I’m finally back in the States after eleven days in Great Britain, a trip that brought me from London to Cambridge to the Hay Festival in Wales to Edinburgh, Scotland, and back to London again. I had a chance to speak to a fair number of journalists, college students, authors, and politicians, as well as a cross-section of people in Great Britain who are just as concerned about their government as we are about ours. The difference, I suppose, is that they’re also concerned about what’s happening here—and many of them are wondering if we’ve lost our minds.
What follows is the transcript, edited for clarity, of the video I shot as I was waiting at Hereford for the train to take me to Edinburgh.
Hello everybody on Substack. How is it going? I am not in America right now. I'm currently at a train station in Hereford, England, having just come from the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye in Wales. It's been quite an extraordinary week. I got to London on Wednesday, [May 21] where I had some media to do, and then on Sunday headed up to Cambridge to speak at the Cambridge Union, and then up to the Hay Festival Monday morning for three days, which was really just an amazing event. It's mostly a literary festival, but there are a lot of political figures and artists as well. Four or five stages are active at once with moderated panels and one-on-one interviews.
It’s quite a bit of a challenge to get to Hay-on-Wye—it took four-and-a-half-hours by train to from Cambridge and we had to switch trains two times—but the reputation of the festival is so great that there are 700 presenters and 150,000 people attend every year. The audiences were incredibly welcoming and thoughtful, and they asked terrific questions. It’s definitely an experience I would love to repeat.
I participated in three events. In addition to a round-up of the news on my last morning, I was on a panel with American journalist McKay Coppins, who writes for The Atlantic, and the First Minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan, Baroness of Ely. Julia Gillard, the former prime minister of Australia, was supposed to be the moderator but, unfortunately, she wasn't able to make it so the phenomenal Rosie Boycott, journalist and member of the House of Lords as well as a long-time trustee of the festival, filled in. It was a fascinating conversation about UK politics and the resurgence of Nigel Farage, the role of Wales, and, of course, the insidious impact of the current American government.
I also had a one-on-one conversation with journalist Samira Ahmed and got to talk about my latest book, Who Could Ever Love You. At the book signing afterward I had a chance to meet a few of the people who’d been in the audience and it was wonderful to see how engaged they were. It heartened me and filled me with hope that so many people continue to be willing to grapple with the myriad problems we face, to question and call out our leaders, while remaining invested in finding solutions.
They reminded me of all of you.
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