Hay Literary Festival

My week-end at Hay Literary Festival was an absolute delight, enjoyable on a number of levels. The accommodation was fantastic in an old stone farm house set up on top of a hill and the only place we could get a mobile phone signal! Rachael only provides accommodation at festival time and it was the first year she had offered, so I hope we didn’t put her off. She had three teenage sons and took a particular shine to A*. Breakfast was great, although only I ate it after the first day as A* was ‘recovering’ from coming in at dawn.

The week-end did wonders for my relationship with A*. After various not very successful attempts to talk to her about how I feel, I felt the week-end got me to an understanding of how she feels and as so many friends have previously said to me, it really has nothing to do with me or how she feels about me as a mother or person. A* has a dream to launch herself into a world of adventurous travel, to live her Spanish persona and possibly never come back. University life has not been a great experience for her, apart from Zaragoza.

She adored Hay, all those insights into authors, poets and journalists, went off on Saturday night with a genius Canadian poet and on Sunday to some alternative Channel 4 party with 2 UEA associates who were stewarding at the event. I saw more of the funny, vibrant, dazzlingly intellectually smart young woman than I’d seen for a long time and I felt very loved by her. It was extraordinarily healing for me and worth every penny it cost!

Finally, it was just bloody stimulating! Brilliant summaries and resumes of middle east politics by leading foreign correspondents and UN officials, a university style lecture on interpreting Donne’s relationship with his wife in the context of 16th century sexual mores by Germaine Greer, Jeanette Winterson talking about myths and our duty to make the world a better place, a Mandela style personal story from a Guantanamo Bay prisoner, angst ridden authors, extrovert impressionists, satirists, readings …… all speakers get white roses and there were all these people walking around with white roses and even who we went to see that I didn’t know. I had to keep asking A* who they were and what they wrote and I shall spend the next year looking them all up on the internet and ordering their books from the library!

And Hay is full of thousands of old people, glamorous, batty looking, affable, liberal, intellectually growing, old people. I can go back in years to come and it will be fine. Old people and students and not much in between.

Hay was a welcome relief from the drama of front of house double glazing, although as it slides into a similar scandal to the kitchen floor tiles I am just sitting on the money and waiting. The first downstairs window went in almost fine, the upstairs was measured totally wrong and will be 3-4 weeks while they make new ones and is just held in with sticking tape, the porch roof has not happened because they had no one in the organisation who had the skills to make ‘that type of porch roof’ and have had to contract someone in who then got something in his eye and has had to have a week off (think of all the rain in the last few weeks). And there are various faults with what is already in BUT J2, A* and Bear think it looks great – J1 hasn’t seen it yet – so all is not lost – it’s just problematic!

A* is spending the summer in Spain, Morocco and Norwich at her pub job there. J1 comes home next week and is back in Waitrose in Harpenden and has 3 weeks work experience at a PR company off Bond Street as well as holidays with mates planned. I am waiting to pay for the double glazing before I see how much we have left for a trip for J2 and I. Rosie (ex-lodger, but still secretly dating Bear) got found out again and is being sent back to the USA. J2 had a great time on his football trip to Holland.

It looks like I am finally losing my Scarman work as they inch towards appointing a full time Director (James is going back to customs and excise after his secondment), but I’ve got a promotion at EC1 and have been asked to manage the community development team. I’m not exactly jumping up and down about this as I feel I have been here before where I get early promotion and then get myself into trouble on some point of principle, but I couldn’t say no as the guy who gave me this job asked me to do it and the extra money will be useful when I lose the Scarman stuff. However, I have quite enjoyed just being responsible for commissioning and monitoring projects rather than people hassle.

I am also deciding I need to address undeveloped bits of me in order to network myself into potential opportunities if I don’t get my contract renewed this year. This involves Chamber of Commerce networking events which are quite fun and you get to discover that people you think are so get up and go are as scared as you. J1 says that the A-level he has used the most is drama and I can absolutely see why. I met this inspiring young man with oblong black rimmed glasses which lots of entrepreneurs wear in London who has offered me 5 days training free to become a recruitment consultant for the over 40s; I’ve met up again with one of regeneration’s bright spark consultants who I remember from Tower Hamlets days who happens to be a mate of a team colleague here and we all had dinner in the pub and he dished all those people from Tower Hamlets who I thought he thought were genius at the time. I had a wonderful dinner with this woman in her 60s who is big in adult learning and whom I admire enormously and I’m going to the theatre with next month … blah, blah! I am proactively transitioning my middle years to ascertain my post parent stage!

FP and I are fine. I do my friends stuff in the week and devote myself to him at week-ends apart from the Hay one. We spend a lot of time in bed reading the newspapers, in the village pub, cooking for teenagers and their mates, eating, doing house stuff and being companionable. I need it to recuperate from being knackered all week.