Setting Up a New Home During the Festival

 It's been a manically busy week.

Of course, the shop has been very busy with Festival goers, but I've also been running round and emailing to get everything set up for my new home.

This is complicated by the fact that none of the utility companies seem to think it exists.

"Is this a new build?"

(No, it's 200 years old, and you supplied the previous resident)

"Can you send us a photo of your electricity meter?"

(Yes, but I'm not sure I got its best side)

"You must be a Powys resident to order recycling bins." 

(I am a Powys resident - you ought to be used to Hay having an HR3 postcode by now!)

So that's the difficult part of moving - the actual unpacking in a new home and seeing what I need to get has been far easier. 

One of the first things I noticed when I moved in was that there was nowhere convenient to hang my coats.  I have always wanted one of those round coat racks, which could stand by the front door.  Keeper's Pocket didn't have any when I asked, and nor did the two antique places on Backfold, or the Antique Centre by the Buttermarket.

Sally at Fleur-de-Lys had four, so I was able to pick out the perfect one.  It's even painted to match the colour scheme in the front room!  It fits all my coats, and has a rack round the bottom for umbrellas, sticks and - from my re-enactment days, my collection of swords!

One of the nice things I've noticed is that people passing by during the Festival often look up to read the sign over the almshouses, about Frances Harley setting up the charity for "poor, indigent women".  When Tim Pugh came to deliver my new TV screen, a couple were standing looking up.  The chap looked at me and asked: "Are you one of the poor, indigent women?"

I grinned.  "Yes, I am!"

The ladies in the other almshouses have lovely plant pots by their front doors, and I didn't want to be the odd one out.  Saturday was the Scouts' plant sale, so I went down and picked up a tall purple plant with variegated leaves, and a low growing white flower.  I have no idea what they're called, but they are very pretty.  There was a big pot, empty, in the back garden so I carried that through and potted them up with good black soil from under the plastic grass at the back.

The plastic grass has been taken away, leaving a big potential flower bed at the end of the garden.  I've already bought a honeysuckle to go up the back fence.  I've been offered other plants, too.

I went back to the plant sale to sample the Secret Wine Bar - Black Mountain Red this time - and noticed some carved wooden owls for sale.  I took one home with me, and he's now presiding over the patch of gravel near the house, where my new deckchair is going (given by a colleague at work).

On the way home with him, I passed the Wobbly Owl cider shop, and they had the Ebbw Vale Owl Sanctuary owls there for the day, so I had to go in and admire them! 

I've also had delicious tacos from the stall in the Castle Honesty Garden - and there are some of Sally Matthews' wolf sculptures lurking around the Castle grounds.

I'm hoping to get back to the Festival site to wander round the stalls later (no Oxfam book sale this year), after my new fridge is delivered this afternoon from the local A1 electric shop.

Watermills

 The second event I had a ticket for at the Festival was the talk on local watermills by Mary Morgan and Elizabeth Bingham. They've just written a new booklet about the watermills in the area, and visited as many of them as they could.  Considering that they are both in their 80s, they seem to have had a lot of fun scrambling around in ruins, but they also visited watermills that have been converted into family homes, often with the old mill machinery still in place, and even a few working watermills that have been restored.

One of the millers from Talgarth Mill was in the audience, and he said a few words about the mill during the question time at the end.  It's been very dry this year, so the mill can't get up enough speed to actually mill flour, but they can show the machinery working and demonstrate the different parts of the process.

Mary took us through the history of watermills world wide, and Elizabeth described the technology, and then they got onto the local mills.  Local in this case ranged as far afield as Ludlow (where one old mill is now a cafe) and Brecon's Priory Mill.  There was a brief mention, too, of the five or six mills along Cusop Dingle, one of which was a paper mill (it's still called Paper Mill Cottage).  Some mills have open days - National Mill Weekend was a couple of weeks ago, when mills around the country are open to visitors.

They also included a mill in the Golden Valley which is not a watermill - it's the only cider press in the country worked by a horse - whose name is Feathers.  They let visitors help, and bottle some very good cider.

Flour is surprisingly flammable when it's floating in suspension in the air, which happens a lot in mills - and this can cause explosions!  There was a quite dramatic video (Elizabeth had been persuaded out of doing a live demonstration in the tent!).  They also told the story of the biggest flour mill disaster in history, in Glasgow, where 18 people were killed! 

The booklet is being sold partly to raise money to save Boughrood Church roof, and they need £40,000, so I hope they sell lots!

Is A River Alive?

 I think the answer is definitely "Yes!", after listening to Robert Macfarlane talk yesterQday afternoon.  I'd bought the ticket before I'd had any idea I'd be moving house, and I wasn't going to waste it.

Rob Macfarlane was being interviewed by Horatio Clare, who is very good at interviewing - and it helps that they are already friends.  The new book - Is A River Alive? - is his most personal yet, and he spent five years travelling around the world to write it, featuring rivers in Ecuador,  Quebec and Chinnai in India (which used to be Madras, when it was famed for its rivers).  

He started off by introducing a third entity on stage - he had spent the morning at the Warren, and brought back a flask of Wye water.  He spoke quite a bit about the Wye, including the information that there is a new post in Herefordshire Council specifically to be the Voice of the Wye, so that the needs of the river are represented at an official level.  Given the sad state of the river (it's not so long ago that you could paddle without slipping on slimy green weed at the Warren), this is much needed.

He also talked about chalk streams, in the south of England where he lives, and the desperate state they are in.

But he also mentioned signs of hope - a river system in the Pacific North West of America which was dammed in the 1920s has recently had the last dam removed - and the salmon are already coming back to spawn there, in what was once one of the most important salmon rivers on that coast.

Eating Out

 I'd used up as much food as possible before I moved, so I wouldn't have to carry it across, so I found myself installed in the new place with half a loaf and a tin of rice pudding, and a lot of spices!

So I treated myself.

For a late lunch, after watching the ATK men work so hard all morning, I ambled down to Shepherd's and had a mushroom melt and coffee, which was just right.

And in the evening I went into Kilvert's and had their vegan chilli, washed down with a pint of Tiny Rebel IPA. It's one of the few times I've ever strayed away from the beers on the handpumps, but I used to drink Tiny Rebel when I went down to Cardiff for a day out, and it was nice to see it again.

This morning, I took my folding chair out into my new garden, and had a snack there.  It's lovely to be able to watch the robins and blackbirds, and hear the sound of the stream down below the gardens. 

And now the Festival has started, and I watched the coaches full of school children heading for the Festival site this morning.

Later, when I was taking the empty boxes back to work (it's great to work in a bookshop when you're moving - we have all the right sized boxes for removals!) I met a couple of the schoolgirls trying to fill in a questionnaire.  They were looking for the oldest book they could find in Hay, and had pencilled in 1992.

"We can do better than that!" I said, and took them up to the Francis Edwards department, where we have a book which I think is dated 1483 - an early example of a printed book.

They were last seen heading off to the gold post box, to tick that off their list of things to find.  There's a new post box topper of Gavin and Stacey on it!

Moving House Update

 I've moved!

The men from ATK removals were brilliant, and they managed to get everything in one van.

So now I'm unpacking boxes.

I won't have internet access at the new house until 5th June, so I am coming back to the old flat to use the broadband here while I can.

It's going to look lovely when everything is put away!

Packing

 No time for posting for a few days - only packing....

Well-Being Assembly

 This was the third of the Citizen's Assemblies organised by Mike Eccles.

To open the proceedings, he gave us an update on what has been achieved so far.  

Hay is now part of the South Powys Food Loop.  Our part in that is to set up an online supermarket of local food, and to encourage local people to use it to buy their groceries as much as possible.

On the  energy front, three consultants are working with the group in Hay - one from CAT, one from a group in Leominster, and I didn't catch who the other one was.  Setting up our own energy company is complicated, so the target is to have it up and running by 2035.  So far they are at the stage of mapping suitable local energy generation sites and having talks with the landowners.

This Assembly was on Mental Well-Being, and apparently it's something that has never been tried before.  They are hoping that, if it is successful, a similar model can be rolled out across Wales, via the library services.

The slogan of the Assembly was "It's OK not to feel OK, but it's not OK to not talk about it."

The idea is that Hay as a community should be able to identify people who are struggling with anxiety or loneliness or low level depression, and give assistance before it gets bad enough to involve the NHS.  NHS services have seen serious cuts in recent years, so even if someone is ill enough to need medical help, they can be a long time on a waiting list before they get it. 

As part of the discussion process, they are trialing some new software to record and analyse the conversations on each table which is AI assisted.  My comment was that AI is Evil - but this seems to be one of the more ethical uses of the technology, as it is not being trained on copyright material stolen from the authors, but just looking at the conversations in the room.

So the question we were considering was: How can we catch people before they need medical help?  How can we create a supportive community?

Before we started the discussions, we were shown a short film from Cambridge, interviewing schoolchildren and mothers who were suffering from climate anxiety - the worry about how the climate is changing and how it will affect the children who are growing up now.  One lady being interviewed said that, if people aren't worried, there must be something wrong with them - there's a lot to be worried about!  Everyone involved seemed to think that doing something practical helped a lot, even if it's only something small and local.

Then we had a short speech from Marie Brousseau-Navarro, who is the Deputy Commissioner and Director for Health in the Future Generations Commission for Wales.  This body ensures that decisions taken in the Senedd take into account the consequences for people in the future - more long term thinking than is usually the case in politics.  They produce a report every five years assessing how well the Senedd is doing.  Mike met Marie at Hay Festival, and she was so interested in what he was doing that she wanted to come along and see the Assembly in action. 

On our table we had a mix of people who are long term residents of Hay, who know the history of what has been done before, and some newcomers, which was useful because we could compare notes on how easy it was to find out what was going on in Hay and how easy (or not) it was to access groups of fellow residents with similar interests.  There's a lot going on in Hay, and that's one way to help people who feel isolated, if there is an easy way of finding out where those groups are.

During the coffee break, the lady who was filming the event set up her camera in another room to do interviews with volunteers.  I went along because no-one else on the table felt brave enough to do it!

It was mildly terrifying, but I think I made sense, and the camera lady said I'd given her some useful content.

The last part of the process was for a person from each table to stand up and share what had come out of the discussions - each table had a note taker using post-it notes, and a moderator to keep the discussion on track and make sure everyone was heard.

Just about everyone agreed that what Hay needs is a central hub where people can go and meet and find out what's going on.  At the moment the Library has this role - but Hay used to have a proper community centre, and that's really what's needed again.  (there is a long, long history of Hay trying to get a new community centre which I will not repeat here).

Several tables also suggested that it would be a good idea to give some sort of training to people in the community so they could recognise people who were struggling and offer support.

One table suggested making Hay a Town of Well-Being, and our table suggested a group at the Thursday market called something like Happy in Hay that could share information and lend a friendly ear.  (the British Legion has a very good Tea and Chat session regularly, but not everyone wants to go into the British Legion).

There was some worry about the younger people growing up in the community, and the need for inter-generational activities was stressed, as well as the suggestion that there should be a Young People's Assembly so that they could decide for themselves what they needed.

There was also mention of the perennial problem in Hay of groups needing to collaborate more - and publicise the fact that they exist better.  The Hay Community Facebook page is a useful resource, but not everyone is on Facebook, and there needs to be a way of communicating without being online as well.

Finally, there was an emphasis on the benefits of nature - getting out walking, working with farmers to improve local biodiversity, and creating nature based projects.

When I went along to the Assembly, I wasn't sure what I'd be able to contribute, but it turned out to be a very useful session and I'm very glad I went.

Tanzanian Cuisine

 I needed to go into Hereford for the bank yesterday.

I normally go in the morning, and have a late lunch when I get back, but yesterday the removal man was coming round in the morning to see how much stuff I have to move, so I took the 11.50 bus.  The next bus back was 16.20, so I had quite a while to hang around.

The May Fair has moved on now, but there are signs of the terrible fire that engulfed a burger van the other day.  They did a brilliant job of clearing it up, though, and even had members of the Showman's Guild from Birmingham come down to help them.  A couple of nearby shops need new signs and paintwork.

My next job was to find the furniture warehouses/showrooms.  When my mum heard I was moving, she said brightly: "Oh, I'll buy you a sofa as a moving in present."  Which is incredibly generous of her, but I'm pretty sure there won't be room for a sofa, so I talked her down to a comfy chair.

90% of the chairs on offer seemed to be recliners, and I didn't really want a recliner.  But there was a very nice one at the oak and pine place behind the Green Dragon.

The only other furniture warehouse I could find was the one I got my bed from a few years ago, near the multistorey car park.  They had a bigger selection, again mostly recliners, but there is one very nice high backed armchair that looks perfect.  It even comes in 4 different colours.  So as soon as I'm settled in, I can go back and order it.

It was definitely time for a late lunch now.  There's a little food court in the Market, and I noticed a sign for Tanzanian cuisine.  I'm pretty sure I've never eaten Tanzanian food, so I got the lady at the stall to talk me through what the choices are.  I'm very sure that I've never come across ugali before - it's a slab of boiled maize.  The lady said it was pretty bland in itself; the flavour comes from the curry it's served with.  I chose the beef curry, and it was delicious.  Next time I need a meal in Hereford I'm going back to try some other things on her menu.

And from the other window on her stall, she sells hand made soaps.

Moving House

 I've signed all the paperwork, set up the standing order with the bank, and I'm just waiting for a date from ATK Removals, and I'll be leaving the little flat over the Old Electric Shop.

It's all happened very quickly - three weeks ago I had no intention of moving!  But now I have been offered one of the Harley almshouses, and it was too good an opportunity to miss.

(The charity has a very sensible rule about not discussing the almshouses online, so this is the only time I will mention anything about it).

Of course, this means that I now qualify as a little old lady, though one of my friends said that couldn't be right, because I'm too tall!

And one of my colleagues at work said: "They're a bit hobbit-y, aren't they?"

I think this can only be a good thing.  After all, Tolkien said that hobbit holes mean comfort.

It's Not All at the Co-op

 I don't know if anyone will remember the old advert "It's all at the Co-op Now!" but today I went down and I've never seen the shelves so empty.  No veg apart from a few turnips, and gaps all round the store.

Fortunately they still had everything I needed.  I've stocked up on some ready meals so I don't need to worry about cooking for a week or so.

The chap on the till said it was due to computer difficulties.

Exhibition at The Chair

 I've been running around doing Behind the Scenes Stuff (which is still ongoing), but I was impressed enough to stop and look at the new exhibition at the Chair gallery.

It's a comparison between clothes made from derivatives of oil ("clothes from the oil fields") versus clothes made from natural fibres ("clothes from the farmers' fields").  Superficially, the two outfits in the window look very similar - but when you look closer, and think about it, the natural fibres are renewable and sustainable and the clothes from the oil fields - aren't.

I'm not sure if I'll have time to pop in to chat to the exhibitors - I'm sure it will be very interesting. 

[Edited to add: I did have time to pop in today, and as well as the comparison between different sorts of clothing there were also some examples of visible mending, natural dyes from the lady who has the spinning wheel on the market, and a nurse's cape decorated with patchwork and crocheted squares.]

A Walk Round Hay

 It's Market Day, the streets are buzzing, the sun is shining, and I went for a wander after my shopping was done.

The little purple shop next to Murder and Mayhem has closed down, but there are paint tins in there and it looks as if someone new is going to move in very soon.

Meanwhile, Haywain Antiques, close to Kilverts, has closed down.  It's quite a large space, with lots of good windows, so it'll be interesting to see who takes it on. 

Mac has given the bus shelter on the Hereford side of the road a new coat of green paint, which makes it look much better, and the sedum roof has appeared on the new bus shelter at the top of the car park.

I would have photos, but my new laptop is not talking to my old camera at the moment.  I'm sure I'll be able to work something out, though.