A sink of one's own: Virginia Woolf - the tea towel.
A Virginia Woolf tea towel - could this be the ideal birthday gift for Morrissey? It's one of many intriguing discoveries to be made at Hay-on-Wye since I got here on Monday, along with some kind of sculpture made by local school kids: a white tunnel structure covered in sheets of mysterious text, it's like a mutant version of Tracy Emin's famous tent (now lost for ever in the Momart fire - perhaps this could work as a replacement?).
Away from the merchandise stalls and strange installations, yesterday morning I saw Sebastian Faulks speak to a packed house about his new book, Engleby, along with a few revealing asides about signing books (which he did straight after the talk, for more than two hours). Rather waspishly, Faulks asked any potential eBay merchants not to give him piles of books to sign, and not to expect him to sign a first edition of his "terrible" first book A Trick of the Light, since "that's like me handing you £500, and I don't see how that's supposed to work, unless you agree to give me the £500". Everyone laughed except a woman next to me, who hissed, "Why, hasn't he got enough money?" and then refused either to clap or laugh at any of Faulks' funnies.
The author of Birdsong was touching on the subject of missing his family while on tour to promote his book. At another book signing, he said, he'd asked an American woman what her name was. When she told him it was Holly, he said, "That's my daughter's name". "Yeah? So?" the woman snapped, whereupon Faulks just scribbled something in her book and sent her on her way. At the end of the signing, she came back and said, "Look what you wrote in my book". He'd inadvertently written, "To Holly, lots of love from Daddy".
Family life also had a significant role in the talk by Blake Morrison later on. A man asked him whether his family had complained about being so exposed in his two memoirs, but Morrison said they hadn't: while his mother asked for a couple of trivial changes, she allowed the description of his father's affair and final, painful weeks to stand unaltered. He added that he'd changed one of the names in one of his books to protect the individual concerned - who then went on to complain bitterly that they weren't in the book under their own name.
Richard Eyre's talk was absorbing. He divulged that Fox Searchlight, the branch of 20th Century Fox who made his Notes on a Scandal along with recent hits The Last King of Scotland and Little Miss Sunshine, put a budget of $15m on every film they make - surely peanuts. He revealed that his next project is an adaptation of the short story The Other Man by Bernard Schlink, to be produced by the same man behind Downfall and The Lives of Others. He talked passionately about political theatre - how he believes that the play Comedians was the best play of the 70s, how political theatre lay dormant under Thatcher (is this really the case?) and how much he misses Spitting Image. He also discussed how disappointed he was by the treatment of the arts under the Blair government, rather shockingly saying that David Mellor would have done a better job "but he couldn't keep his trousers on". Fascinating stuff, which even survived a choking fit by the interviewer and a final question, "Are you comfortable in your own skin?" so lugubriously phrased it sent the audience into fits of laughter.
As I write this, a gig by Bob Geldof is booming from a nearby tent. It reminds me of Russell Brand's joke: "He knows all about famine - he's been dining out on I Don't Like Mondays for the last 30 years ..."
