If you are looking for something to do at a summer festival that goes a little beyond bingeing on cheap cider, listening to dodgy soundsystems and eating foul kebabs, you would do well to snap up the last tickets to the year's  Latitude Festival. Why? Well, for starters there's the bands – NIck Cave And The Bad Seeds, Patrick Wolf, Spiritualized, Bat For Lashes, Pet Shop Boys – and the myriad trippy woodland areas where you're likely to come across some day-glo elves pondering surreal site-specific artworks, but there's also a lot of other crazy shit that you just aren't going to get anywhere else. This is the only festival offering you a chance to have a chat with Vivienne Westwood about her Resistance To Propaganda manifesto; to show off your whacked, experimental dance moves to teachers from Sadler's Wells; to come down from last night's excesses at 'Guerilla Science' classes that will give you the lowdown on everything from quantum physics to marine biology; to pin your hopes and dreams to the Tree of Lost Things – a spiritual repository for stories of and personal objects, based loosely on David Best's world-famous 'Temple' at Burning Man; to indulge in twisted psychedelic picnics; to take a front row seat at The House of Blue Eyes' Rock'n'Roll Fashion Extravaganza; to spend the entire afternoon loafing about in a row boat; to watch open air plays performed by The Royal Shakespeare Company, or catch a play penned by The High Llamas. Seriously, each year Latitiude becomes a more legitimate contender for Albion's finest festival, and with Glastonbury increasingly looking like a being a hardcore global warming mud bath, it's probably your best bet for some summer madness.

The Latitude Festival takes place July 16 – 19