This festival, in its second year is supposed to be like a mini Glastonbury, supporting a range of contemporary performing arts such as poetry, theatre, comedy as well as music. It’s set in a beautiful estate park near Southwold… and there ends the positive things I can find to say about it! Latitude was set up and run by a company called Mean Fiddler who specialise in festival management. They now help to run Glastonbury, which was a big compromise by the original management designed to satisfy the Mendip District Council that the festival could be run in a controlled fashion (i.e. with better security) and could therefore continue to run safely. Left to their own devices and running their own festival it becomes very clear what a greedy soul-less organisation they are. Yes, there was entertainment but the crowd so large this year and the resources so sparse that it was almost impossible to get into the festival spirit and enjoy it.
Examples include,
Not allowed to take your own water or alcohol into the arena areas (so you can buy theirs at really inflated prices e.g. at least 3.20 quid for a pint of beer. Security made me tip out a few ml of water from my water bottle. This is more like concert practice and something we’re not used at festivals. Security were rude to us whereas they’re usually pretty good to other workers. The crew catering was a joke, often there was nothing to eat or if there was we’d have to call it “food”. We tried to get into tents to see comedy etc and couldn’t get close. There were massive queues for loos as they hadn’t put in any urinals. At one point we managed to get in really early to see Mark Lamarr present some of his favourite bands but after the first one I had to go to the loo and there was no chance of getting back in as there was an enormous queue of people waiting. They had a system of requiring a 2 pound deposit for a reusable pint cup. This seemed like a great idea to reduce the litter of cups that covers a site as each one is disposed of before the next pint is purchased but then again we realised that this too was a money making scam. They closed the bars on Sunday night and there was no further opportunity to cash in the cups – so hundreds, if not thousands of cups worth about 20p had been sold for £2. We saw people with £20-50 worth that hadn’t been able to get refunds…. On the upside we found one and cashed it in so were £2 up on the weekend.
So we spent no money at all over the weekend, not wanting to partake in the blatant capitalism and for reasons unexpected we had one of our best festivals ever.
When we first arrived in Vinnie, Ade (Oxfam dude) was there to greet us and it was great to see the first of many familiar faces on site. We pulled up near this enormous army truck and its owner, Gary from Lancaster quickly introduced himself. The truck is a huge beast and kitted out with all the gears including a massive sound system. And Gary’s one of the nicest blokes you could ever hope to meet and a great story teller. Martin who we recognised from Wychwood soon also arrived and over the course of the weekend we were joined at various times by Jen and Danny in the VW next door, Tom, Martin F, Clive, Nigel and many others around our rather impressive campfire. Gary dug a proper fire pit and I spent much of the weekend in the woods collecting burning material. So we did our shifts, drank our cans of warm beer instead of the £3 ones and ate our ample stocks of food, listened to our own music, had loads of laughs and generally stayed up too late, too often.
For two shifts I supervised the Pixies in the forest which unfortunately due to a rude and officious zone area manager was a lot less fun than it could have been. Our last shift on the Monday was different, with me supervising the few stewards left on the whole site, on a crappy bike. It turned out to be lucrative though, as the rather bland, perhaps slightly too well to do festival goers really couldn’t be bothered carrying a lot of their stuff out. So we helped clean up to the tune of ~80 cans of beer and cider, 6 litres of cider, about 7 wine casks, bed rolls, LED lights, picnic blankets, buckets, the list goes on…. So we were well up on the weekend especially as I sold two cans of the ‘recovered’ beer for a quid each to some punters who’d run out. Money spent £0, money gained £4, stuff recovered… priceless…
