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The misty town of Hay-on-Wye may have seen a decline in the number of bookshops it is famed for – from 35 to little more than a dozen in the past decade, but no one could deny that its artistic and intellectual output is prodigious. Hay now has not one but two cultural festivals competing for audiences.
This weekend, as a permanent downpour failed to dampen spirits, both got into their stride. Neither festival likes to acknowledge the other. The Hay Festival remains somewhat sniffy about the young pretender, HowTheLightGetsIn, and concentrates on its traditional strengths – poetry and books. Now in its 27th year, it was founded and is run by Peter Florence and boasts global spin-offs. HowTheLightGetsIn, conceived and run by philosopher Hilary Lawson (and with the Observer as media sponsor), is about philosophy and music and is in its sixth year. As both grow and stretch mightily, the B&B industry in and around the town has never had it so good.
The alternative festival is pitched by a stretch of green next to the town's tiny Globe Theatre, with yurt-like tents and trestle tables giving it a medieval feel. "We ran it at the same time because there were so many people here at that time – it seemed the natural thing to do," said Lawson.
His aim, he explains, was to reclaim the unfashionable word "philosophy" and open a platform for non-combative discussion. "We're very different from the literary festival, which is largely publishers sending their authors; all our events are about debate and ideas. I took the view that we are all philosophers, and at some point everybody puzzles over their lives.
"We bring scientists and academics and audiences into conversation. All our seven venues are quite intimate. It's far away from London, and I think that helps people to leave some of their grandstanding lines of argument behind and relax a little, go to places less travelled. Why should it be only Parisian taxi drivers who get to have such real conversation? We mingle everyone. Here you can be in the coffee queue and end up chatting to a Nobel prize-winner."
The atmosphere is certainly alternative. There are bands, including Hot Chip and House of Hats, and even the odd standup comedian. As the festival kicked off, Dr Barry C Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, could be seen dressed as a druid, trailing behind a procession of people in animal masks and chatting about morality.
A Ukip supporter, the historian Nikolai Tolstoy, could be heard denouncing the European Union as existing both to fund the mafia and as a place "to keep dreadful hasbeens like Chris Patten and Neil Kinnock".
The Observer-sponsored debate on the open society and its enemies – with Chris Huhne, David Omand, John Naughton and Mary Ann Sieghart – was a sell-out, even as the noise of rain on canvas competed with views on oligarchs and Edward Snowden.
"It's a 90-second walk but that's more than enough to get drenched," said BBC director and economist David Malone, escorting his panel from the "green room" tent to the Globe theatre for a debate entitled Bang Goes the Big Bang.
Laura Mersini-Houghton, an esteemed cosmologist and professor of physics at the University of North Carolina, hopes that, in a new paper, she and Dr Malcolm Perry of Cambridge University have finally proved what Stephen Hawking said suspected earlier this year – that black holes do not exist.
"I think this is a wonderful place to come and release these things," said Mersini-Houghton. "As a scientist you are isolated, and I have spent the past five months locked up with equations. It is wonderful to come here and see people's eyes light up in front of you as they get it. The big scientific questions are just as interesting to everyone."
Some of Lawson's 200 or so guests think that the relatively free-and-easy format at HTLGI is still not quite radical enough. Scottish writer AL Kennedy said: "I disapprove a little of the debate thing, matching people up with opposing views and letting them be rude to each other. If you're interesting, people will be interested. There's a huge appetite for a level of conversation that isn't happening on television or in the media. There are lots of these events springing up around the country, well outside the awareness of London. If I said yes to everything I was asked to, I could do an event like this every weekend.
"Its about the audiences – they are lovely, and completely unrepresented in British cultural debate. All the arguing and shouting, it's very English actually. The Celtic tradition is far closer to a talking and questioning approach. But at the moment we haven't got a grown-up culture. It's all toxic bullshit about what people can and cannot say."
For the politicians here, HowTheLightGetsIn (the name was pinched from a Leonard Cohen lyricthe name was pinched from a Leonard Cohen lyric) does represent a radical shift from the way they have to debate on Newsnight or in parliament, said Diana Wallis, former vice–president of the European parliament, who took part in a debate on the future of the nation states. This is her first year at HowTheLightGetsIn and she confessed herself taken aback by the informality of the event.
Clutching the sunflower she was given after her speech, she said she had been won over. "We feel our politicians aren't representative but the fact is there are very few places to have interesting debate, so this is wonderful for politicians. If it was just us speaking, we'd have nine people and a dog in the audience, but an event mixing so many different people, discussing ideas, is very welcome."
The warmth of the event was summed up by a burying of hostilities between two of Britain's leading feminist voices, Julie Bindel and Laurie Penny, long at loggerheads over feminist theory. When Blindel turned up without her inhaler, Penny raced off through the rain to her digs to find one. It's a toss-up whether the revelation about black holes could be as meaningful a shift in culture and debate.
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