Everyone always says this was the best Hay ever but this one (my seventh? Eighth?) really was.
It started in the car from Hereford, where I talked with neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow about her thesis on schizophrenia and the fact that 10% of ordinary people have experienced hallucinations. I asked whether the (occasional) waking visions I’ve had qualify, but her son threw up all over the car so I missed her answer. Damn those winding Welsh roads…..
No one home at the hotel, so I caught a lift down to the festival with Martin Rees, world-famous astrophysicist, and discussed the new 38-meter telescope being built in Chile. As you do.
Five hundred people came to see Shappi Khorsandi and me try to out-wit each other in a session on humour, but in the meantime Robbert Dijkraaf talked about the usefulness of useless knowledge (“there aren’t separate words in Dutch for ‘arts”’ and ‘sciences”’), Rahaf Harfoosh changed everyone’s life with her warning about how the internet has changed our brains (“in the future, the ability to focus will be more important than the ability to write code”), Bettany Hughes told us about the first woman in recorded history to have a mastectomy for breast cancer (600 AD), and Cat Weatherill enthralled a room full of cynical adults with the story of Bluebeard (with added sexual content) while Chris Riddell drew the pictures.
I saw old friends Tracy Chevalier and Neil Gaiman, and met new ones Sebastian Barry and Colm Tobin as we navigated the treacherous waters of Start the Week with Tom Sutcliffe. I pitched a series on cross-sectional discussion to Radio 3 program director Matthew Dodd, bought a book on Mexico thanks to the extraordinary Lydia Cacho, the bravest woman I’ve ever encountered, spoke about my dear departed friend Mal Peet and our book, Beck, and felt a bit demented by the time Rosie Boycott and neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor convinced us all that we had or would soon have dementia.
I didn’t sleep because I was too excited.
Time to sleep when we’re dead.