Thirty years on, Hay festival is still thinking, talking and laughing

It was conceived as an excuse to ‘have a few mates round’, but now the Hay literary festival is embracing a much wider vision and is a global event

Eddie Izzard is in the Spar, wearing leather trousers, four-inch heels and a light smattering of pancake. But this is Hay, so nobody notices. He buys his stuff and totters off down Castle Street, pausing to talk to a dog waiting in the back of a car. Later in the evening, dressed more casually, he will take to the stage to delight an audience.

Hay is like that. The familiar-looking, clean-shaven chap in the linen jacket? (Linen jackets are de rigueur for chaps, this being a literary gathering.) Why it’s Nick Clegg, ex-coalitionista, unexpectedly tall in the flesh. The other tall chap (linen jacket)? Paxo, of course, equally tall. Oh look, there’s Stephen Fry, former National Theatre boss Nick Hytner. It’s like the maxim about the 1960s, that all the people who made the swinging decade would have fitted in one room. Perhaps that’s what Bill Clinton was thinking when he famously decribed the festival as “the Woodstock of the mind”.

Related: Thirty years of Hay: Christopher Hitchens, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel – in conversation

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