The first Saturday of the Hay Festival is always a bit like the first day of term — bumping into people you’ve haven’t seen in months, sometimes for a whole year. Then there are the people down from London, dressed in mufti, sporting inappropriate sunglasses and crumpled linen jackets that haven’t been out of the wardrobe since the previous Hay Festival. I like to pick up my tickets, hang out in the green room and generally reacquaint myself with what is undoubtedly the greatest literary festival in the world.
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I had planned to watch Hilary Mantel, Boris Johnson and Harry Belafonte, but a bout of food poisoning probably caused by a hastily consumed steak tartare the day before had thrown my schedule into turmoil. However the one thing I wasn’t going to miss was Francine Stock talking to Ed Victor and Gail Rebuck about her late husband Philip Gould’s extraordinary book When I Die: Lessons From the Death Zone.
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