all it took was no internet. Depressing – The Irish Times

On a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye, a small market town in Wales, my phone suddenly becomes no more useful than a cracked glass brick. The town, which is thronged with visitors each summer for the Hay Festival, doesn’t really have the infrastructure to support the numbers milling around. Two hundred thousand tickets sold last year, mostly to literature enthusiasts who come to this beautifully verdant pocket of the country for the talks and panels. But there’s also the mystery and intrigue of potentially seeing Colm Tóibín buying skimmed milk in the town, or Malala Yousafzai necking a pint in the pub. It’s a window into another world. Another time too – apart from the 20 or so book shops this annual mass pilgrimage somehow manages to sustain within the small town, the place is also peppered with antique shops.