Punks, Poets, Players and Politics

This collage represents some of things we saw at Latitude on 18th July. [ and I do feel a tiny bit guilty about having done a couple of collages lately, I had always tried to really do one picture per day, but for Latitude festival I thought I would make an exception.]

The poetry tent was pretty good, here I have a pic of Andrew Motion. I wanted to hear him as I've never really understood or rated his poetry. But he did do quite a range, and some touching poems in memory of his father and close friends and about the Iraq war. The main host of the poetry tent was a brilliant poet, Luke Wright. He read a fabulous poem of his called ' In the company of men'.

It was interesting, especially given my job (technology and information related) how much new technology was talked about, a lot of authors mentioned ebooks and how they felt there was about to be a revolution where we'd all have a library of 200 books in our pockets. I also noticed that Brian Patten read from paper and Luke Wright read from a PDA.

I got to hear some of the Vivienne Westwood slot on her Active Resistance Manifesto, hosted by Miranda Sawyer. Vivienne Westwood was interesting and pretty down to earth, she seems to be in a dilemma about how far you can cut air flight down, like most of us I guess. We later had our dinner and she then sat (almost) next to us. Her presence at a food tent caused a bit of a stir but she seemed happy for a few snaps to be taken.

Keith Allen was brilliant, his '2 Pikeys on a Mini Cruise' was delivered perfectly the reading, singing and music worked well.

The orchestra shown here is the Britten Sinfonia, they are different in that they are not led by a musical director or principal conductor instead they try to extend their skills by collaborating with other artists.

If I had picked one picture from today it would be the stage reflected in the water...or maybe Andrew Motion as I liked his expression.

Another collage on Flickr.