My best hour at the Telegraph Hay Festival was spent not listening to one of the many literary superstars on display, but talking in the Telegraph tent with a group of eager Welsh teenagers about careers in writing. So it is great that the festival's organisers are about to increase their work with young people dramatically. Extraordinarily, in this supposedly dumbed down age, Hay brings tens of thousands of people every year to a wontedly wet field in wildest Wales to talk about ideas. But the young people who come are usually the children of those who care about books anyway. So from next spring, the festival is to take its mind-expanding mission to schools in the depressingly disadvantaged areas that still dot the principality. The Scribblers programme will bring 10,000 pupils, aged 12 or 15, to universities around Wales for a day of meeting and talking with well-known authors, having their horizons widened at ages when they are making crucial choices about their future education. These "Hay days" will concentrate on climate change and other environmental issues, as "the biggest challenges they are likely to face in their lives". The Duchess of Cornwall turned up to launch the programme - and to read Dog Loves Books to children at the festival - as well as stocking up on chocolate brownies. as patron of the National Literacy Trust, it's very much her bag, while all that greenery (and perhaps the brownies) will doubtless please her old man, too.