A Summer of Festivals

This blog has been silent for a few months. It's not due to my laziness (okay, not completely...), or to the lack of things to write about it. Instead, it's due to the fact that I've been out in the field for much of the summer.

In two fields, to be precise.

In July, Litro presented three live events as part of the Latitude Festival in Suffolk, and I was on-site for most of the festival, taking care of authors, making contacts, and generally pestering people around the Press Tent (especially those interns they placed by the fridge to guard the Happy Hour drinks). The festival as a whole was a slightly chaotic - and very damp - smorgasbord of music, arts and entertainment, featuring the likes of Damon Albarn, The Black Keys, The War on Drugs, First Aid Kit and Temples. There was more than enough to keep anyone entertained. As long as you managed to dodge the marauding hordes of teenagers intent on - well - moping about mostly.

As for Litro's events, we presented a wide range of authors, all discussing the hot topics of surveillance and privacy in the modern world. On the Friday we were joined by Luke Brown (My Biggest Lie) and James Miller (Sunshine State, Lost Boys), who regaled the audience with stories of horny geriatrics and literary shindigs. The Saturday event was hosted by acclaimed, respected, and always very well turned out journalist Anita Sethi, in discussion with Patrick Flanery (Absolution, Fallen Land) and Kate Williams (The Storms of War, Josephine). Then on the final day I took to the stage (slightly damp, suitably dishevelled) to chat with actor and biographer Ian Kelly (Mr Foote's Other Leg, Casanova) and debut novelist Ben Fergusson (The Spring of Kasper Meier), where we touched upon such subjects as the fall of the Berlin Wall and Regency-period buggery. No, really. (You can also read my interview with Ian Kelly here.)

You'd think the two huge storms that lashed down on Suffolk over the course of the weekend would have been enough to put me off festival life, at least until next year. But the following month I headed off once again, to a field in the Brecon Beacons for Green Man 2014. This time it was mainly for pleasure (no, really), but I did meet the erudite and hilarious Andy Miller on site, touring with his book The Year of Reading Dangerously. Quite apart from the fact that we have several friends in common (you know who you are), and the unlikely discovery that he shopped in the same record store as me in his teens, Andy proved to be a mine of information on the touring life, and music festivals in particular.

Which brings me on to my final point. Having endured more than a week this summer living out of a tent the size of a large box, and eating 'meals' from mud-stained napkins, you'd think that I'd have had enough of the festival life. But as it turns out, I quite like it. Even the thunderstorms. So... where to next year?