Hug Your Heroes: A week at the Hay Festival
The Hay Festival arrives, and my hometown bursts into multicolour, as chic women and men clamber out of London cars packed to the gills with tents and suitcases. Hay folk are used to this annual influx, as the town grows from a sleepy 2,000 residents to 300,000 overnight, for ten days, before the bubble bursts and normality is restored. During this time there will be endless talks on philosophy and literature, plus all manner of music, parties, food and gigs. It gives Hay a yearly cycle, something to work toward and get excited about. In the weeks running up to it, doorways get a re-paint, shop-fronts are cleaned, bunting strung up, marquees erected, the castle grounds filled with Caribbean food stalls, gin bars, and ice cream stands.
I like to be in Hay anytime of the year, but especially this time. This morning, half way through the festival week, I am dampened from a night of booze in The Old Electric Shop. I went out to watch old-time musicians pluck fiddles and mandolins, dried mud from Primrose Farm caked between their bare toes. A Moroccan lantern hung above us all, fairy-lights glittered in the shop windows, as the sky behind them grew dark, silhouetting the pavement drinkers outside.
I wander around the Electric shop between bands, sniffing boxes of mesquite incense and fondling beeswax candles. I trace my fingers over blood-orange silk quilts, buttery soft and way out of my price range. Settling on another SIPA beer instead, I return to the throng.
During the Hay Festival I stay at my dad’s house, the home I knew for the first 18 years of my life. It’s a home with so much personality, it helped form my aesthetic, my comforts, my misery and joy. We stay up late every night, sipping red wine by the wood-burner, philosophising with whoever else has pitched a tent in the garden. On the nights when I see the clock has crept towards 2am I panic, my usual routine as a parent so much tighter than this.
These fire-side talks fill me with so much enthusiasm and artistic inspiration that I am buzzing. The drinking wears me down. I miss my boys who are staying with my mum again tonight, ensconced in their happy place with nanny. I dream of these moments alone, but once they arrive it’s hard to dismiss the background tapping of guilt, to be momentarily living a life away from them, in circles they’ll never be a part of.
We’ve been discussing the ‘inner voice’ a lot this week, after my dad went to see a talk on the topic. Comparing our inner voices (mine are definitely plural!), how they help and hinder us, how old they are, what tones they take with us. One of these voices is always telling me I’m not good enough - not a good enough mother when I live my own life away from the boys. Not there 100% of the time, instead choosing old time music and alcohol over curling up under Star Wars duvets next to their warm bodies and rosy cheeks. It seems as a mother you can’t really win. Driven mad by no space, and then guilty when it finally arrives. I hear this voice when I’m in my studio working, too. The voice says, ‘They don’t really know where you are, and why you choose all this time away from them.’
‘But you’re keeping yourself afloat and healthy, doing what you need to do,’ comes the reply from friends. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’
This morning I lie in my childhood bed, watching through the leaded windows as the ash trees dance in the wind, their long skinny trunks swaying. My room is mostly emptied of me, except for selected artefacts balanced on windowsills or inside cupboard drawers, which drum up instantaneous memories. Golden statues of Tibetan deities, bright eyed and gleaming, despite the cobwebs that have been knitted over their bodies. Clay animals I bought from a market in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2010; a marble eagle pendant gifted from an ex-boyfriend. A stiff, glassy-eyed teddybear. A row of heart shaped stones, each a wonky, cracked love note that I’ll forever pocket from pebble beaches. A washed-out framed photograph of my great grandmother and all her siblings, lined up formally, unsmiling as they gaze at the photographer. (She is the great grandmother I channeled in this piece of writing, one I feel a real kinship with, despite never meeting her.) There’s the painting Hels made for me 20 years ago, after we first met - the two of us sat in a field of barley, chewing barley sheafs as we too stare unsmiling at the viewer. The painting has faded, but the moment seems like yesterday.
Even with the old windows shut I can hear the waterfall and birdsong. The distant chainsaw as Llew and dad saw off dead branches of an oak tree.
When I’m not nipping back to see my boys, I sit and watch friends’ bands play in local haunts, swig Corona next to a campfire, eat Tibetan thali with my brother, listen to the rawness of Johnny Flynn’s voice in the flesh.
I roam around the Hay Festival site in the sun and the drizzle. Yesterday I had lunch on a picnic bench with three women from the Arvon writing course I did back in February, checking in on what we are all doing (and not doing) in our creative processes this month. There are books and poetry pamphlets and memoirs that want to be born out of us, and we need each others’ accountability from time-to-time, to keep on the straight and narrow.
I visit the festival gift-shop, to collect my free mug. It’s the second year they have asked me to design their official mug, and it’s been an exciting job to have, to be part of a festival that I have witnessed evolving and expanding my whole life. ‘This’ll be the last year they ask you to illustrate for us, probably,’ says the woman behind the desk. ‘It’s getting more and more corporate.’ To be commissioned by them has felt special, and I’m sad as I look around the merchandise, noticing the same logo taking over all the quirks and illustrations that used to be on sale there.
On the last weekend of the festival I sign up for a creative writing workshop with one of my favourite authors, Clover Stroud. I love the exceptionally feminine honesty of her writing, especially around motherhood. I leave with a plethora of notes and ideas to keep me writing. The next morning my mum and I watch her on a panel of women (including Lucy Jones, Candice Brathwaite and Dr Pragya Agarwal), all of them speaking about the reality of motherhood. The theme of guilt comes up over and over, and I leave feeling so liberated by their certainty of the essentialness for mothers to tend to their own journeys alongside their children’s. We talk about mothers in Palestine right now, too, the tragedy of this moment too big to ignore.
It’s like taking a deep sigh. A sigh of grief and violence, of recognition, of impermanence, of feeling deeply seen. Later I go to see Robin Wall Kimmerer (author of Braiding Sweetgrass) talk, astonished that I get to share in her energy IRL. It’s another deep sigh, this time of ancient Native American wisdom, sacred environmentalism and our abusiveness to the natural world.
My heart is expanded from it all, and worn out too, and I am ready to curl up next to my sons, to watch Pokémon while the impermanence and beauty of life swirls around my head alongside happy happy memories of another year of our festival.
