Latitude

It's a long time since have appreciated a bath so much as I did last night when we arrived back from Latitude Festival. Although I enjoyed the festival immensely it has to be said that the facilities were abysmal - especially in comparison to WOMAD. The showers broke on Saturday morning and were still out of action on Sunday.

That said the music was great, the weather held out, the location is beautiful and the poetry was excellent.

Highlights for me were Damien Rice on Friday evening, the brilliant and funny Simon Armitage in the poetry tent, the hugely entertaining Jarvis Cocker and The Gotan Project. I was sadly unmoved by The Good, The Bad and The Queen, I can appreciate that they are good musicians but the music always leaves me feeling a bit flat. Best outfit prize in my opinion should be awared to the lead singer of CSS for her metallic pink jumpsuit.

I was especially impressed by the stand-up poetry tent, which made the festival for me - nice to see poetry getting more exposure.

Compared to WOMAD though, there were a few areas that we found lacking - WOMAD has more of everything - stalls, food and one thing we really appreciated was chill out areas - bars and cafes that had areas where you could just hang out for a bit and get your breath back. We eneded up going to bed not long after midnight at Latitude but if there had been places where we could just chill for a bit we might have got a second wind and stayed up a lot longer. (spoken like a true oldie).

Strangely I didn't meet many people I knew - even though its only 40 miles from Norwich - there were only one or two familiar faces - and a couple of people that looked like people I used to know, but I was too embaressed to go and say hello in case they weren't!