Hello all - it's day three of the festival, and I've picked up the blogging baton after a sterling first leg by Gwyn. Things, naturally, get off to a scrambled start: slow trains, bank holiday bus timetables and one very lost taxi driver combine to find me dashing to make my very first event – UCL Emeritus Professor John Sutherland talking about his latest book, So You Think You Know Jane Austen. As it turns out, sprinting across the festival site in search of the right tent was not the best preparation I could have made: Hay is basking in May sunshine, and the temperature inside the marquee is shooting skywards. They should be handing out salt tablets on the door.
The Austen-Sutherland double act has proved quite a draw – there's not a spare seat in the house, and the polite, pre-lecture silence is broken only by the discreet rustle of 600 audience members fanning themselves with their programmes. The warm-up guy, a slightly younger, slightly more dashing version of Sutherland himself, steps up to the microphone. If you're not an Austen fan, he suggests, please leave now. Nobody moves.
"I feel like Daniel in the lion's den", says Sutherland, gazing out over the sea of white heads, clearly wondering if they're here for him or Austen. He then fails to endear himself to the audience by admitting that he'd actually wanted to write a book about Thackeray, but his publisher didn't think there was a market. Stony silence. Sutherland wilts under the gaze of 600 Austenites, before winning them round by admitting that he quite often feels like cutting his throat after reading Hardy. This goes down extremely well. I hope there aren't any Hardyites listening at the door.
Things warm up when Sutherland begins posing some of the questions from his book (of which, despite considering myself an Austen fan, I'm able to answer precisely one – How old is Mr Knightly?). The marquee is soon ringing with appreciative laughter. A brief diversion to talk about the paucity of A level essays also meets with approval, while a lengthy gripe about the inability of TV adaptations to get to grips with the fine calibrations of age in Austen's novels is greeted with sage nods of agreement. Despite a shaky start, and an awkward moment when he becomes flustered and loses his place while discussing the extreme eroticism of Marianne's fall in Sense and Sensibility, by the end of the event, his lecturer's skill has triumphed, and he has the audience eating out of his hand.
"Let's get out of this Turkish bath into the fresh air", he suggests. Absolutely – I'm off for an ice-cream.
