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.

IS IT VERVEINE OR CHAMPAGNE?

Verveine! Or, as it's sometimes called here, Verbena, is a most unprepossesing little weed which I first met on a 'herbal walk' conducted by that eminent herbalist, Zoe Hawes. It was growing in a sandy car park, I remember, and had little purpley-pink flowers.

Now I can't live without it, for made into a tisane - a type of herbal tea - and drunk at bedtime it ensures that even insomniacs like me will have a good night's rest. There are two problems, however: first it tastes like cat's pee and secondly you can't easily buy it inexpensively in Britain.

As to the first, well it is amazing what you learn to put up with for a good night's sleep but an admixture of orange or peppermint improves the draught. And as to the second, the answer is just to buy the stuff in France where the supermarket shelves bulge with rack after rack of tisanes of every description, including half a dozen different preparations of Verveine. The cost is minimal - about €1.30 for 25 sachets.

Knowing my weaknesses, my neighbour, Annie, who is French, came back from a trip home this week not only with several boxes of Verveine tisane but a winebox as well. I suggested that an aperitif was due over an above a monetary settlement. She agreed but insisted we came to her.

There's an upside to that, for Annie always serves champagne and not only any champagne but a champagne - Denis Salomon Brut Reserve - that is not sold in shops but which she acquires mysteriously by the cellarfull. It has a wonderfully, dry biscuity taste that is so much friendlier than many similar concoctions. Anyway, in no time at all we had managed to put away two bottles and reeled home to supper full of that especial bonhomie which only champagne can bring on.

The following day we were on Theo duty - looking after our grandson of two and a quarter whose diversion of the moment is painting rather than champagne. We covered the kitchen floor with blank paper, mixed a pot of blue paint, put a brush in his hand and in no time had some thoughtful abstracts, vortexes of blue against the swirling white for which a gallery might have proposed the name 'Parental Anguish.'

We tried some hand painting, and then some foot painting; bold prints tracked across the paper.

"Why, Theo," I asked, "don't you try painting a head?" I was wondering whether he might attempt John the Baptist or whether that might be a step too far.

He contemplated the problem, stroking his cheek with the business end of the paintbrush. Then his face half-blue, he lay down on the paper and pressed cheek to canvas. A broad blue spludge resulted. Well, I had suggested head painting.

On Thursday we flipped the phone through to the mobile and headed up in the late afternoon for our first visit to the Hay Festival where Russell, an old friend and colleague and now a Professor in Cardiff, was delivering the Richard Livsey Memorial Lecture.

As it happened our host - who was also introducing the talk - had been delayed and so we were sitting there in the tent, a small but select gathering, wondering what to do. For a moment I thought that I might have to make the introduction, which indeed I was to learn later I was well placed to do. But then our host arrived, the introduction was made, and we heard a most interesting exposition on the History of the Welsh Liberal Party.

But it made me wonder whether I should perhaps be writing some of this history; certainly of the anecdotes and stories of the local and national figures that I had worked with during the eighties and nineties. I mentioned this to Russell in the sponsors' tent afterwards as we sipped an obligatory glass of Cava. "But it's all in my book," he said. "We did a two hour interview, you gave me a great deal of material. Do you not remember?"

That must have been three or four years ago, but all memory of it is wiped! Gone! Now that he had reminded me I recalled a dim trace that he was preparing something or other. So now I have to wait until September when the book comes out to see what is and what isn't in print already.

Oh dear, I am getting old. Or maybe a side effect of drinking Verveine is memory loss. One never knows quite what these innocuous herbs do - and it must be doing something to send me to sleep as it does. Then again it could be the champagne!