Imagine if you can Richard Littlejohn's worst nightmare – with cheese, crosswords and Clay Shirky thrown in
"Curiosity and conviviality, the two Cs, were our watchwords," explained Madeleine Bunting, director of the Guardian's Open Weekend. There was, in fact, a third C – compote – which Felicity Cloake was making for breakfast in front of an audience of 100 or so as I arrived. Food for thought.
It was Richard Littlejohn's worst nightmare. Not just Cloake's fruit compote and Scotch pancake – he is surely a bacon roll kind of guy – but 5,000 Guardianistas gathered under one roof at Kings Place in London at the weekend for a festival of reasonableness. The weather was perfect, proving that God, whatever the Bible might suggest, is a centrist. Not even the Heathen's Manifesto, being concocted by philosopher Julian Baggini at the same time as the compote, made Him veil the sun or send a plague of frogs, interesting though that might have been for Paul Evans's country ramble round King's Cross.
The programme had been artfully devised to make you feel guilty. Each hour there were around 10 events. Cloake's compote was up against not just the Heathen's Manifesto but the Role of Women in the Arab Spring, Zac Goldsmith being brutally honest about the limitations of Tory environmentalism, and a talk on terrorism in Kashmir.
When it came to a choice between What is the Future of Capitalism? and The Art of the Cryptic Crossword, there could only be one winner. John Halpern, aka crossword-setter Paul, was generating waves of love among the cryptologists gathered in the Scott Room. Except for one woman, who said she found his puzzles too hard. "I see your name on a crossword and give up immediately," she said. "What is the secret of solving them? Can you give me a clue?" "Perseverance," said Halpern sternly and uncryptically.
Another woman had a more practical suggestion. "Work backwards. Look at the answers the following day, and try to get inside Paul's head." It took Halpern 10 years to become a full-time setter, and in his early days he had to do other jobs to make ends meet, including transporting urine samples from a hospital to a lab for testing. "I was the official piss-taker," he said. In a way, he still is. His crosswords aren't just puzzles; they're offbeat views of the world. He aims to subvert and satirise, and also likes to smuggle in smut. Mistakes are a catastrophe. When he placed Settle in Cumbria rather than North Yorkshire, the Guardian switchboard was jammed for days. As an act of reparation, he had to compose a puzzle in which settle featured in every clue. "I had to settle up and settle down," he said.
The weekend was challenging to report. There were an awful lot of wannabe journalists, including James Carroll, a student doing English at Oxford, who pointed out that my scribble was not proper shorthand. "We're told you have to have shorthand now to get hired," he said. He had come as an antidote to reading Chaucer for his imminent finals. How did the weekend compare? "Faster paced, but just as difficult to understand," he said pithily. He will go far, damn him.
I also talked to the editorial team from the Boar, Warwick University's student newspaper. They were £17,000 in debt, but were pinning their hopes on a digital future, rejected the idea of a paywall and hoped to break even through advertising. "If we had a paywall we would just be talking to ourselves," said editor Natasha Clark. Perhaps they could consider a festival.There was a farmers' market next to the canal with olives, crepes and a juice bar, as well as a cheese boat where you could taste Welsh cheeses. The queues at the stalls were long; the cheese disappearing rapidly. I bumped into Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, who was on his way to a debate about phone hacking, and told him I'd found a new business model for the media.
Forget all this digital stuff and concentrate on pancakes, smoothies, mature cheddar laced with whisky, and of course crosswords. He gave me a slightly quizzical look.
Grayson Perry, in conversation with Decca Aitkenhead, was a great hit.
"It's one of my deep fears that I might become fashionable," said Perry, a natural aphorist. "All that means is that you are on the verge of being unfashionable." Most of the questions were posed online by readers. The first came from Perry's wife. "What's for dinner?" It was Perry's birthday and at the end of the session he was presented with a cake. "Very unusual," he said. "It looks like spam and avocado."
Guardian Society editor and committed apiarist Alison Benjamin presented a talk on keeping bees in cities. "How did it go?" I asked her afterwards. "Buzzing," she said.
Because I was late I wasn't allowed into the How to Be Happy session, which made me furious. But I was cheered up by Simon Hoggart's one-man show, which was wise as well as witty. "Why have you stayed at the Guardian for 45 years?" he was asked. "Because they let you write what you want." As for parliamentary sketchwriting, it was better than working, he said. Though he admitted Welsh questions on a wet Tuesday was tough.
Steve Bell also did a brilliant turn, running through the past 30 years of British history as seen through his cartoons. Very occasionally his scabrous humour had been too much even for the Guardian's liberal editors, and he showed one cartoon from the Falklands war which had never seen the light of day. "But on the whole I've been very lucky," he said, "though I suppose I have to say that because I'm here in the editorial conference room."
Sunday morning was tough. "Did no one planning this realise we were losing an hour?" complained one frazzled woman as she bought her latte. Ed Balls, on early in the main hall, was undeterred, telling interviewer Katharine Viner he was in training to run the London marathon. Probably wise as Labour's road back to power could be long and arduous.
The foyer at Kings Place had a stage with musicians and dancers performing energetically throughout the weekend, and there was a wall on which cartoonist Martin Rowson and illustrators Scriberia (motto "Visualise your thinking") were mapping the day's events. I noticed that when they went home on Saturday evening, a sign was pinned to it – "Please Do Not Draw On This Wall". Crowdsourcing and mutualisation evidently have their limits.
I liked the middle-aged group who spent a large part of Saturday sitting in the foyer reading the Guardian. It felt like a piece of situationist art. Everywhere you looked there were live-bloggers, tweeters and vox poppers. I vox-popped a trendy young woman reading Sartre's Iron in the Soul and asked her what she thought of the weekend. It transpired she was at Kings Place for an ultra-cool jazz concert that had nothing to do with the Guardian. "I'm probably not the best person to ask," she said with what I thought was unnecessary condescension.
I did steel myself go to some of the more serious events. Andrew Adonis and Simon Hughes debated Britain's "progressive dilemma". I'd expected Hughes to be torn apart by the audience, but he was treated relatively gently. "You never fend people off by not coming and having the debate," he told me afterwards. "Some people think we have betrayed them, but in coalitions you can't deliver everything you want." Come the next election, he said the Lib Dems would present themselves as "a progressive party willing to do a deal with a progressive Labour party". The question of whether that other C would form part of this potential progressive alliance was left hanging.
David Miliband was less forthcoming when I buttonholed him after his session, which posed the question "Are we facing a crisis of democracy?" "Are you writing a puff piece for the Guardian?" he said. No, a hard-hitting piece of investigative reporting, I insisted.
The philosophical starting point for the weekend was, where does the Guardian go from here? How do we carry on in a world where newspapers are dying and social media are becoming ever more central? Here made manifest was the community which might eventually replace the traditional us-and-them relationship.
Clay Shirky, the pope of openness, was interviewed by Rusbridger on Sunday morning, and even a dinosaur like me who thinks this piece should be 5,000 words long and written in dactylic hexameters found him persuasive. "Every time a technology comes along that allows citizens to communicate more freely the legacy industries flip out," he said. He recalled that TV companies had likened the video recorder to the Boston Strangler when it was launched. Shirky argued that in the modern media world, loyalty was everything. Should media organisations offer a product, a service, or strive to build a different sort of organisation – a group of like-minded people who thought "God forbid that the Guardian should ever go out of business?" It was clear what shape the 300-strong audience thought the Guardian of the future should take. These, after all, were the loyalest of the loyal, people who had given up their lost-hour Sunday to ponder existential media questions and eat a lot of free cheese.
The weekend was principally about those readers, and meeting Cathy Robertson, who had come down from Liverpool with her Guardian-agnostic husband, summed up its purpose. "It's a fantastic opportunity to get closer to the paper I've read for years," she said. "After this I'll be reading it with new insight. I'll feel closer to it; feel it's even more my paper and that it reflects my values. It's been a wonderful experience."
And, with apologies to Miliband, it had. Hardly any children fell in the canal; I managed to miss Tim Dowling's banjo session; and very few people mentioned "the digital journey".
Rusbridger told me the festival would definitely be staged again next year, though that this overview would probably be compiled by multiple interactive curators and presented as a videographic.
Truly a revolution. Yet the Guardian likes to stress continuity too, and in 84-year-old Alec Gilmore, who was here with his wife Enid for the whole weekend, I found a man who embodied it. He had been reading the paper religiously (he is a Baptist minister) since he was 18.
More than that, as a boy his printer father had given him a tour of the Guardian's office and printworks in Manchester.
That was in 1938, and here he was in 2012 visiting the new digitalised, mutualised, Shirkyised Guardian. Did he recognise the Guardian across those 70-odd years? "The grammar's not what it used to be," he said, "but the spirit of the thing hasn't changed."