Diary

30 May 2009

Peter Florence opens his diary

People are pouring into the festival in far greater numbers than ever before. This really doesn’t taste like recession. Nor is it simply ‘staycationing’ driven by a strong euro. There’s something strange going on here. The economists are all talking to vast audiences and so are the entertainers. Not a ticket to be had for Nick Stern or Frank Skinner or Vince Cable or Hugh Masekela. We want to take the crisis news both more seriously and with frivolous contempt. Enough with the bad times, the low morale and enough with politicians making out it’s all going to be fine if we mortgage the present off to our grandchildren. There’s a tribal thing going on too. Vulnerable, we like gathering together. We like to visit and to revisit other, enduring values of community and imaginative adventure. Hay, Glastonbury, Edinburgh are all havens of resilience and pleasure.

Gag of the week from Richard Holmes, remembering the rain of Hays past and recalling an intervention from a reader who hailed him from under an umbrella with: ‘Good morning, Mr Holmes. Lovely weather for biographers... plenty of feet of clay.’

Bum of the week is Niall Ferguson, Harvard prof and purveyor of dazzling brilliance on money, war, politics and society. Bunking off from the British Council cocktails, he skinny-dipped off into the River Wye. Bunking off, as it turns out, upstream from the party and swimming with the current, he will now forever be known as the Naked Historian. Txt msg from Terminal 5: ‘Jamie Oliver eat your artichoke heart out.’

The buzz here in the green room is around digital publishing, and it has an acute tang in a town that’s built its reputation on secondhand books. The gadget of choice this week is the newly launched Sony Reader. ‘Slightly Foxed’ of Hay-on-Wye thinks it might toll the death knell of the antiquarian book trade with its hundreds of books on a single datacard. The ‘artefact argument’ that insists that books be beautiful things seems not to be in play this time, as the gadget is sleek and utterly covetable. Publishers who’ve watched the music industry’s upheaval are either deeply anxious about security of content or cannily embracing the brave new world — like Jamie Byng of Canongate, and who’d bet against him? For what it’s worth, the people not complaining about the collapse of the music industry are the musicians and the music-lovers who download their tunes and flock to their festivals. Not so much an industry collapse as an industry revolution. Publishing’s Darwin moment will follow. Adapt or die.

Only Stephen Fry could possibly tie Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill and H.L. Mencken into an analysis of Obama’s rhetoric. But as of last night there are a thousand of us who can reach back to the marvels of 1812 with just four degrees of separation. At a Cambridge Mummers party in 1980, Fry recounted, the late, great Alistair Cooke took his hand. ‘This hand,’ Cooke said, ‘shook hands with Bertrand Russell. And Bertrand Russell’s aunt danced with Napoleon!’ Magic.