Insider View - On Festivals

Lucy Madden reflects on the life enhancing power of festivals – even when it rains

“We’re not coming to stay” said the woman at the front door. “But the parrot is.” So began the 2011 Flat Lake Arts and Literary Festival here in Co. Monaghan. What is it that makes festivals, events that expose one over a number of days to the vagaries of the weather, a monotonous diet and the stern gaze of Security, so utterly compelling?

Fields garlanded with camper vans and tents that shiver in the wind are not pretty to the eye, and the lavatory arrangements for thousands are best not contemplated, so why do we put them on? Our own little festival, this year competing as it did with Bloom, Writers’ Week at Listowel and several local sporting events, seemed a precarious undertaking. And yet.

Writing In his Devil’s Dictionary,1911, Ambrose Bierce defined Hospitality as ‘The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging’; a definition which for those experienced in the industry will undoubtedly strike a chord. But it’s different with festivals; the opening of the gates brings on the possibility of a more democratic, all-in-this-together, encompassing kind of experience.

It’s about taking what comes, almost a suspension of reality. The absence of hierarchy, the chance of chatting with your favourite writer, or musician, or just your neighbour or turning a corner knowing that you will always find the unexpected are what make festivals such time-out-of-life events.

During the first evening, and under a still hot sun, I was asked “Do you view this with horror, or awe, or delight?” The answer was all three emotions, of course. There was still the pre-festival angst, would the weather hold? Would enough people turn up? Would the performers perform?

For us living in the middle of an evolving and extended campsite there were other issues. Cole Porter’s ‘tinkling piano in the next apartment’ had romance; six tinkling pianos night and day in the middle of the field next to our house, was another thing. Yards from our bedroom window bands would thud out their music into the dawn and daybreak would bring the certainty of finding strangers in our kitchen, and comatose bodies sleeping under bushes.

There was, too, the uncertainty of promised appearances. We had been told that actor and writer Sam Shepherd (be still my beating heart) was on his way. Then suddenly he is here, and Ulick O’Connor and John Banville and Antony Cronin are sharing hay bales.

And where else, but at the festival, would I find myself sharing breakfast with a man (Robert Fisk) who is telling me about his three interviews with Osama Lid Laden? How else would I know they had eaten naan bread?

Festivals are full of opportunities. Anyone can turn up with a story, a poem or an instrument. A man made music out of a Hoover. There was a poetry slam where local people of all ages read their work. Who would have known there were so many poets on our doorstep?

A woman arrived with a sewing machine to teach children how to make skirts out of recycled plastic. A man who had recently joined a creative writing class was encouraged on stage to read his story about a blind boy in the Holocaust. A little girl was selling her homemade Welsh cakes. Children were splattered with mud and sand and nobody cared.

Then, on day three, the skies turned steel grey and the rain began. As the hours passed, the wind whipped the tents and water gathered in muddy pools. The food was beginning to run out, but gallantly the visitors ignored the storm and gathered under any canvass that hadn’t been washed away in the deluge.

At one stage I was serving venison sausages on wet paper plates and I heard a man say “It’s odd. You see kinds of people at festivals that you never see at any other time” And looking round, I knew what he meant; you couldn’t imagine these rain soaked and colourful individuals who were so merrily embracing the moment had ever queued at Tesco or spent the weekend mowing the lawn.

Nobody complained or looked for one moment as if they weren’t having fun. I wanted to thank each and every one of them for their joy of life and thanks too, and it’s not exaggerating to point this out, for instilling in one world weary and cynical heart, a little bit of hope for the future of the human race.

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Together with her husband Johnny, Lucy Madden runs their magnificent 18th century mansion, Hilton Park, Clones, Co Monaghan as a country house which is open to private guests, groups, small weddings and conferences. The restored formal gardens are also open by arrangement. Lucy is a keen organic gardener and also a member of the Irish Food Writers Guild.