Are you sure that we are awake?

There is breakfast in the sun; there are costumes, a procession with a marching band, laughter and a gathering together where close friends share memories of our hosts. Everything has been carefully planned; everything feels easy and spontaneous. So when the roar above our ring of tents is not Easyjet coming out of Bristol airport but something much deeper and faster we are not surprised to look up and see the Red Arrows practising overhead. Were the field not full of green lefties, we could almost believe they'd been booked.

After a fabulous pot-luck lunch some of us decide to have a walk in the woods up to a ridge with, we are told, magnificent views. The dappled light through the leaves is lovely but we fail to find the ridge and turn back so as not to miss the birthday-cake cutting. Almost back at the site we meet a much bigger group of walkers on the same mission and among them is J, our actor-host. The cake will not be cut without her so we join them and are led quickly and easily to the ridge. 

As we look out to sea, surrounded by an unexpected herd of goats, we hear the Red Arrows return. Swoops, crossings, splays downwards, fireworks upwards and then, unbelievably, they are drawing a huge red heart in the sky. A most rare vision. (I'm not quick enough to record it but the top of it remains in this picture.) To those who have conjured serendipity, serendipity comes. 

The goats have bonded with us and bound around as we pick our way carefully down the steep hill. One tries to pass me on a track not wide enough for me, let alone the two of us. I try to block it with my right leg and instantly it is ahead of me on my left. Nothing we do can stop them following us back to the site.

The cakes are cut, more songs are sung, and there is a zany game of bingo that somehow engages everyone in disco-dancing on the grass. What fools these mortals be.

More musicians arrive for a ceilidh and we dosey doe, strip the willow, promenade and swing our way into darkness.

But the curfew for amplified music is not the end. J is a member of the very talented Wardrobe Ensemble, and after their hysterical spoof game show last night, this evening some of them perform The Blue Blue Planet, improvised around shadow puppets created by the audience. I am amazed and know not what to say. Each Easyjet interruption is turned into the next instalment of a sub-plot about David Attenborough being on his way to join us. Which eventually he does, disbelief having been hanged from a tree in the woods hours earlier. Pure theatre.