Insufficiently Welsh Read Online Free PDF Page B

In a town of a million cheap secondhand books I bought nothing at all. Not even a Simenon for the train back.
    My challenge was to swim in a mountain lake. So I was planning to leave the town for the hills in search of something wet and freezing. I even had a joke. “I would never be able to buy a swimming costume in a book town, eh?”
    But now I was back in Hay, I noticed that it was no longer exclusively a book town at all.
    There were antique shops, knick-knack shops, perfumed candle shops, antique Welsh blanket shops and humid cafés, but, in order to make my laboured point on camera, we had to actively search for bookshops. We found the detective and thriller centre, the poetry bookshop and countless racks up near the castle, but Hay had turned into “a destination town”. And I had to find another destination up a hill and swim in it to prove my Welsh hardiness.
    Tempted by the wholly unsuitable five-toed, acid-green rubber shoes in the window, I found what I think Richard Booth had wanted to preserve all along: a straightforward, up-and-down, old-fashioned haberdashers on the main square. The autumn rain was pattering against the door. The season for wild swimmers was over. They usually stocked bathing suits, but nothing remained in my size. So I discussed the likelihood of extreme weather with the son of the proprietor. “In the Beacons,” he told me, “extreme weather is not extreme. It is normative.”
    I pondered this and bought a massive navy-blue coverall waterproof poncho in its own carry bag.
    We would have left Hay immediately, but we had an invitation to a regal event. Richard Booth had been the victim of a stroke, but it happened to be his birthday. There was a lunchtime celebration in a club down by the church. We arrived early. While I ate an organic lamb burger I watched the King of Hay’s courtiers roll in, sporting the tatterdemalion flourishes of a once flourishing middle-class hippy set. A pug ran around yapping at ankles. Wine glasses were raised and filled and filled again. A man in a black suit on a balcony sang the Hay National Anthem.
    Richard, with a gleam in his eye, joined me on a sofa. He outlined his new campaign, bursting with the old rebel mettle. The mantra had changed. Hay was no longer solely a book town. It was a “tourist” town too. (As indeed it was.) It provided jobs and supported a population of roughly 1500. The Hay Festival brings in over 80,000 writers, publishers and literature fans. Bill Clinton dubbed the festival “The Woodstock of the Mind”. But something was amiss.
    I gradually gathered that the Welsh Assembly Government and Sky Television had made an unholy pact to seize the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival. This was to be resisted. Rupert and James were mentioned in unflattering terms. The centralising effect of the Welsh Assembly was disparaged.
    I wanted to dig deeper, but Richard was ushered outside, to sit under his flags of office, wearing a tin crusader helmet, surrounded by adoring women in cotton print dresses. Toasts were offered. New vows of eternal resistance were sworn. It reminded me of Passport to Pimlico . Perhaps it was a fanciful idea. Maybe it was parochial. Except that those few book towns that we had discussed, nearly thirty years before, had now grown to number two hundred, worldwide. There are “food towns” too, in Ludlow and Abergavenny. I still fantasise that there might one day be an “old paintings town”.
    While governments fret uselessly about the high street, Hay is packed. And Richard Booth has proved conclusively that local commitment can make the difference.
    In the meantime I had hired a bright red Vespa scooter and mounted up to drive out into the Beacons and link cool, cosmopolitan Hay with rugged, out-there Brecon.
    Like other iconic vehicles, the Vespa was conceived in the ashes of WWII. Similar to the Lambretta, the Vespa was inspired by an American military scooter