Town Mouse

Feed your mind – and your stomach – at a festival

tom hodgkinson

The Scottish philosopher David Hume was not keen on London, according to a new biography by contemporary philosopher Julian Baggini.

He complained it was packed with ‘factious barbarians’. When visiting Paris in the 1760s, he praised the capital of France as a sophisticated hub of letters and learning: ‘The Taste for literature is neither decay’d nor deprav’d here; as with the Barbarians who inhabit the banks of the Thames.’

This seems a little odd, since Hume’s contemporary Dr Johnson famously loved London and could hardly be called a ‘barbarian’, as the foremost English man of letters of his day.

Perhaps Johnson hadn’t been introduced to the delights of Paris. Its literary scene was dominated by a gang of competing salonnières, including Madame Louise d’Épinay. Hume had a wonderful time, speaking at the Parisian salons and half-falling in love with their hostesses. It all sounds like an 18th-century Call My Agent.

Alas, it appears Town Mouse will not be able to visit Paris this summer – not without an awful lot of quarantining and hassle. But what we have in this country is a modern tradition of festivals which are very much like the salons of the 18th century. I’m looking forward to escaping the barbarity of London town this summer to spend some time in these havens of reflection.

My favourite used to be the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall but this is, alas, no more. Run by the aristocratic Eliot family, the festival started life as the Elephant Fayre in the eighties. Siouxsie and the Banshees played there and you could go to talks by the likes of John Michell and Heathcote Williams, the now deceased leaders of hippie haute bohème. In the noughties, the festival was relaunched with more emphasis on books and less on pop music. The wits of the day gathered, from Bruce Robinson to John Cooper Clarke.

As for this summer, the live summer version of Glastonbury was sadly cancelled again. But it looks as if both Wilderness in the Cotswolds – which runs a 400-capacity talk tent – and Latitude in Suffolk, which features various wits, are going ahead.

There’s also How the Light Gets In, which pops up in London and in Hay and where ideas are discussed in yurts. The original Hay Festival of Literature was an online-only affair this year, and I am less keen on this one – for the simple reason that I am banned from it for my part in a protest, many years ago, against their policy of paying their writers nought pounds.

The great-great-grandson of Victorian liberal pioneer William Gladstone, Charlie Gladstone, and his salonnière wife, Madame Caroline, run a refuge of contemplation and Athenian philosophical reflection at the Gladstone estate in Hawarden, North Wales, in September. It’s called Camp Good Life and is a magnet for chefs such as Thomasina Miers, who come along and cook live.

Town Mouse will be making an appearance at a festival near Oxford run by Alex James, best known for being the bassist in Blur (that’s a contemporary beat group). It’s called Feastival, to indicate its emphasis on food. I’ll be putting on a toga and, alongside Madame Souris de la Ville, will host philosophical salons there each afternoon. It should be like a little corner of Athens – though instead of lyre players we’ll have ukulele strummers.

Writing to a friend about his love affair with Paris, Hume said, ‘I eat nothing but Ambrosia, drink nothing but Nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread on nothing but Flowers … between public Business, the Company of the learned and that of the Great, especially of the Ladies, I find my time fill’d up.’ And that’s precisely the experience we aim to recreate at the summer festivals.

I feel that the amiable David Hume would have approved of the foodie nature of today’s rural salons. Later in life, while living back in Edinburgh in 1769, he took up cooking and turned into a sort of cross between Socrates and Jamie Oliver. He talked of his ‘great talent for Cookery, the science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life’.

The lovable man of letters then boasted in a letter to a friend, ‘I have just now lying on the Table before me a Receipt [recipe] for making soupe à la Reine, copy’d with my own hand. For Beef and Cabbage (a charming Dish), and old Mutton and old Claret, no body excels me.’ In savouring the pleasures of table alongside those of study, Hume was consciously attacking the ascetic tradition in philosophy.

Fun and feasting can live alongside philosophy very happily, he thought. It’s all part of the good life. We can congratulate ourselves in this country for our festival culture – weekends where we can indulge blissfully in ideas and the sensual pleasures.