I went to the Hay Festival this year for the first time since the pandemic. I took some notes on the train back in the hope of capturing some of the humours which swam through me.

The Train Journey Convo
One of the best things in life is an epic train chat with randoms.

On the way down, my friend and I had the most incredible and hilarious conversation with the two people who happened to join us on our table. One was a 40-something sharply dressed, stocky English fella with two mobiles, a tablet, and a beaming grin, and the other was a colourfully dressed round Colombian lady in her 60s. Incredibly, Maria’s Sicilian husband – who she met at in club in Cardiff in the early 1970s – had lost his favourite blue jumper made by the brand that our man Derek worked for.

He made some phone calls to locate the item in XXL. We also discussed how conservative Sicilians were compared to Colombians, and the relative position of women in each country. Derek showed us pics of his six sons and we discussed the pros and cons of having children earlier in life. We talked about the beauty of the Wye valley. We parted ways with laughter. I live for hours like these.

Celebrating conservatism conversation
Sparked by her reading of my piece on Ramadan, my mate and I had an impassioned chat about how misguided the contemporary British Left is on religion – especially radical Islam – and how it is a betrayal of women. We discussed how as we age, our bottom lines sharpen: women’s rights, secularism and freedom. We wondered if it was our calling to start some sort of platform for the secular Middle Eastern diaspora in Britain.

I also shared how my other diaspora friend in France had uttered the quote of the year when recalling colleagues’ bafflement that Egyptians can be xenophobic. “Don’t they realise that it’s racist to assume that brown people can’t be racist,” he said. So good.

Reacquainting myself with different versions of myself
I’m not a rigid person. But I forget this. The story I tell myself and others conveys a sense that I am a quite controlled, inflexible and self-disciplined. This is partly true. But not always. There are other Nadias. I’m an ex-smoker who rarely drinks. In conversations about alcohol, I’m critical of booze – both its affect on me and on society in general. Yet as soon as we unpacked our bags and organised the tent, it became apparent that nothing was to come between me, a can of lager and a fag, sitting right there in a camping chair out in a field. There is me, this me, writing at a table in the suburbs between four walls on a working week, and there is me in a field, at a festival. The smell and sounds of a campsite transform me, the joy of a sunset in the open, the campsite atmosphere, and the stars.

Queue conversations

Whether buying a tea, or getting your book signed, in Hay it was so easy to talk to people in a way that I – even the most social of people – find hard to enact in everyday England.

Margaret Atwood and Rob Delaney laughing through grief

Bacon baps and breakfast rolls at the Monkey Bunch Funky Munch

The bridge, the books, the stars

The clockwise moon-lit ritual walk before bed

My phone on holiday mode for 77:22:46