After leaving home mid-morning and stopping at an oddly soul-less rest area en-route, we arrived in Hay on Wye early in the afternoon. Against expectations - while wrestling with a navigation app on my phone that seemed intent on navigating us backwards towards our destination, we somehow navigated directly to the front door of the cottage we are staying in.
We arrived a couple of hours early, so set off on foot towards the town - a trecherous journey of - ooh – perhaps 150 yards. It’s a small town. Small enough that I consciously looked up if it should be termed a village or a town. It has a market - which makes it a “market town” according to the history books.
Hay on Wye is everything I had expected and more. You know how sometimes you build a picture of how somewhere might be in your head, and are left ever so slightly disappointed? Not this time. The rabbit-warren of narrow streets through the town center are lined with cafes, bookshops, pubs, bookshops, charity shops, and more bookshops. More bookshops than I’ve ever seen, anywhere.
We stopped at a quiet pub in the sunshine and grabbed a snack for lunch before setting off in no particular hurry at all to look around some of the bookshops - along the way passing a grocery store and filling a bag with everything you might need if you’re not planning on eating in at all (so wine, snacks, cider, and more snacks). The lady at the counter said it looked like we were all set for a wonderful weekend. Smiles broke out all around.
On the wander back towards the house we passed the “Cinema Bookshop”, and got sucked into it’s magical gravity field. Imagine an old cinema with mezanine floors, and endless rows of bookshelves stacked from floor to ceiling with any and every subject you can imagine.
Bliss.
I set off into the labyrinth in search of Ernest Hemingway - to fulfill a promise to return to the classics, and find something of consequence to read. More by luck than judgement I found my way to “A Moveable Feast”, and pulled it from the shelf to read the synopsis. I had heard of the book before, but didn’t really know what it was about.
Who knew that the Paris visited by Gil Pender in “Midnight in Paris” is the Paris described in Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” ? Of course it is. Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) yearns to visit a place he has only read about - through Hemingway’s book. If you watch the movie, you’ll understand.
Anyway.
A good friend joked that the suspension of our car will fail on the way home, given the payload of books it will return home carrying. I’m starting to think they may have been right.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an old Hemingway book, a glass of wine, and an armchair in the sunshine waiting for me.