You may have noticed the blog has been a bit quiet this year and I thought it was about time I explained. I set up Making Hay in 2009. I’d been coming to Hay for a few years and wanted to give the blogging thing a go for a bit of fun. The first post, Making Hay Whilst the Sun Shines was a brief affair but I managed reviews of Jake and Dinos Chapman, David Aaronovitch, Stephen Fry amongst others and enjoyed doing it. I managed a grand total of 551 views in 2009. I repeated the exercise in 2010 and it gained a bit of interest with 3000+ views during the festival.

In 2011 I was approached by Lyndsey who wanted to blog too and she remains the only other person to have blogged for Making Hay. I never met Lyndsey not even at the Festival, we exchanged tweets and emails but as she was there just for the 2nd weekend I left early that year we only crossed over for a day. Despite the fact some people have assumed blog was part of the Hay establishment I’ve never met any of the organisers either. Making Hay has always been a amateur affair and predominantly a solo project. Despite that last year there were 21,419 visits and there’s a twitter following of over 15,000.

All of the above makes me just a little sad to say that I won’t actually be at Hay this year.  I’m a PR person by trade and in November I set up a new company.   It’s been going well but it’s demanding and and that’s where my time is going right now.  So at present the blog may not have a future.

I did have a thought that there might be one or two Lyndsey’s out there.  If there are I’m happy to open the doors of Making Hay to other bloggers who will be at the festival this year.  There’s a ready made audience and you can email me at makinghay@rocketmail.com or at post @Making_Hay on Twitter and we can take it from there.

Best,

Rob.