Suzanne Harrington: I'd never been to a literary festival before —  it was actual paradise on earth

I'd never been to a literary festival... I’ve long considered myself too young to waft around a picturesque rural town surrounded by men in white straw hats and ladies in Birkenstocks and floaty scarves

Hay Festival in Wales turned out to be 'actual paradise on earth'. 

All my life, I have been in love with books. They spill out of my house. Build up in corners, waiting to be read. Flop through the letterbox in fat brown envelopes — my favourite sound is the flump of them hitting the hall floor.

Yet I’ve never been to a literary festival. Despite being firmly in the adolescence of old age, I’ve long considered myself too young to waft around a picturesque rural town surrounded by men in white straw hats and ladies in Birkenstocks and floaty scarves. Festivals mean jumping around in a field being deafened by Amyl and the Sniffers.

Until I get invited to the Hay Literary Festival. 

My friend Colin has written a book, What We Leave We Carry, about migration to Britain, involving the stories of 70 people from around the world who upped sticks — I am one of them. Did I want to be on a panel to talk about immigration? With a Cameroonian poet and a Puerto Rican playwright? I grab my Birkenstocks and floaty scarf, and set the satnav for Wales.

I arrived to something I was not quite expecting — an idyll. Actual paradise on earth. A little town full of independent bookshops, twinned with Timbuktu, also famous for its books. A festival site of shady trees and deckchairs, and people sitting around reading. Not on their phones — on their books. 

Milling about the giant white marquees, where writers are doing talks all day long. A giant bookshop tent, with queues for book-signings snaking across the green.

Excited children about to meet the creators of their favourite characters. Bemused security guards with nothing to do. Nobody is on drugs, apart from Warfarin.

I am given a magic wristband, with access to author talks and homemade cake.

It’s Colm Toibin’s birthday — in a hot, packed marquee, he regales us with professorial hilarity, and we sing him Happy Birthday at the end. He is gracious about being called Colm ToyBin by his English interviewer. 

Kae Tempest gives a passionate talk on how there is beauty everywhere, and Miriam Margolyes goes head-to-head with novelist Lionel Shriver about whether the current penchant for flag-shagging is Nazi or not.

Kevin Rowland has a conversation with Irvine Welsh about all his resentments, and in another tent, Sarah Wynn-Williams, who dissed Facebook in her book Careless People, is forced by a Zuckerberg injunction to sit in silence. Orwell would have shuddered.

More joyfully, it is Winnie the Pooh’s 100th birthday. Although not a Pooh aficionado, I go to pay homage — AA Milne bequeathed the Royal Literary Fund his Pooh fortune, which funds Writers Mosaic, the literary magazine run by my friend Colin, whom I write for, and the reason I am here. Winnie, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger have paid for my petrol, my accommodation, my lunch.

There is an event to celebrate Winnie’s centenary, where Emma Thompson, and several children’s literature titans — Ottoline, How To Train Your Dragon — act out a Pooh scene. Emma Thompson is Eeyore, who has fallen into a river.

She lies on the floor in her crisp, creamy linen, with her arms and legs in the air, braying dolefully in a Manchester accent. She is magnificent.

My partner and I leave Hay after several days of book-buying, writer-spotting, and general geeking-out. We realise something, as we eagerly plan next year’s visit. We are not too young for this. We should have come years ago. We are HOME.