Baroque Interlude
Sunday, while other people are doing something I will never and running a marathon. Instead I am reflecting happily that this time last week I was involved in an equally rewarding musical marathon: the four day audition course that selects this year’s players to the fantastic training band that is the European Union Baroque Orchestra....
An Easter Ramble
Easter day dawned as it should, warm and sunny – and then clouded just to demonstrate that nothing pleasant is permanent. It is, after all, only a week since Wales felt positively Mediterranean, only to have three inches of lambing snow on Wednesday. It happens every year but never fails to surprise, rather like the...
A Week After That Rugby
I was tremendously jealous last weekend of the fourteen year-old son of a friend of mine who has two real passions in his life, singing and rugby, and found himself invited with some schoolmates to sing in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff to watch Wales clinch the third Grand Slam in the 6 Nations Rugby...
Starting March
The first of March is one of those days the seems to carry resonance further than we think. For those on the Welsh side of the border it is, of course, St. David’s Day and daffodils are worn in profusion. This year they are close to blooming, even in the hills, despite the firm frosts...
Meanwhile, in Europe…
Very good to see that Hay Cartagena has been going with such a blast – at least that is the impression from my fellow bloggers, including my son John. One year I hope to join them all by the Carribean instead of spending the week as I did in rainy Brussels. If I had been able to...
Ideas for the future
I am sitting in the former monastery, turned hotel Santa Clara where the classically Hay festival like convergence of friends, writers, general public are all happily bumping into each other as if this diversity of conversations and people were a school hallway after the lunch bell has rung. Yesterday and todays events have been too...
Beyond the walls of old Cartagena
Yesterday the best event at Hay Cartagena took place, but it wasn’t in the program and it was far beyond the colonial theaters and little plazas of the beautiful old city. Cartagena has two very distinct faces. The charming center, with wonderful restaurants and 5 star hotels, is a very small part of a very...
Macho mags
Machismo matters fuelled the session about men’s magazines featuring Daniel Samper Ospina, editor of ‘Soho’ and Dylan Jones, who has edited i-D, the Face and now helms GQ, now a worldwide brand, with a very successful GQ launched in China five years ago. The Nineties saw men’s mags burst on the scene and they are...
Once Upon a Time in Xalapa.
Once upon a time there was a Xalapan bar filled with red dragons. They cried, they whooped, as scrum-half Mike Phillips went to work and Wales made it into the Rugby World Cup semi-finals. Those dragons were the National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, Hay Festival director Peter Florence and the author Jon Gower. It...
Hollywood Hay
We came from the mountains of Bogota, thin on oxygen. It didn’t take long for this coast and the soft, thick air of Cartagena to revive us. This year Hay began with a Hollywood blast. Colombia’s son (via Jackson Heights), John Leguizamo, has to mentally translate Spanish for the interview, ‘I always think in English...
First day – Near death experience and Cartagena (abridged)
This is the story for Thursday: 3 days of planes and buses from the Peruvian Andes – bus almost fell off cliff Arrived Cartagena, muggy, Caribbean, one part Havana one part New Orleans with a dash of getting you lost like Venice. Checked into 7$/night hospedaje outside the walls of the old city with very...
What the Dickens
“Dickens could have been a comedy writer, his work is full of catch phrases that could work as mobile ring tones.” That’s what Andrew Davies thinks. Doyen of TV screen adaptation, he was in Cartagena as part of the British Council’s celebrations of Charles Dickens and the subject was ‘Bleak House.,” a Victorian court-room drama...
