25 Hay Festival

To feel ourselves more than ourselves. To learn and escape, sometimes at the same time. To see the world differently. To pay attention. To enter other lives. To time travel. To have another human whisper in your ear from thousands of miles or thousands of years away. As part of the ongoing beautiful failure to capture what it means to be alive in the letters of an alphabet.

Yes
Yes. Language is the primary means we have of explaining, filtering and communicating the world around us. Our ideas and perceptions live in language, and live differently in each language. The death of a language reduces the variety of our understanding of being here. Histories, cultural proclivities, experience are all inlaid in a language. If a language does die then every effort should be made to record it for future generations.

The two tier British education system which perpetuates inequality, the class system and unfair privilege. Regardless of social background education should be the one level playing field from which all children should be allowed to start. A one tier system would mean everyone would invest in that system. Standards would improve, not drop. I still hope, one day, we’ll look back with shock at this period of educational apartheid.

Any leader or scientist genuinely working towards a sustainable form of energy which will release us from the strangling grip of oil upon our economies, security and environment, but will also not result in just another dangerous monopoly of greed.