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This year’s Hay Lit Fest – one of my favourite events – has flowered as never before. Seduced by a full-on sun from dawn to dusk over the weekend, the punters have flocked in. After the utter drenching of last year’s festival, and wary of the effects of the recession on the bibliophilic public, Peter Florence and his dedicated gang of supporters took the decision to remove one venue and to reduce ticket prices. As it happens, last year they lost one tented stage to the torrents anyway, when it became instead a muddy tented swimming pool.

The result of the price cut has been that show after show has been selling out and the whole place is seething with thousands of people cramming walkways resounding with cries of ‘Sorry! So sorry!’ as they cannon into one another or splodge their neighbours with Shepherds ewes’ milk ice-cream.

The open spaces have been planted now with young trees and permanent borders of flowers and shrubs, tended with creativity and dedication by Rosanna Bulmer. For the rest of the year they are fenced off from the sheep but now the grass is covered with bodies sleeping, caressing, sunbathing and reading the Guardian.

Which brings me to the Guardian people, who have their own dedicated yurt in which they hang out and do not much, if the coverage so far in the paper is any guide. I went in to discuss a photograph which they once ran but had to remove, which we have inserted into the paperback edition of Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings. I foolishly forgot first to remove my heavily figured, sharp-toed, high-heeled, oxblood Western Boots, which, once spotted by the gentle hacks and hackettes, caused them to recoil in horror and clam up, on the assumption (I suppose) that a man wearing such footwear could only be an intolerable shit. Their reaction was so sweet and unsophisticated that I forgave them and left with a smile.

This year’s menu reflects the eclectic and subjective choices that give the festival its special, happy flavour; one knows instinctively that these decisions have not been made by some up-their-own-arse Lit Ed from a Sunday broadsheet.

I was nevertheless surprised to see that Jane Birkin was coming; somehow, one feels Ms Birkin has become French property and has not much dialogue with the English, let alone the Gwalians of Brecknock. Up until now I have associated her with only two things – her audio-erotic recording with Serge Gainsbourg of Je t’aime, Moi non plus, which so shocked and excited the world in 1969, and her appearance in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 movie Blow Up. In the autumn of 2003 I spent three months (which turned out to be his last) working with David Hemmings on his autobiography, Blow Up & Other Exaggerations. The film was a key element in Hemmings’ career and we dissected it thoroughly. Jane Birkin’s part, though small, was not incidental.

She is one of two wannabe models who turn up at the studio of the photographer played by Hemmings, prepared, it seems, to do anything to get him to take shots of them. The result is the famous and amazingly erotic ‘purple paper’ scene in which Hemmings and girls romp and strip as he clicks away at them. In this scene, for the first time in British cinema in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot, a triangle of pubic hair is visible. It caused such a sensation at the time that it wasn’t unheard off for projectionists to cut one frame of the short sequence from the film, re-splice it and take the shot home.

Jane appeared for a talk at Hay on Saturday afternoon, limping elegantly, slender and stylish, her hair dark and cropped, looking as if the word ‘gamine’ had been invented for her.

She’s 62 now, but still clearly the beautiful and iconic presence she has been ever since Blow Up first hit the screens. Introduced briefly by Phillipe Sands, who had no need to utter more than three sentences once he’d launched her, she was an enchanting, fluent raconteur, with a slight French accent and phrasing in her lilting voice. She spoke warmly and movingly about Serge Gainsbourg, who had done so much to establish and keep her in France, although it’s now 30 years since they parted. I asked her how she’d found working with the 24 year-old Hemmings (whom I’d found charming and generous spirited as a 62 year old), and with Antonioni.

She was, she said, a nervous and shy 19 year-old, booked for only three days to shoot the scene. As Antonioni let the camera roll for the first time for the famous scene, knowing what she had to do, she was terrified, but David whispered gently to her, ‘Don’t be frightened of the camera; it’s me you’re meant to be frightened of…. And it’ll be fine.’ He was, she said, a sweet and considerate man. And Antonioni was an ‘architect’, who would stand for nothing less than perfection in every detail, where every colour had to be precisely what he wanted – fences, trees, bodies, buildings all painted to conform to his vision.

After this, I had to hear her sing. I hadn’t booked but managed to get a ticket for her show later that evening. It was a revelation, a charming, touching set. Jane has a sweet, high voice, for which Serge Gainsbourg had written many of the songs she performed. She has also added some of her own, all in French and of a soulful, introspective nature. Her musicians, undoubtedly of quality, were badly sound-engineered and thus lacked cohesion, which didn’t help the songs as they should have done, but it was a deeply nostalgic and, in parts, beautiful event, which I’m glad I didn’t miss.

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