There's something "country" about the Festival. A walk around the site gives one a glimpse of the lovely 'green' views of nature surrounding it and certainly feels most comfortably appointed. While buckets of rain were pouring incessantly, people still came in droves, garbed in their colourful welly's and rain jackets, like a troop of country farmers marching to a field demonstration.
The poetry menu of the day had all the ingredients that make for good cuisine. Director Peter Florence made sure there was something from all the regions of the world. From Africa to Wales, the audience had a treat of different poetry dishes. The seven poetry chefs were all superb - Simon Armitage, Gillian Clarke, Menna Elfyn, Wole Soyinka, Amir Or, Gwyn Thomas and Nabeel Yasin.
Oneword's Paul Blezard had his bag of wits to chair the discussion on Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. He announced, in his comic way, before the session that 'though Conrad and Waugh may have wanted to be part of this discussion, Peter Florence, could not find their email addresses and so the two authors could not unfortunately be with us today.' The audience raptured into laughter. I couldn't agree more with Blezard: great writers never die, they live through their words.
The cast of panelists that included myself, Peter Godwin and Peter Stothard the Times Literary Supplement editor was as varied as it could be. Conrad and Waugh's works intricately touched our pasts and still do resonate on the fundamentals of human relations today.
While my mastery of the Welsh language is limited to the basic greeting salutations, I couldn't resist the temptation to listen to the local funky rock band A'r Barf led by songstress Fflur Dafydd. The magic of music is that it speaks to the heart. The night was still young and had to dance myself to warmth.
