George Binning

‘Zines and self-publishing are a bone of contention in my house. “I don’t have much time for self-publishing,” says my flatmate who works for Bloomsbury, “if it was any good it would have been published properly.” I, however, am in love with the idea that if anybody wanted to make a book or zine themselves, they could, quite easily, and control every step of the publishing process. So on Saturday I left her reading ‘proper’ books and took myself to the Publish and be Damned ‘zine and self-publishing fair at the ICA.

If you've always loved audio books but never stopped to wonder how they are made, then give yourself a slap and continue reading. Maggie Ollerenshaw described her world to a modest audience at the Guildford book festival, revealing the production process with some of the anecdotal colouring-in that makes listening to veterans talking about their particular fields so enlightening. With over 50 audiobooks to her name, she cheerily played down quite what hard work this voice-acting really is. Recording at a rate of a 150 pages a day, each page-turn is meticulously planned to fall into an editable pause. Clunky jewellery is to be avoided and the highly sensitive microphones require the actor to sit incredibly still.

The Hay Festival has ended, but so much of this enormous festival went largely unreported. Here’s the final dispatch from George Binning: Richard E Grant’s conversation with Peter Godwin about Mugabe’s regime and Godwin’s latest book, The Fear, gave us a nuanced insight into African politics that could not have been written by the Western press. Godwin, who fought against Mugabe in the civil war, started by describing the dichotomy of being a white African, especially when lecturing to audiences of predominantly black American students who had never been to Africa themselves, but still identified with the continent.

The Hay Festival has ended, but reports from this enormous festival do not. Here’s another dispatch from George Binning: In 1977, having started a craze for second hand book shops and festivals in Hay on Wye, Richard Booth crowned himself King of Hay. He also appointed a chamber of hereditary peers in 2000 (a nice little earner), but in spite of his lifelong contribution to Hay's cultural landscape, a large number of the locals think he is a wally. In fact one man tells me that there was a sort of revolution a few years ago where an angry mob ritually beheaded an effigy of Booth. He recently sold Hay Castle for around the two million mark and there are fears that the castle will be closed off and redecorated.

As night fell I was joined by my friend Sarah, a researcher for documentary maker Nick Broomfield. We attended a talk by William Cohen, an investigative journalist who told us that Goldman Sachs really is the evil corporation that everyone says it is, but before long we succumbed to the dark side. That is to say, we venture into How The Light Gets In, a rival festival organised by the Independent. The musical entertainment was Disraeli and the Small Gods, a very competent Ska outfit headed by an intensely annoying Bristolian wide boy, who I suspect may be posher than he would like to let on, followed by a cheesy DJ.

If one scientist were to sit at a table full of philosophers it might seem at first that the scientist had the upper hand purely by virtue of their self confidence. The philosophers' humility might be no match for the all encompassing certainty of science. Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry and author of A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence, stood up before an audience of several hundred and proudly declared that science would eventually answer every question relating to the physical world, even perhaps, to morality. Science is the only way to answer a question, he said, as all science is based upon evidence and observation. He then gayly dismissed the existence of anything for which there was no empirical evidence.

I don't arrive at my camp site until 11pm, partly as a result of my own sense of comic timing, partly the result of a long lunch with Dear Mary and chums. Good fortune would have it that Spectator HQ has been pitched next to Radio Cymru's weather reader, who tells us in the morning that it will be fine today and even hotter tomorrow. So far so good. First on my extensive program of literary delights comes Simon Garfield, talking about his wildly entertaining book Just my Type. The lecture proved so popular it was bumped up two spots to the much larger Oxfam stage.