The Hay Festival (Part Two)

One of the things I used to hate when I was travelling was being told that somewhere had deteriorated. You were expected to feel culpable, I think - you were the kind of person, after all, who enjoyed pancakes smothered in honey - but I always ended up feeling that, yes, there are places that have been hollowed out by tourists much as certain wasps hollow out the bodies of certain spiders but, in the end, most beauty spots still have something (an essence, call it) that is pretty much inviolable. Cusco's walls are still vividly there - they still seem to speak to you - even if you have had a fry-up before you visit them.

It seems to me that the Hay festival's like this. The presence of the Daily Telegraph; the glib slickness of its offshoot, The Hayley Telegraph ("His [Chris Evans'] trajectory from broadcasting hero to boozed-up zero and back again is a riveting story"); the crowds; the way that you are hustled from queue to queue - well, let's just say that there've been better years. Still, once inside, one's irritation tends to fade. While it's true that I saw trousers and jacket that were, let's say, egregiously red and yellow (V.S. Pritchett called it the "loud shabbiness of wealth"), it's also true that what I was left with once an event had started was simply the words themselves - their power and the pleasure that I take in them.

So. Don Paterson called the sonnet sequence "the hula hoop of the 1590s". He said that the iambic pentameter was like a hi-hat over which Shakespeare riffed; he had perfected the form to the point that "it didn't exist". Alfred Brendel said that, for a pianist, form and expression were "near identical twins". Eric Hobsbawm told us that his world view was still, essentially, that of a man who had been involved in the popular fronts of the thirties while Paul Theroux spoke in an African dialect, quoting a proverb that said that "if you're ugly then you'd better learn to sing". Howard Jacobson quoted Dickens, pointing out that his happy endings aren't happy at all but return us to the way that "the arrogant and the froward and the vain fretted and chafed and made their usual uproar".

These are the type of statements that remain with you. They linger in the mind - they light the subject up - and, yes, I will be going back next year.