Hay Festival: Winter and books are the perfect mix

Writer Antony Woodward is looking forward to snuggling up to Hay's Winter Weekend, a wonderful pre-Christmas event in the beautiful Brecon Beacons
Hay-on-Wye, home to the Hay Festival Winter Weekend, is on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park Photo: Getty
By Antony Woodward

Few things go together like winter and books. Pretending you’re ever going to read anything poolside or on a beach fools nobody but yourself. The sun’s in your eyes, your arms ache, you’re the wrong temperature; besides, sun loungers are inherently uncomfortable. No, winter’s the time for reading.
You ‘curl up’ or ‘settle down’ with a good book - it’s the language of hibernation, not of summer. You can heighten the effect by choosing your book well: Wuthering Heights is good. Apsley Cherrard’s The Worst Journey in the World is better.
Those who ‘get’ winter love it far more than summer; that sublime combination of outdoors and in. It was a craving for winter wildness that brought me to the Black Mountains. Fed up with the airless Tupperware skies of urban life, I required gales and storms, snow and, ideally, permafrost.

We moved to a cottage so high up it was routinely lost in cloud. Driven by increasingly offbeat imperatives - lugging an old railway carriage up the mountain, chopping wood, building box beds under the eaves - we adapted to winter nights in which the wind moaned like an organ, increasing to an animal shriek the time it sucked a window out.
We were snowed in for five weeks last winter, though we also often awoke above in an Alpine landscape above the clouds, or to find wild ponies drinking at the spring in the yard.
As I started to write about creating a garden and living at 1300 feet, however, I discovered I was by no means the only person to be driven by such compulsions. Many, writers especially, it seemed, craved precisely the wild weather I was after.
It was Thomas de Quincey who articulated it best. His hymn to the joys of winter in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, prescribing precise details of the ideal ‘scholar’s library, in a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy winter evening, rain driving vindictively and with malice aforethought against the windows, and darkness such that you cannot see your own hand when held up against the sky’ read like a personal creed.
That was when the penny finally dropped: it wasn’t wild weather I was after. It was the cosiness it brought with it.
Hay-on-Wye, home of the Hay Festival, is a town made for winter. It nestles and huddles: higgledy-piggledy houses on narrow, crooked streets around its looming castle, dwarfed by the Black Mountains far above, like some mittel-European Hammer set for Transylvania.
Everywhere are cosy nooks and rooms with beams; coffee shops and pubs with smoke-blackened interiors. Even the name evokes pleasing Nativity associations: contented animals snatching fodder; accompanied by that calming rhythmic munching of ruminants’ jaws. And through every window are real mountains with real heather.
Hay does that combo of wildness and civilised cosiness better than anywhere else in Britain. One moment you can on Offa’s Dyke, striding out like those noble inventors of walking, Wordsworth or Coleridge, with glowing cheeks and 70-mile views. Fifteen minutes later you can be gorging yourself with bookish thoughts and Butty Bach. This year’s line-up includes Michael Holroyd, Julian Mitchell, George Clarke, Sam Llewellyn and the Art Themen jazz Quartet.
You can even do it all: join Robert Penn cycling Gospel Pass before listening to his account of his search for the perfect bike. As the barometer falls and the nights draw in (splendid phrase), do like the animals do: snuggle up in Hay.
Hay Winter Weekend 3-5 December: Antony Woodward talks about his book The Garden in the Clouds at 10 am on Saturday 4 at the Hay Community Centre.