97.

97 – Visit Hay-on-Wye during the festival.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Hay-on-Wye is a small town right on the border between England and Wales. It’s famous because it is full of book shops (literally every other shop sells books) and they also hold a literary festival every year. As someone who loves books, I’ve always enjoyed going to Hay. My parents used to take me when I was young and as I’ve got older it’s become a nice day trip with Tom or friends (it only takes about an hour to get there from where I live). But I’ve never before managed to get to the festival. When we were at uni we always got home too late to be able to go, and last year I completely forgot about it until it was over. It looked as though I was going to miss it this year as well – Tom pretty much never gets weekend off and I couldn’t go during the week because my boss was on holiday so I couldn’t get the time off, but luckily on the bank holiday weekend Tom actually ended up only working the evening on the Sunday so we went in the day. It was really fun. We didn’t realise at first that there’s a special festival site a few minutes down the road from the town so we spent a while wandering round the town wondering why it was so quiet! In the end we found where we were actually meant to be, and it was really good, even though we didn’t go and see anyone. (They have lots of different people there – writers, comedians, actors, politicians, etc., but unfortunately on the day we went there wasn’t really anyone there we wanted to see). It was a really nice day though and we got to sit in the sun and wander around. There were lots of little stalls around so we even got to buy some books (2 by David Mitchell, including the new one which cost us about £20!) and we bought an amazing board game based on books.

So yes. A lovely day.