Latitude Festival has its coordinates right. Pass through the woods, cross the river and a sprinkling of performance tents and music stages are beckoning. Throw in some pink sheep, a secret woodland stage or a few stands selling freshly squeezed lemonade and it becomes more like a crowded fête.

And that’s because it sort of is. The music, while important, doesn’t dominate. This less frenetic little festival near Southwold in Suffolk is a summer union of arts tents – theatre, cabaret, poetry, crafts and music - each attracting a loyal and eager crowd.

I made a bee-line for the Literary arena, which consumed the day nicely. The only problem was that the tent – like many of the others - wasn’t big enough. Many of us spilled outside onto the grass where distant wafts of music accompanied Maureen Lipman’s riotously comedic storytelling or David Soul’s commanding delivery of Tobias Wolfe’s ‘Bullet through the Brain’. There were bedtime stories for kids to snuggle up to and Vox ‘n’ Roll readings from big hitters like Irvine Welsh, A.L. Kennedy and Hanif Kureshi lending the credentials of a more traditional literary festival.

Knitting the event together was the Book Club and its host, Robin Ince, the festival’s veteran funnyman, tender literature lover and derider: “The Book Club is more about Mills and Boon, Lighthouse Romances and Christian horror novels about creeping evil coming to Portsmouth. We don’t sit down and talk about Dombey and Son.”

Ince bounds on stage, book in hand and engagingly reads from a selection of D-list titles: “The self-help books that I go through – How to Marry the Man of your Dreams or How to Pick up Sexy Girls - are so close to parody I’m uncertain as to whether they are meant to be funny.” Other times he talks about a single title - ‘What God Does When Women Pray’ - or writers who don’t know when to stop describing “a pepper pot slightly dowdy with age”. He also takes a hearty swipe at show biz autobiographies of the 70s and 80s before modern ghostwriters made them professionally homogenous, “they have very little self-knowledge which can be great”.

Throughout the weekend, comedians like Jo Neary, Bridget Christie and Stewart Lee shared their own bookish material, while writers and storytellers performed to curious backing tracks. “I think Latitude is the festival with the most possibilities for creating something strange that may well fail or succeed” said Ince. Last year he grabbed a couple of stray performers and coordinated a chorus of singing maggots.

The mix of spontaneity, musical performances and comedians not taking literature too seriously – most of the time – keeps the tent’s atmosphere upbeat. Latitude is a mini-literary festival with edge – where, inside or outside the tent, you’re in a world of enthralling sights and sounds.

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