Despite recovering from the illness that had laid me low on my 43rd birthday
I had an ace time at Latitude last year. It was sunny, there were lots of pals around and I mainly enjoyed staying in a tent. We'd only got down there for one night then and so I had made a point of keeping all four nights free in my diary this time so we could make the most of a mini break. I was really looking forward to this holiday with the mild inconvenience of a weird 45 minute gig in the middle. This time last year I was at the start of a long six and a half months of alcoholic abstinence, but this year I could enjoy a drink if I so wished.
But things were immediately slightly less idyllic than 2010, as even though the rest of the country was sunny and warm, East Anglia had been hit by heavy rain. As we came off road on to the muddy track that led to the performers' camping area it was clear conditions were not going to be pleasant. Deep tyre ruts had cut into the track and the undercarriage of my car scraped against the mounds of mud, the car buffeted around a little and was hard to control and at one point when I moved aside to let another car pass in the other direction I thought I was stuck. The wheels were spinning and nothing was happening, but luckily the car lurched forwards and I escaped the humiliation of having to be rescued.
The path in the camp site was a bit of a quagmire, but it hadn't rained for a few hours and it was easy enough to find a nice patch of level ground to pitch the tent. We were far enough away from the other tents to not feel like we were sleeping with the occupants, but near enough, I assumed, to ensure that no one else pitched up beside us. We were near to the toilets and showers and I was impressed on my first visit to see that they were proper porcelain loos with flushes and toilet paper which were working fine. The liquid soap had already run out, but that was fine. It was about 8pm and we headed out to walk through the mud and investigate the site.
Everything was looking great and the sky was turning a nice shade of pink. We had an expensive burger and an expensive beer and it felt like a holiday. Then we looked in on the poetry tent, where a fiercely intelligent student was pontificating about the way young people are perceived and how he wanted no part of it. It was impressive and great to see a tent full of people listening to something clever and thoughtful. Then we went to the literary tent where we saw a Literary Death Match where authors read from their work in a light-hearted competition, which saw serious up against humorous in a competition between an engaging story about a Jewish girl trying to escape the Nazis and a man who attends the wrong night class and is told to make a model of his vagina. Hard to judge which was the better as they were so different, but again, amazing to see an audience engaged with something so thoughtful. I loved it and was glad to be a part of it and was really looking forward to seeing more stuff tomorrow.
We then headed back to the tent stopping for a night cap on the way. We decided to have an early night, mindful that there might be the odd disturbance given we were turning in at 12.30, but we didn't know the half of it. We came back to find a massive tent that might have accommodated half a pack of cub scouts (but in fact contained some drunk young men) had somehow been erected in between our tent and the ones around it. It was practically touching our tent, which was slightly annoying and we feared the worst (though it was going to be worse than we thought). Then at about 1am as we were almost drifting to sleep a group of what sounded like drama students arrived late and attempted to pitch their tents in the dark, unluckily choosing the two other sides of our area to squeeze their four tents into. One of them had lost the outer tent and was moaning loudly, another was singing what sounded like opera. One of the girls was also saying that her friends were welcome to drink her beer but they'd have to pay £1.60 a can so she wasn't out of pocket. They were in very high spirits and shouting and screaming and putting on silly voices. My girlfriend who had been clever enough to bring ear plugs (a serious omission from my packing routine) found that stuffing her ears with foam could not dampen the sound. She wondered if we could ask them to be quiet, but I reasonably said that given it was so early it was probably not on for us to make such requests upon our neighbours. They were young, this was a festival, it wasn't really about getting sleep and I didn't want to appear like a fogey. And in any case it sounded like they were going to head into the main area once they had located the huge bit of tent they didn't have. Had I been them I might have been concerned that other performers (perhaps like me with an earlyish start) or families might be sleeping, but they were actors and thus incapable of thinking about another's feelings unless they are called upon to pretend to be them. After an interminable half an hour of high drama things became a bit more peaceful and I managed to fall asleep. Alas worse was to come, but for that, dear reader, you will have to wait until tomorrow.
