At the back of the tent

By TOBY LICHTIG

Even to the hardiest of campers the modern British music festival contains its share of obstacles (sunburn or trenchfoot, depending on conditions; traffic reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard's Week End), so the decision to bring our ten-week-old daughter to Latitude this month was not taken lightly.

Days of planning and buying (miniature ear defenders, an electric fan for the car) segued into hours of congestion on the A12, screaming infantile discomfort and an error of topographical judgement that led to an hour-long trek around the perimeter fence. As we finally acquired our wristbands and entered the site, it was impossible to ignore the uncomfortable question: would it all be worth it?

Fortunately it was. Latitude is about as child friendly as big festivals get, and, along with beautiful scenery ��� woods; a punting lake ��� there was plenty for tiny eyes to marvel at, not least the sheep sprayed a psychedelic pink (washable dye, we were assured). Babies can simplify as well as complicate things, and our options this year were fairly limited: no loud music (the ear defenders proved to be too large), no big crowds, somewhere with space to lay out the changing mat. What better areas to camp out in than the back of the Literature and Poetry tents?

The programme was very varied ��� which meant bad as well as good; and yet the curators can partly be forgiven for holes in the literary line-up. This isn't Hay or Cheltenham and there's little point in inviting a wide array of major names from the book world when they also have to compete with Portishead and Thom Yorke. (With this in mind, perhaps there could have been more focus on the experimental, the challenging; and I'd have liked to see more genuine debates than cosy book promotions or fully consensual discussions.)

The theme for the weekend was "For Richer for Poorer for Better for Worse", and a host of the usual suspects (Owen Jones, Georgia Gould) were there to give their views on what's happened to Britain's Left (the most convincing argument: it has forgotten how to play hard politics). An environmental strand also ran through the weekend, with Patrick Barkham speaking eloquently on coastal erosion and Blake Morrison providing his own take on local environmental degradation in poems from his most recent collection The Ballad of Shingle Street. In the title poem, which was first published in the TLS, memories of Nazi invasion in 1940 ("And in the dusk they tell a tale / Of burning boats and blistered flesh") mingle with an apprehension of more recent natural threats: "The waves maraud, / The winds oppress, / The earth can't help / But acquiesce". Shingle Street is about an hour's drive from Henham Park in Suffolk, where Latitude is based, and even nearer is Dunwich, the scene of another of Morrison's Suffolk coast poems. "The Discipline of Dogs" tells the tale of a woman who feeds her beloved mutt an ice-cream at Dunwich Beach, "its tongue neatly curling to detach / the twirly flourish at the tip": an image that caused a ripple of amusement around the tent.

Along with some pretty effective beatboxing, some rather abject cabaret, and a bizarre if spirited adaptation of the works of Virginia Woolf to the music of Benjamin Britten (perhaps I was distracted by the baby but it was pretty hard to work out what was going on), I enjoyed Eimear McBride in conversation with Anita Sethi. McBride again told the well-known tale of the provenance of her prize-winning novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, but she also provided some fascinating insights into her development as a writer. A Joycean commute in London was one crucial factor: "I got on with Ulysses at Bruce Grove and by the time I reached Liverpool Street I knew that everything I ever knew about the novel had changed forever". The influence of the playwright Sarah Kane was another: "I had previously thought that women weren't allowed to be angry in prose". McBride also argued that, despite its debt to modernism, her style is a direct reaction to the contemporary world: "In the age of the internet the novel has a different job"; no longer concerned with imparting information, "it has to be boiled down to its most essential self". "I wanted to take the writer out of the reading experience . . . to make it completely unmediated."

Mediation is John Crace's stock in trade; style, to him, is everything ��� that is, other people's style. Crace is well-known for his Guardian "digested reads" in which authors are cruelly and amusingly mimicked. He hasn't yet taken on McBride ��� he never tackles debut writers ��� but given the idiosyncrasies of the Irish author's voice it is perhaps only a matter of time. At Latitude, the targets of Crace's mimicry included Lady Antonia Fraser and her admiration for the poems of her husband "Herald" (sample, via Crace: "Your radiance divine / Is mine all mine"). Despite being "so very heppy", Crace's Antonia spared a thought for the misery of others around the dinner party table ("Salman was also present. His fatwa is too too awful"). Stepping out of role, the author commented on the unfortunate irony that Antonia "submitted herself to Harold's happiness, and it was clear that Harold was the grumpiest bastard around". The memoir of Fran��ois Hollande's former mistress, Val��rie Trierweiler, delivered by Crace in a ludicrous franglais, provided another amusing butt ("It was toucher et aller whether I would survive") and Crace's "digested read digested" for Harper Lee was both topical and succinct: "To kill a golden goose".

Crace is also the Guardian's parliamentary sketch writer, having succeeded the late Simon Hoggart, and he answered questions about the current Labour leadership contest, apparently unequivocal about his favoured choice. "I'm certain the person David Cameron would least like to face is Yvette Cooper". Who will win remains anybody's guess ��� Crace also spoke about the failure of pollsters and pundits at the most recent election ��� but with Labour currently in tatters, it will be interesting to see whether commentators at next year's Latitude will be able to take a more positive view of Britain's flagging Left.