Hay-on-Wyte

This piece was published in the Huffington Post on 29 May.

After half an hour waiting in my second queue of the day I was catatonic. The people behind were chatty at first but grew markedly frosty when little Sylvian exclaimed (finger pointing for dramatic effect) she’s the one that booed bankers in the Tata tent! (more on that later) As the father’s face froze in a glacial manner, I clocked the Barclays logo on his salmon/pink Lacrosse sweater. Suddenly the Festival’s 87 page brochure became a compelling read.

It also enabled me to feign obliviousness to the tuts from the family in front, who clearly disapproved of my 6 year old catching stagnant water in his open mouth as it dripped, in torrents, from the side of the tent. There were some big questions posed in the forward, such as Who are we in 2014? and What do liberty and equality look like? I leafed through the brochure for answers. Apart from one black face on page 57, all the other images depicted happy white families enjoying the Festival’s delights.

I looked around at the hundreds of people queuing, eating in the café and walking around. Everywhere I looked, the whole day, there were white faces. Around 10% of British people are BME. The answer to the question, who we are in 2014 then, won’t be found in the hideously homogeneous Hay brochure (eat your alliteration heart out Francesca Simon), or indeed the corridors of the festival itself.

This was my first foray into the world of the literati. My son is an avid consumer of the Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third series of books by the splendicious Cressida Cowell (who encourages playing with words, as opposed to traffic or fire). She was our main attraction and didn’t disappoint, inspiring children and adults alike. I was slightly disappointed to learn of her privileged background. I liked imagining her sagesse as being born of a life of privation and adversity but my prejudice could not deny Cowell of her genius.

There are core themes that form a thread which weaves its way, seamlessly through her work. In a tribe of burley Vikings, Hiccup is the “weakling”. He employs wit and intellect to defeat brute force and idiocy. Although Cowell clearly coddles her penchant for the pantomime villain, her complex characterisations challenge us to see the potential for good in everyone. But perhaps the most compelling theme for me is her call to arms, to children everywhere, to question everything.

Childrens' thirst for knowledge and their innate curiosity is satiated by questioning things we take for granted. That’s how they make sense of a sometimes incomprehensible world, even for adults. Cowell said her next book would depict Hiccup growing up and his political awakening. So, when she said that anyone seeking fortune should go into banking rather than writing, I found the sound boooo involuntarily oozing out from my mouth and dissipating like flatulence into the ether. It was an instinctive reaction to the contemporary pantomime villain and the children loved it. Those in close proximity joined in, much to their parents’ disgust. Not surprising, given the demographic and sponsors (including Barclays Bank), there’s a good chance many of them were b***ers.

When I saw the first black face of the day on my way out I wondered how he would answer the second big question posed in the brochure’s forward, What do liberty and equality look like? Surveying the sea of white faces looking back at him I can only imagine his answer, Nothing like this.

What do E.On, The Tories & Gary Barlow Have in Common?

They all exploit loopholes in the law (allegedly) to their own advantage.

E.On has apparently been fined 12m for mis selling to its already long suffering customers and the Tory party is accused of circumventing electoral law in order to keep big donor anonymous. Individuals who donate over £1,500 per year are supposed to be named. If donations are made through a private club however, no such restrictions apply.

One such club, despite having no website and appears to be operating out of a house in leafy Buckinghamshire, has donated inordinate sums to Tory coffers but individual contributors cannot be identified. By way of putting our minds at rest, a Tory spokesperson (speaking from an offshore, hot and duty free location) said “All donations are entirely proper and accounted for”. See, everything’s entirely above board. Nothing illegal going on so it’s obviously a loony left wing conspiracy.

As for Gaz Barlow (a devout Tory apparently), should he be asked to relinquish his honour just because he was allegedly engaged in some kind of tax avoidance scheme? According to his mate, Dave (the PM), absolutely not. His logic? Barlow gives shed loads of money away to charity. If I didn’t have to pay all the tax due on my income, I could afford that kind of munificence too, and get the knighthood that goes with it. The fact is though Mr Cameron. It isn’t his money he’s giving away, it’s ours. Does Gary Barlow live in Buckinghamshire by any chance?

Bring Back the Stolen Girls of Nigeria

It’s almost a month since 274 girls were brutally abducted from their beds in the dead of night in Nigeria. They were piled into the back of lorries and transported, like livestock, to be sold into a lifetime of child slavery, rape and forced marriage. A barbaric practice that affects 10 million children worldwide. Some reports cast doubt on whether the girls will ever be found alive.

Yet, this mass kidnapping has only hit the headlines in the last few days. What took so long to break this story and why are the children’s parents living in fear of their lives for speaking out? In theory this has all the hallmarks of a headline grabber. Anyone who has children or a heart could relate to this heinous crime, yet it didn’t make the grade.

Protestations of the remoteness of the locality don’t bear scrutiny. The story was known but it took social media, rather than mainstream media to break it. Once broken, momentum was slow. It gathered pace once pictures of grieving parents were beamed across the globe and outrage began to grow about the lack of urgency or apparent strategy to rescue the girls.

Is it that the abduction of 274 girls doesn’t seem to matter or is it that the abduction of 274 African girls doesn’t seem to matter? One thing is for sure, if this happened in California or Cornwall, it wouldn’t take a month for it to make the news.

I’ll be supporting the “Bring Back Our Girls” Campaign and lobbying for the safe return of those 274 children to the arms of their distraught parents. I hope you will too.

* A Note to my readers in Nigeria: If you have any information you think I could help to disseminate please get in touch via my website: www.tessfinchlees.com. Many thanks.