Hay Segovia 2013 day one: 'You can't wait until the muse strikes' Confession: I am, or was until Friday morning, a Hay Festival virgin. I had my Hay cherry popped, if I'm allowed to carry on this slightly uncomfortable metaphor, by Val McDermid at one of Hay Segovia 2013's first events. A note about Segovia itself, first. It's an extraordinary little Spanish town, confined by walls and surrounded by the sort of dry, yellow, hilly grassland you'd expect in a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. The city is rightly famous for its Roman aqueduct, an intimidatingly huge and yet somehow fragile-looking thing which it is almost impossible to believe is 2,000 years old. But everywhere else you look, there's an ancient church or synagogue, or the 11th-century "Alcazar" or castle, which looks like something out of a Disney fairytale, and the wonderful Gothic cathedral which somehow looks like Gaudi before Gaudi. But back to Val. The prolific crime writer, probably best known for the Dr Tony Hill series (Wire in the Blood), was speaking at the Caja Segovia, a little venue in the heart of the city. Wonderfully, she turned up wearing flip-flops and a sort of tie-dyed psychedelic sunburst outfit which looked as though she was heading for the beach in San Francisco circa 1968. If clothes exist that make the wearer look more relaxed, I would like to know about them. She was speaking to her fellow writer and friend Tiffany Murray about her career. She has a splendid Scottish burr (for obvious reasons, the word "murder" was regularly used, which is good, because it sounded great: "muh-rrrderrr") and was as no-nonsense and unfussy as you might expect: "Writing is a job," she said. Not something to be precious about. You can't wait until the muse strikes. This was something she said she'd learned in a long career in tabloid journalism: if you need to write 1,500 words about a train crash, you can't tell your editor you're not in the mood. Don't try to write the perfect first chapter, because you can't. Just get it down, get to the end, and by then the first chapter will be different anyway. She's clearly an old hand at public speaking: the room was full of 16-year-olds from a nearby British Council school, and the atmosphere at times was very much one of an assembly, with lots of giggling and talking behind hands and teachers hissing "shhh." But unruffled Val breezed on. She loves "making stuff up for a living," and feels sorry, she says, for writers who peg themselves to a particular genre or worse a particular set of characters. I can't write two books in a row with the same characters. At the end of a Tony Hill novel, she'll move on to a stand-alone work. It must be dreadful, being confined to one set of characters, always needing to find a new set of adventures for Detective Inspector Grumpy. The first thing everyone tells you, if you say you're going to Segovia - or if you're already in Segovia, and you say it's your first time, or indeed if you don't say a thing about Segovia, are nowhere near Segovia, and until then had not in fact heard of Segovia - is that you SIMPLY MUST TRY THE PIG. It's not pork, you see, it's suckling pig, and it's a local speciality. Every year the Hay-organising tribe descends on the house, or palace, really, of the local marques, where they've been slow-roasting the world-famous Segovian pig for the last seven months (or whatever) and where they have this tradition called (I'm sure this is right) "smashing the pig." It involves whoever the most famous person is at the festival cutting the pig up with a plate - demonstrating, thus, that the meat is so tender you don't need knives or any such nonsense - and then smashing the plate on the floor. Everyone then talks about it for years afterwards, how they saw David Mitchell or Jose Luis Borges ceremonially carve a pig with crockery, and they then tell you how wonderful the meat tasted. This year, they served posh sausages and a Swiss raclette. It was very nice. But somehow I feel short-changed, even if I did get to meet an actual marques. The first thing that takes some getting used to around here is that everyone's a writer. That might not be so surprising at a literary festival but somehow it came as one to me. And the thing about writers, it seems, is that they can drink. Not that they're drunk - they're just constantly holding a glass of wine. Lovely local Spanish wine, in fact, which at lunchtime, it turns out, goes straight to the head of those of us who tend to stick to beer. "Oh, there's definitely a knack to it," said one cheerful travel writer. You've got to maintain a constant level of jolliness without letting it tip over into being drunk. Otherwise you'll never make it to the 2am cocktails beneath the cathedral, and what else are you here for?