It seems to be a good day for amusing comment threads at The Guardian. The latest blog entry to turn up in my feeds was this one, which is about their coverage of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. Sadly the first comment has now been deleted by Guardian staff, which is a shame because it was a rather funny rant about the commenter’s opinion that no one wants to listen to a bunch of luvvies talking to each other. In The Guardian’s defense I should note that the comment did include at least one reference to copulation so it probably wasn’t deleted for being uncomplimentary about the literati.

Anyway, this encouraged me to pop over to the Hay Festival web site to see what I could find. Two things were immediately obvious. Firstly, no one involved with the Festival is aware that the European Cup hasn’t been called the European Cup since 1991. And secondly, the next time someone complains that a convention web site is doing a poor job of presenting the program online I shall point them at Hay’s web site so they can see how badly it can be done if you try hard enough.

I did, however, look through the entire brochure. After all, Hay isn’t that far away. If there was a train station there I could pop over for the day (but there isn’t). And indeed they have appearances by Michael Wood, Ben Goldacre and Karen Armstrong that I might find interesting. On the spec-fic side there’s not so much. It seems that Hay is quite happy to talk about fantastical things if they are in books for children, in movies, or even in opera, but in books for adults, oh dear me no. (Well, except for Mr. Rushdie of course, but we mustn’t accuse him of writing anything fantastical, even if his new book has just been reviewed by John Clute and sounds really rather interesting.)

But never fear, science fiction fans, the people who run Hay know that you exist, and this year they have put on a program item just for you! They have got the man who does the voice of the Daleks to come and run a Doctor Who trivia quiz. Isn’t that thrilling!?