keep food out of reach of rats. Quite eerie - a regression to another age.  Yet in the midst of plenty. 

The old mayor brought us a bottle of walnut oil this morning. He said it was strong and it looked strong - a rich nutty brown, and yet it has hardly any taste apart from a slight mustiness, similar to that which still rises like a miasma from the old and disused walnut pressing chamber in the Mill here.  That too is dark, black and gloomy.  Like hell with the fire out.  Most curious. We delivered to him last autumn three sacks of walnuts and he has given us back three sacks of crushed walnuts. Our task now is to separate the shells from the kernels.  In the old days apparently the village would get together for this task and spend a day shelling walnuts and generally feasting and drinking.  Then the shelled kernels would go for oil.  I am an expert on this now.

It is still warm, but becoming too dark to write. The birds are still singing and a cock has just crowed somewhere in the gloaming.  Neither have the cicadas found it time to go and clean their teeth. I expect the first bat will be along in a minute.