Kate & Candy on their Hay days
I got talking to Kate (on the left), who's a health service manager in a hospital and Candy, who works with a social enterprise in prisons, both 56, between sessions at the Hay Festival (post coming up about that later this week, but you'll have seen my social media posts whilst I was there. I absolutely loved it). This was my first time at the festival, but they're old hands.
Kate: "There are three of us who’ve been coming to Hay for 10 years with our husbands and children. And now we no longer have husbands and we’ve no longer have children.
Candy: Well, that’s true about the husbands, but we still do have children, it’s just that they don’t come with us!
Kate: The festival is a complete complete cultural and intellectual top up for me. I keep going “Oh right, there’s my brain. Get a bit bigger, get a bit wider.” It’s brilliant to have some time listening to really intelligent people and to think about the things I’m hearing about.
You don't know what you don't know
Candy: The intellectual energy is the great attraction for me too. It’s often not the big talks that have the greatest impact, it’s the little ones that you just stumble across that you learn the most from. It’s that thing - you don't know what you don't know. We’ve now all started almost deliberately to go to different things so we get triple for our money.
I was here yesterday on my own for the first time (Kate and our other friend hadn’t arrived) and I went to two great talks, and I came out and.….there was no-one to talk to. It made me realise there was something massively missing.
Kate: It’s also about adding to the memories we have together. We have tons of those. We’ve known each other 25 years. We’ve all grown up together. Also our children have grown up at Hay, which is also fab.
Candy: My daughter was saying today that she’d actually love to come back next year and bring her boyfriend, so that’s lovely."
Have you been to Hay, or any other festival? If so, what did you think of it? Any recommendations?
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