John Walsh, from The July 2003 issue of The Word magazine:

“Every festival, since the Edinburgh extravaganza got under way, needs a Fringe, where avant-garde and rackety experiments in art and life are essayed by the groovy young. Hay hasn’t got a Fringe yet but it has a Bohemian strand generically known as “Whitney Court”. This is a rather grand house, three miles from the town, a place with a dozen huge bedrooms, a vast grate in the drawing-room, a music room and library, and a plethora of dining-rooms, sculleries and servants’ quarters. For the last two years it’s been taken over by a grand Indian documentary-maker called Palash Davé (although he’s popularly known as Dave Pashmina) who throws a string of parties. Daily news of decadent goings-on and sexual jiggery-pokery filters out of the Court and permeates the conversartion of festival-goers, who long for an invitation to this reeking Gehenna. Myself, I’ve never encountered anything stronger there than stewed tea and Marlboro Lights, but you have to admire his projection of his court as the successor to Appleseed Rectory in Martin Amis’s Dead Babies .”