MAKING HAY at the Hay Festival 2013

Mary Portas was appointed by Steve Hilton in David Cameron’s office, to look at how we might revive the British high street.  Most of the country is desperate to regenerate the high street, she believes and she’s speaking in a town where feelings are running high on that subject. The people of Hay, perhaps as many as 85% are opposed to the arrival of a new supermarket, which Portas was careful not to name, but is known to be Tesco.

She has spoken to the campaigners leading ‘Plan B for Hay’ and is clearly sympathetic and supportive.  Her views nationally and their’s locally are clearly aligned.  She does however express some concern as to whether ultimately the people of Hay can have an effect.

Portas turns to the question of manufacturing and acknowledges that we will never match the capacity of India and China to produce low cost high volume clothing but she points out that designer manufacturing has also moved offshore from the UK.  She believes that with the right strategy we could bring as much as 30% of fashion manufacturing back to the UK, but we only have 10 years in which to do it before we lose our native skills.  She tells us how delighted she was to hire a former seamstress for her Kinky Knickers project who had been stacking shelves for Tesco.

Internet has replaced mediocre retailers and for many chains has reduced their need to be in as many places.   We need to better define what the high street is for.  Last year’s rioters were people with no sense of belonging, we need to create community by turning high streets into multi functional civic places.

Portas shows us a short film about Margate, which shows just how far decline of the high street can go – she will be working with Margate to attempt to arrest that decline an involve the retailers are the core “decision making should be the responsibility of the people of that town”.

She believes she is making inroads with the government but some of her more radical proposals are “still under review”.  The scale of her task is brought into sharp relief when she mentions that on her visits to number 10 she is “always bumping into the head of publicity and marketing for Tesco”.

She finishes with a  quote from Gandhi relayed to her by David who drove her to Hay “be the change you want to see”.

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The sun is out and it makes it somehow even more appropriate to head over to HowTheLightGetsIn, the fringe festival that sprang up in Hay four years ago.

We’re in the more bohemian surroundings near the centre of the town to hear Michael Eavis, Hilary Lawson and Melvin Benn talk to Mary Ann Sieghart about Festivals.  Lawson is the founder of HowTheLightGetsIn, Benn is the man behind Latitude and Eavis, well you know who Michael Eavis is.

We begin with a short history of the beginnings of Glastonbury.  A little over 42 years ago Eavis attended the Bath Blues Festival and decided he could do something similar.  T-Rex was on the bill for the first Glastonbury, entry was just  £1 and Eavis gave away free milk, illegally as it turned out as the  milk was not pasteurised.  Clad in tweed jacket and denim shorts Eavis also talked about the bleaker years of the festival such as 1985 when a bunch of barrier jumpers attempted to set fire to Michael’s house.  Despite some ups and downs Glastonbury holds a special place in the hearts of everyone who has been there.   Hilary Lawson thanked Michael for “many years of wonder”.

Lawson spoke of the great community that characterises the best festivals and their levelling nature.  Benn spoke about how he set out to create a  live version of a Sunday review section with Latitude. All of the panelists talked about the tough economics of the festival business.  There was agreement across audience and panel alike as to the special experience you get at festivals.  How wonderful  to be at one, in the sunshine.

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Alain de Botton begins by saying that he does not believe that God exists, but moves swiftly on.

He talks about religions as dishes at a buffet or cafeteria where we can select what we like from each. He makes cultural reference to literature and music stating that we wouldn’t listen to a single musician or composer or read a single author. Comparing Catholicism to The Beatles would seem to be something of a stretch.

The essayist and philosopher turns to religion and education. He suggests that the secular approach to education is mechanistic whilst religious education plays to the fragile reality of human existence. He talks about ritual in religion that harnesses the community to deliver truths to the inner self.

Oratory in the Pentecostal church creates a far greater response and involvement than the average university lecture.

Another station at de Botton’s imagined buffet is the one where we consume art. He argues that art does not realise
its potential to move us. When art is combined with religion the messages are simplified and more effective. Alain de Botton was confused by Rothko when he first saw his work at The Tate and believes that his messages have been obscured by an ideology of coolness.

He comes closest to describing religion when he talks about them as institutions and organisation and when he references religious community.

His arguments were carefully constructed but ultimately very narrow. He focuses on the structures and cultural outputs of religion but avoids entirely both the intentions and purposes of religion.

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Alex Crawford opens with a stunningly frank and raw passage from her book Colonel Gadaffi’s Hat. With her colleagues and facing death in Libya she contemplates fear and regret thinks of family and friends then realises she has a phone signal “shit if we are going to die I’m going to let people know about it… I phone the office and ask to be put live on air.”

The war was ugly and disorganised. The rebel army didn’t even have a communications network at the beginning. Even the conclusion of the war was messy. After Alex Crawford had entered Green Square in Tripoli with the rebel army the fighting flared up again and Saif Gadaffi gave a defiant press briefing from the leader’s compound.

Amongst the horrific stories of witnessing brutal killing at the closest of quarters and losing “eleven of my nine lives” there is humour in a story about her family. Naughtie asks what she tells her children “well I did say to my one child that the children in Iraq would love to have the food on her plate ‘take it to them then’.”

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Lionel Shriver was a must see booking at this year’s Hay Festival and the event did not disappoint.  Shriver was here to talk about her ‘new’ novel ‘The New Republic’ – a book where everything is not as it seems.

First the book isn’t really new it was completed in 1998, written before ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’.  Secondly it’s a comic novel: about terrorism.  Third it is set in the fictional province of Barba, tacked onto the south of Portugal – though the narrative was greatly influenced by the writer’s experiences in living in Northern Ireland, her home for 12 years.   Shriver’s bitter distaste for terrorism came through forcefully.  The novel embodies that distaste “there are two things that terrorists can’t stand – being ignored and being ridiculed.”

As the session drew to a close Rosie Boycott asked Shriver what her text novel would be about “fat” said the author.  Boycott a journalist to the core responded without a beat “is that because of your brother?”.  Shriver was clearly unsettled, revealing that her elder brother had been morbidly obese and died as a result.  ”We are meant to be hungry” the author says “being sated is unpleasant.”

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The weather is cold and Andrew Marr admits to having enjoyed a whisky on his way to the event. Not a problem at Hay, the great Christopher Hitchens liked to have a drink both before and during his eloquent despatches. Marr makes it clear that he is the right side of merry.

A republican turned monarchist, Marr is here to talk about his book The Diamond Queen. He sets up a debate with his 25 year old self. He talks about the “sticky little network of privileged elitists” in the country today but argues that has nothing to do with the Royals. In fact he argues that the British aristocracy have largely sneered at the modern Royal family.

The younger Marr has no idea says the present day Marr, how incredibly hard the Queen and Prince Phillip work. In addition to the interminable public duties she reads reams of government and intelligence documents on a daily basis.

The monarchy is one of the few institutions that unites the country, says Marr, something of great value as we face the difficulties of the next 10 or 20 years.

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Peter Oborne won’t answer the question, Simon Scharma thinks he would be happy to be oiled up on a beach and Val McDermid thinks crime writers are amongst the happiest people around. We are in the Barclays Pavilion for the latest panel discussion and another selection of 25 Hay Questions about the way we live now.

The panels in these sessions are too big and the format is too rigid to allow the conversation and ideas to flow as they might. Despite that Peter Oborne brings the afternoon alive with his condemnation of teaching unions. I’m sure Oborne must know that this is half-term and teachers are disproportionately represented at Hay.
It turns ugly and the boos outweigh the claps by some margin, though I suspect that many aren’t actually listening to the politically conservative, socially liberal argument that Oborne makes.

The next time Oborne speaks the severe winds whip up and part of the tent dressing is blown over “is something biblical happening?” he asks.

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Eva was Stieg Larsson’s partner for 30 years before his death in 2004. She knows better than anyone how he wrote the Millenium trilogy. She has written a memoir ‘Stieg and Me – Memories of my Life with Stieg Larsson’.

Eva revealed that many of the stories that have become legendary about Larsson are distorted or untrue. He worked hard but he wasn’t a workaholic and he ate well, most of the time.

The books were written concurrently. The entire trilogy was complete before the first ‘Men Who Hate Women’ later retitlled in English ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ was published. As many know, Larsson died nine moths before the first publication. The stories were not fully conceived or planned out before they were written. “If something didn’t fit in one book then it might go into one of the others”.

The first book began with the simple story of a man who receives pressed flowers every year and grew from there.

When Larsson died nothing went to Eva as they were unmarried and he had left no will. Everything went to his family. Eva felt that many people rushed in to exploit Stieg’s memory and legacy. She invoked an ancient Nordic curse and she believes many have suffered as a result of that curse.

There is an incomplete fourth book. Two hundred pages are written and exist on a laptop that belongs to EXPO the anti nazi magazine that Stieg founded. It is set in Canada but as a book that was only a third completed it is unlikely to be completed or published. Using ghostwriters “would be just for business.”

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Anna Reid is a journalist and author and former Ukraine correspondent at the Economist. She began with a quote from a thirty year woman trapped in Leningrad during the siege “there’s a corpse for every family..altogether the library has lost at least 100 people…what saves you is bestial indifference to human suffering”.

Three quarters of a million civilians died of starvation or a related illness, or over a quarter of the population.

Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941 taking the Red Army completely by surprise. Their advance was swift. By September 8 they reached Leningrad. No food stocks had been made nor evacuation plans laid. The city fathers were in disarray.

The siege began. A month’s worth of food was all the city had. Health problems set in as a result of poor diet, gum disease, scurvy and oedema. By November people were collapsing in the street.

Fuel also ran low. Normal life collapsed. There was no sewerage. Public transport ceased and the snow arrived. As the winter progressed the death toll rose from 11,000 in November to 100,000 in January. Corpses were left where the died. Doorways and abandoned trams were filled with the dead.

Temperatures dropped to minus 40. People queued from 3am until lunchtime for 125 grams of bread. Forced abandonment became commonplace, people who secured permits to leave did so leaving family members to face certain death.

Rations weren’t equally allocated and your ration card was a likely indicator of your likelihood of survival,

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Jung Chang is in Hay 21 years after the publication of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. She opened the session dramatically by producing her grandmother’s shoe, evidence of the cruel practice of foot binding.

The book is the story of the women from three generations of her own family. Her grandmother was required as a young woman to become concubine to a warlord to whom she bore a child, Jung Chang’s mother. She later married a senior officer in the communist party.

Jung Chang herself was born in 1952 an grew up under Mao as a privileged child of a senior party official. Eventually her parents fell victim to the cultural revolution, her father was excited and does prematurely and her mother was paraded in the streets before also being exiled.

The writer became deeply disenchanted with Chinese communism and the Mao leadership and came to Britain in 1978. She was one of the first 14 people to come to the UK to study and the first from the 90 million strong Szechuan province. She gained a doctorate from York University in 1982.

Following the success of Wild Swans Jung Chang spent 12 years with her husband Jon Halliday researching a biography of Mao. She is deeply critical of Mao and accused him of being knowingly causing mass starvation amongst the Chinese population by selling food to buy weapons and military technology. Mao Zedong: The Untold Story was published in 2005.

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