Cheers, but(t)…

Visual

I should be taking pictures but they would only make you jealous. Each day is more beautiful than the last; summer is here, towering like a lark. 

 

(Note to sponsors: it wasn’t Elena’s fault! She tried, she really did. I’ve got the camera and all the leads, and she showed me how to – but… no.)

 

Actual

“We live in rural Wales. The church, the pub and the village hall are gone. But we have a virtual community now, on facebook and twitter,” said a lady yesterday, in the audience of the Green Dragon’s Den. 

 

Virtual

My spirits dipped. But this morning I breakfasted with Johnny Duddle, author and illustrator of ‘The Pirate Cruncher’. Jonny desgined the characters for the upcoming Ardman film, ‘Pirates!’. (Note well: Gideon Defoe, author of the books on which the fim is based, created the characters: Jonny designed their screen avatars.)

 

Residual

Jonny prefers working on an electronic, touch-senstive screen: “I do miss the smells, and the materials, but children love detail, and the screen is brilliant for detail – you can leave things, knowing you can come to them; you can correct mistakes, you can zoom in and out…”

 

Pivotal

He was off to do a talk, and you rarely meet a happier man: he has a new pirate costume, the book is flying, he was about to entrance the children with his digitally translateable skill. 

“And what are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to America, actually, on holiday. I’m going to do an oil painting course! I’ve never painted oils….”

So there you go – WAP screen, cutlass, action.

 

Paradoxical

The festival is spotted with puns, overlaps between the provinces of the past and future. A man shades his iphone with a book, then uses the machine as a bookmark. I have not seen a single Kindle – except on the back of every copy of the Telegraph’s festival newspaper. 

 

Instructional

Teaching today, Young People’s Writing Squads. The workshop is billed as ‘how to write reviews’ and ‘how to write for blogs’. We have just done the former: an excellent group of students are currently watching Jacqueline Wilson with brightly critical eyes. (I bet she melts them in the first five minutes.) As for writing for blogs… This is the last day of the residency, sadly.

 

Lamentable

Just when I was beginning to get the hang of it, too… My comrades in the blogsect, Simon Mundy and Tiffany Murray, make it look easy. They work in a relay. cCme to think of it, that is easy. My wish-list for next time would include an avatar who could tell the difference between Cae and Caer (field and fort – thank you Sum) and Henry V and Henry VIII (thank you Sarah) and who could subtract (thank you Sarah) and spell, and eat by imagining food, and overhear beyond the lines of –  

Simon: “As my assistant blogger, have you got anything to report?”  

AB: “No.”

 

Unforgettable

Thank you, gentle reader, for any time you have been able to give this.  Thank you, Literature Wales, and thank you Hay Festival. It has been an honour to see behind the scenes: I resisted blogging the dialogue in the little huddle at the end of the day where receipts are counted and venues planned – but it was very funny to eavesdrop. The crew in the Green Room kitchen have washed up more literary cups than anyone since Orwell, with considerably better humour. I particuarly relished the calm of the staff refuelling tent, where the stewards, riggers, drivers, back stage and front of house staff eat – Jody, Alex and Philippe Sands ended up in there, watching the football together, and everyone was too kind to throw them out. 

 

Coda

A conversation in the book tent with Angel Scott, a white-haired lady with a glinting eye and commanding manner, who was scouring the signed copies table.

“I’m a PUNTER,” she said, grinning. “I love BOOKS! Now go away and WRITE one, will you?” 

Mrs Scott, I will. Gentle Reader, thank you.

Melting ice-cream, burning books

Oh

The golden time; you can smell the fields. Other festival scents include ‘spicy’ lamb burgers, tents, tobacco, macs, new books (which don’t smell as good as old ones) and my favourite so far – the refrigeration trailer belonging to Martin Orbach.

 

My

He cracks open the trailer to a swirl of vapours, a dervish-dance of condensation, soaked with the sweet snap of sheep’s milk ice-cream. Martin has sold this manna, Shepherds, to over twenty Hay festivals. The vapour is very strange, operating instantly on those senses which seem to lie dormant, in wait for chocolate, vanilla and – who knew – cinder toffee.

 

God

More cinders than toffee in Germaine Greer’s lecture on the psalms. At the end she waved gaily to her fans – once, twice – kissing her white rose and taking a reluctant leave. It had been an impassioned rush through the history of the bible in English (“the most burned book in Europe,”) illustrated with successive translations of Psalm 43.

 

Fire

The psalms are Hebrew devotional texts. No one knows who wrote them, when or why, Greer said. We followed psalm 43 from it Vulgate (Latin) version, through Wycliffe’s translation, pausing at a conversation at High Table in St John’s, Cambridge, where Greer found a number of international scholars conversing in Latin, as all scholars would have done in the fifteenth century. (“Just a touch of toffee pudding please”, in Latin – go!)

 

Time

We passed via Tyndale’s version, and Cranmer’s Great Bible of 1540, copies of which were chained in churches. To consult one of the six available in St Paul’s you would have had to queue, like people waiting to use a telephone, Greer said. (Though one only sees that in long-distance services in the inner cities, now, perhaps the simile makes sharpened sense.)

 

Tempus

Greer’s theme was the struggle between establishment attempts to curb access to the scriptures and the people’s desires to read them. (“Literate”, – Latin for ‘lettered’ – meant able to read Latin, rather than able to write it.)

 

Fugit!

Henry V, Edward and Mary Tudor are all bible burners, but in 1560 the Geneva bible emerges: the first small, mechanically printed, annotated with notes and arguments (introductions) bible, ideal for personal study. This is Shakespeare’s bible, Greer argues, a radical protestant bible with a  version of the psalms that directly fed his poetry. She claimed that with the coming of James I and his version (much celebrated at Hay this week) “You got the Authorised Version and a King – the radical tradition went to America!”

 

(Greer’s Australianness, no less than her learning, allows her to address us as You, which she does very charmingly, and we love it.)

 

And Back

“I have written to Cambridge University Press, one of the few presses authorised to print bibles, and asked them to bring back the Geneva bible, but even now I would be amazed if you could get it printed. The British Library has not got one, there are none in the great collections, and this is because it was rigorously suppressed in favour of the Authorised Version,” she said.

 

Will Would

The ‘stream of consciousness’ psalms, Greer concluded, gave Shakespeare room to move – they were not merely lyric, honorific, devotional poetry, but whispers in God’s ear.

 

Compare and contrast:

 

Here is psalm 43 from the Geneva bible – note the notes: this was a teaching bible, a study bible (and the first to have numbered verses) which was why it was so threatening.

 

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/cmt/geneva/psa043.htm

 

And this is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 34. Note the tone – the direct, intimate, psalm-like way the complaint is made to a silent figure.

 

SONNET 34

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
‘Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence’s cross.
Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

 

 

Hotter…

Hope if you will

 

Much talk at the festival of Kah Walla, who will be challenging Paul Biya for the presidency of Cameroon this autumn. Paul Biya has been in power since 1982. Ms Wallah has had an interesting time of it so far. She was abducted for 24 hours, she has been beaten in front of her supporters: she clearly does not scare. Crossing your fingers for her would be a wonderful start, but if you were to look her up on the web, and spread the word…

 

http://theblacklistpub.ning.com/profiles/blogs/kah-walla-cameroon-peoples

 

Overheard at a Party (courtesy of Alexander Clare)

 

Ah, Toby Young. We met last year.

 

Was I a ****?

 

What?

 

Was I a ****?

 

No. But it is quite a good line. I read your book. Didn’t think much of it.

I don’t think much of your school, either.

 

Huh. I had another left-wing **** going on at me this morning. He had a go at me about the school in front of my kids. In front of my kids!

 

Ghosts

 

Fiona Dunbar writes for children. Her heroine, Kitty Slade, can see ghosts.

(Her latest adventure is Divine Freaks.)

“No, I haven’t seen one. But my mother came to say goodbye to me: she was in a coma for two weeks before she died, so we never… anyway, she came to say goodbye to me. She just – did.”

 

 

Driving Change

 

Stan Charity can make it snow and rain. He starts fires and sets off explosions. When he is not blowing things up for the film industry he pilots extraordinary machines: he took me home the other night, in a shining black V8 beast. The thing could have shown me a DVD, as I reclined in the passenger seat, while displaying its satnav map to Stan as he drove – on the same screen. I don’t think they do it with mirrors – let’s not even get into the mirrors.

 

“The things that go on under the hood are amazing. I wanted to talk to the guy who presents the Gadget Show – I just missed him. Why don’t they do that on the show? Get a different piece of an engine every week?”

Top Gear thrashes cars in circles; The Gadget Show features consumer technology – MP3s and Blu Ray etc. Stan Charity has seen the gap – show the kids how clever cars actually work and you might just inspire the next generation of British engineers. If you see the guy from the Gadget Show, Jason Bradbury, please tell him to get in touch with Stan.

 

 

Rocket Science

 

“I don’t mind being described as a Welsh writer,” said Tom Bullough, author of the The Claude Glass. “But that’s what other people call me. I’m a Radnorshire writer.”

“Where are we from?” and “Where are we going?” seem to be the questions of the festival. Tom is from hereabouts, and I have a shrewd suspicion about where he is going. His next novel, ‘Konstantin’ is based on the life of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a nineteenth century Russian visionary, one of the founding fathers of that proverbial science besides which everything else is easy.

“Is it long?”

“Short.”

“80,000 words and the Booker?”

Tom laughs. “It’s not eighty thousand words! I like a shorter book, with density.”

“So what’s it actually about?”

“Nature,” he says.

Ok, fifty thousand words and the Booker then. It comes out in March next year. Do read The Claude Glass in the meantime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sun and Shadow

 

Oh, Wales! The hill country feels like the sea-side today; that light, those slow-sailing clouds.

 

Excellent conversation over breakfast: Anna Coote of the New Economic Foundation believes in timebanking, and reducing the working week to 21 hours.

 

Professor Ian Gough of the LSE specialises in climate change and social policy.

“What should we do?”

“We need to go for zero growth, in the west anyway.”

 

Ian surveys a newspaper. The new UN climate chief thinks the global target for warming should be reduced to 1.5 degrees. Ian is not sure.

 

“We’re all signed up to two, we’re practically at 1.5 already – let’s not get distracted from everything else we have to do!”

 

They went to see Caroline Lucas MP, who is speaking this morning. She worries that we will not get the kind of radical change we need without disaster.

 

I listened to Daniel Swift, author of ‘Bomber Country’ – a meditation on and investigation into the bombing campaigns of World War Two. Swift’s grandfather was a bomber, shot down over Holland. The writer talked to people who were in cities on the nights his grandfather took part in raids on them, as well as interviewing veterans among the air and ground crews of Bomber Command.

 

Swift said that the battlefield extended from the first war’s trenches all the way to the aerodromes of Texas where American schoolboys learned to fly, trained by men like Randall Jarrell, whose poem, ‘Losses’, Swift read..

 

From ‘Losses’

 

We died like aunts or pets or foreigners

When we left high school nothing else

had died for us to figure what we died like.

 

In bombers named for girls

We burned the cities

We had learned about in school

Til our lives wore out

 

And the cities said to me

Why are you dying?

We are satisfied if you are.

But why did I die?

 

 

The audience included the sons and daughters of veterans. Swift refused to stand with or against the bombing campaign, arguing that both viewpoints (in which the bombers were either war criminals or heroes, saving the world from evil) rely on the fiction of judgement with hindsight: the idea that we might have done anything different, and, by implication, that ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is the death of understanding.

 

“Poetry comes in where judgement is resisted,” said Daniel Swift.

 

 

Event 247

 

We left the tent, old figures jacketed

In shuffling wind and sad sunlight.

Six million (of my group) and another twenty

 

One said. Fifty five thousand out of

One hundred and ten in the bombers

(Second worst place to be after

 

U-boats), another. No one knows how

many German civilians died. It is a

number that will not be known, he said.

We settled for half a million.

 

———

 

 

Multiple requests for news of Alex and Jody. They are well. Alex had an encounter with a bug yesterday.

 

Colour: Blue

Expression: Poisonous

 

Also with Axel Sheffler, the Gruffalo’s illustrator – ‘A genius, a complete pro,’ said Jody.

 

They met the Duchess of Cornwall on Tuesday, who asked them how they were. Alex allowed her to pose for a picture with him.

 

They also met Brian Moore. It took me a few years to warm to Moore, post-England, as it will when a man wreaks such havoc on your team. But his wonderfully subjective and impassioned commentary now place him among my heroes.

 

Thanks to Alex we can add another quality: Brian Moore, Jody says, is absolutely brilliant with children.

Psychogeography Section

The crowd has grown a skin of coats. Iain Sinclair is here to give the Gwyn Jones Lecture. Sinclair’s latest book is ‘Ghost Milk’, inspired by what he sees as the destruction of landscape east of the river Lea – a part human, part natural tangle of the kind Sinclair loves – on which the London Olympics will be held.

“I was in Athens, looking at the great Olympic stadia they put up, which are grassy wrecks now. I asked someone, how do you feel? He said ‘We are a culture of ruins. It’s not a bad idea to put a few new ones up from time to time..’”

 

Sinclair traces various threads of energy, literary ley lines running into Wales through writers. (Ley lines are themselves products of this border – it was here-ish (everywhere is here-ish in pyschogeography), in June 1921, in Bredwardine, Herefordshire, that Alfred Watkins either invented or perceived them.) Sinclair connects Arthur Machen, John Cooper Powys, James Kelman and Niall Griffiths. Kelman is a Scot, Cowper Powys was born in Derbyshire, Griffiths in Liverpool – but by assimilation, heritage, recovery or otherwise their tones, pitches and rhythms are celtic, he says, and contrasts this voice with the satirical ‘English’ voice of class and university.

Sinclair says he is split between a Welsh and Scots heritage and an English education, “stitched through like Frankenstein”. The title of the lecture, ‘Unstitching the Border’ leads him to a survey of literary reactions to borders.

 

You need them, he says, citing the poet John Clare‘s collapse. Clare saw himself in peasants in fields, and in Byron’s funeral cortege: ‘seeing himself’ not metaphorically, but in the doubled vision of madness.

Borders destroy, too, Sinclair argues: the imposition of borders in the Enclosures acts confiscated the common land of Clare’s community, dividing what had been a shared world between two landowners and erasing the poet’s hinterland.

 

His ideal seems to be a permeable border, a way of seeing that folds the world over itself in the mind. Sinclair tells a story about Yiang Lian, a Chinese poet, exiled in London, who looked out over the river Lea and saw something of China, a space in which he could write both out of his tradition and within it.

Sinclair went to ask Yang Lian how he felt about the Olympic alteration to this landscape. “We translate everyone and everything into ourselves,” said Lian. “The only deep energy that happens at epochal moments [such as the Olympics] is poetry.”

 

Thomas De Quincey and Machen saw labyrinths of permeable borders between different worlds, and within and without cities; Ford Maddox Ford conceived of London as a network of contours, but the most heroic strategy for negotiating the world is surely that of Gerald Kersh. When faced with two routes, Kersh commands, take the worst. Keep taking it, as Kersh does, and you end up passing a place called Ponder’s End…

(Pleasingly, I once recorded a game of Dungeons and Dragons players in Ponder’s End. Bulky men recreated themselves as elves and fought their way through labyrinths.)

At the end of all psychogeographical choices, Sinclair says, there is either a tower or a pit. Since he is not a great fan of towers this does not sound much fun. But then, in repeating the formula, he adds another possibility: “At the end of everything is a tower, a pit or a park,” he concludes.

That sounds worth testing. In Wales walks tend to end with a bite to eat, but that’s only my experience – and my hope, now…

 

 

 

A Fungus Over The Sun

Peace

The Medes and the Lydians had a five- war which ended 1,426 years ago last Saturday, May 28th, at the battle of Halys. The two sides were doing their usual thing when the Gods put out the sun and the sky went dark. Half a decade of slaughter was resolved in a few hurried days, Richard Cohen said. Halys, 585BC, is also the earliest historical event which can be precisely dated.

War

Where the ancient mind saw God, we see science: the problem being that science struggles to induce in us that mass-awe, mass-response the Gods perfected. Ray Woods, mycologist, talked about several catastrophes: fungi may be to us as eclipses were to the Medes.

Famine

UG99 wheat rust has already raised world food prices, and is moving steadily north from its outbreak in East Africa. A new strain of stem rust fungus, first noticed in Uganda in 1999, it wipes out wheat with unprecedented ease and ferocity.

Bogeyman

The fungus is particularly successful because the strains of wheat it is attacking were developed (in the West) to carry a single ‘vertical’ resistance gene. “If you take your eye off fungi…” Ray said, shaking his head.

Apocalypse

UG99 (not as effective a tag as Gog or Magog) has already spread through Kenya, Ethiopia and Yemen, has been detected in Iran, is thought to be in Pakistan, and Jehova help us all if it makes it to ‘the bread-basket of Asia’, the Punjab.

Action

Ray has been trying to persuade governments to persuade commercial wheat breeders – or universities, or clubs, or anyone – to develop ‘horizontally’ protected strains with two resistance genes.

 

You’ve got the technology and the know-how: help him!

 

Burial

The end of books is not kindle, but landfill. Seven million copies a year are returned to the earth, not as fertiliser, but motorways.

Resurrection

What is to be done? The environmental philosopher and master composter Peter Harper suggests putting unwanted tomes in a box at the bottom of the garden and doing the gentlemanly thing: particularly satisfying when the writer has displeased you, and dynamite for the compost heap.

Transformation

Another suggestion has won one of the Green Dragon’s Den Awards – £10,000 a day is being given to the best sustainable development idea. Yesterday a Brecon project triumphed: ‘Rebound Books’ take unwanted books, chop them up and turn them into notebooks.

Ears of bracken – power of penguins

Night in the small town… A silverfish disappears into the printed hibiscus on the curtains. The last light shrinks to nothing behind the tower of St Mary’s, and beyond the Catalan climax of Ojos de Brujo and the cheers of their crowd, which come clearly across the rooftops, you can almost hear the silence of the border waiting to return.

Self-medicating horses.

Old Welsh farms had a caer ysbyty – a hospital field. A meadow of wild flowers, with up to thirty species per square foot, it was also a natural dispensary. If your heavy horse became sick, you gave it a break in the ysbyty, and it ate itself well again.

The hills actually ARE alive…

The midway slopes of Black Mountains are covered with bracken: wonderful to play in, as a child, until they tell you the plant is poisonous. It turns out that the very cells of bracken host fungi – mitochondria cells in bracken contain up to 60 species of fungi, which are only detectable, currently, by their DNA. Damage to one part of the plant might cause the production by the fungi of a response – toxins, for example – in another part of it.

Which means…

“Survival of the fittest, yes – but survival of the fittest consortium,”

explained Ray Woods, mycologist, who was called to speak from the audience by Jim Perrin, pre-eminent among nature writers. “We are just beginning to realise that nature is much more of co-operative endeavour than we previously thought”, Ray said.

Consider the penguin.

On stage with Jim Perrin, Mark Cocker read a snippet from his forthcoming magnum opus, ‘Birds and People’. Male emperor penguins incubate their partner’s egg. It is an uncomplicated method: they stand still. They stand still in wind-speeds of up to 160 km per hour, temperatures of minus 60, in total darkness, for up to one hundred and twenty days without food.

Seriously.

“They carry warm-blooded vertebrate experience to its outer limits,” Mark Cocker said, and read a description of Cherry Garrad, one of Scott’s party, making the first attempt to collect emperor eggs, ‘assailed by the bottomless terror of the penguin’s everyday existence’.

There goes the sun

Is it coincidence, Richard Cohen was asked, that the sun is precisely covered by the moon in a total eclipse?

“Yes,” Cohen replied. “The sun is four hundred times bigger than the moon, and four hundred times further away: it is a miraculous mathematical coincidence!” He has just written a cultural history of our local star.

And the moon.

Twenty five percent of people sneeze in bright sunlight.

We think of tides as pulled by the moon, but only 56 percent of the gravitational pull responsible comes from our satellite; the rest is the sun’s effect. When sun and moon are aligned, at Spring tides, the gravitational consequence is that we all grow taller. Only a little, but taller.

Anxiety and Love: Cures

Violence 

Roy Foster’s lecture on Yeats examines the poet’s early years and his reaction to the ‘inhibiting shadow’ of the influence of other writers. Foster quotes Richard Ellman (who wrote the classic biography of Joyce) on how the greats deal with the greats who went before them: “Writers move on other writers in violent expropriations…”

He describes the young man reading and rereading Homer, anthologising, collecting and collating, and writing criticism: “Not hack work, either,” Foster says, recommending the poet’s essays on Spencer and Shakespeare. He displays the last stanza of Coole and Ballyle, in which an older Yeats recalls (and mythologises) the purpose and the means of his beginnings.

 

We were the last romantics — chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness;

Whatever’s written in what poets name

The book of the people; whatever most can bless

The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;

But all is changed, that high horse riderless,

Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode

Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

 

Recipe 

Yeats’ interest in Irish folklore, vampires and fairies yields the following fairy recipe for guaranteeing attitude change in an unrequiting love. Take one fresh corpse, ‘found in the graveyard’, cut off  a strip of skin from the head to the foot and wrap it around your beloved as she is sleeping.

 

More than an Aphorism?

Roy Foster shows a card with a little note in the 22 year-old Yeats’s handwriting: “Talent perceives difference, genius unity.”

Foresight

H G Wells had an idea for a world encyclopedia that would be free; it would be based in Barcelona, would require a staff of thousands, and would be distributed around the world by aeroplane. “He dreamed of free knowledge, globally available: he just didn’t predict the microchip,” says David Lodge, before finishing his tea and setting off to work.

Truth – beauty – bears.

Wind

A fine fresh morning: windy in that way that birds seem to enjoy, just this side of too strong. Shattered – two events last night, responsible early-to-bed plan wonderfully ruined by encounter with MAO Oliver, as he calls himself, Michael Oliver, Parthian Poet, quiet star. We met here two years ago when he was living in Cardiff, where he put on a show.

“They laughed at the beginning. Two hours later they weren’t laughing so much.” The entire thing was in Russian.

Bear attack

Michael fell in love with his translator, has recently married her and they now live in Siberia, where they eat deer for breakfast. Siberia: where a thing called a grass bug gets under your skin and kills you by slow poison. – no cure. Where you can’t go deer hunting with your father-in-law, because although he can shoot, you can’t, which leaves you too vulnerable to bears and wolves. Their neighbour was eaten the week before Michael arrived, his father-in-law informed him, roaring with laughter. Michael is writing it. Watch out…

 

Future of Publishing

Writer? Reader? Try this. A new way of publishing – “unbound”: you pitch your book, the web watches, if they like it they pledge cash, you update them on your progress, give ‘em snippets, finish it – two months later it’s out and you’ve got a ready readership who have been with you all the way, and you’re rich! Or at least fifty percent rich – you go halves with the publisher. The first pitches are on the ‘unbound’ site now.

 

Revolution

Yesterday Dai Smith, professor of cultural history, head of the Wales Arts Council, writer and champion of working class South Wales issued a rallying cry to all on this side of Offa’s Ditch. He invokes the spirit of collective endeavour, of the cultural consciousness of South Wales 1935 – 55.

“A Society of Worth is not based on or created by marketing. The metaphor of the ‘ladder’ we are supposed to climb to ‘success’ is wrong. You climb ladders alone; the metaphor is wrong, morally wrong. We need to sing our song again, individually and together…we must put aside silly Welsh tribalisms…Up the Swans!”

 

Cinema

Live locally? Cinema is returning to Hay. Alan Trow of the celebrated film course at Newport is inviting suggestions for the first feature. Fifty seats, opens in November, attached to the Booth Bookshop. I will pass on all votes for ‘Casablanca’.

 

Mystery

Michael Oliver was triumphantly toting a signed first edition of a Yevtushenko collection, dedicated to Scott, “my brother poet”. Who is Scott?

 

Uncertainty

Dai Smith, Eric Hobsbawm, Martin Rees and Paul Nurse have all stressed it: this must be the Age of – ? We need a poet to be sure. Will ask one.

Bombs and Choppers

Have just been ignored by a bomb-sniffing canine. Slightly wounding to be given the brush-off by a dog. And here comes a helicopter. Must be a Londoner.

 

Peace At Last

Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian writer, walker, lawyer and man of extraordinary peace. His contribution to ‘Ox-Tales, Meetings With Remarkable Travel Writers’ is a story about encountering an airport-style x-ray machine where there was previously an open road. The operator is only obeying his orders, of course. Raja is an elfin man; a vegetarian, no longer young, with that light long-walker’s physique. He implores the private-security-company-employee to challenge his own orders, as the cars of the blessed – the Settlers – whizz by.

“Don’t you know how dangerous it is to obey orders without thinking about them?”

It would be wrong to spoil any more of it. Raja stood behind the tent, waiting to go on, looking wistfully at the very green hills which slope down to the festival site.

“But I would love to walk here,” he said.

“Can you?”

“No, not this time. I want to come back…”

“What are you up to next?”

“I have a book. 2037; it is half a novel and half not, about Palestine in 2037. The French are publishing it. Only the French!”

So, are we stuck with more borders, more walls, more machines and order-obeyers?

“It will end,” he said.

“What, nationality, flags, frontiers, passports?”

“It will all end, of course it will. It must end.”

 

So, there you are. I will shut up about it now.

World Exclusive – The Future…

Sir Martin Rees returns my tatty laptop, on which he has been checking email, and grants an interview. (That makes him sound Rather Grand. He is resolutely otherwise – he is fun.) He speaks very quietly, not quite shyly, with a beguiling smile: the Astronomer Royal is probably as close to understanding the cosmic joke as anyone ever has been, one feels.

He will be talking shortly, expanding on his Reith Lecture series.

“The lecture is about 2050 – we know it will be warmer and more crowded; the question is, what will we have to help us?”

“So what will we have?”

“That’s the question! I’m going to be emphasising the unpredictability of future technologies. Everything we have now is based on the double helix and the silicon chip. We don’t know what will come next.”

I misquote him to himself some lines that Julian Barnes cites in “Nothing to be Frightened Of”, Barnes’ splendid meditation on death.

“Humans tend to think we are the most highly evolved species in creation. But the sun is only 4 billion years through its ten billion year span – we forget that the beings that watch it burn out will be as different from us as we are from amoeba.” (The line is even better in full: the beings will either be highly adapted intellectually, Rees suggests, technologically evolved, or they will be very strong and good at eating whatever is left of Earth, munching their way through the fossil record – all that will be left of us.)

Sir Martin will be returning to that point today: “We tend to understand evolution looking backwards; but astronomers…” He smiles.

“You’re the perspective guys?”

“Yes! Though of course the 21st century is interesting from one perspective – this is the first in which a single species will determine the future of the world.”

“Do you have any particular bogeymen, in terms of the future of the world? I mean I loathe immigration-fear, borders and passports. I don’t see how they help. What are your bogeymen?”

He pauses. “So many….” he sighs. Then the pale blue eyes flick up, unsmiling.

“The worship of Gross National Product as an indicator of welfare,” he says softly.

 

And off he goes, after two coffees, to dazzle the Hay audience again. He has been coming for a dozen years. His latest book is ‘From Here to Infinity’.