I’m down in Dorset for the annual music festival of the Gaudier Ensemble in Cerne Abbas. Last night I finished my rehearsals in time to join a crowd of people walking from the centre of the village and up the hill where the famous Cerne Abbas Giant is depicted. On top of the hill, as night fell, a huge bonfire was lit as one of the beacons in the Jubilee celebrations. For a while it looked as if nothing but dark plumes and pillars of smoke would issue from the pyre, but suddenly it burst into flame. The heat was welcome on an evening so chilly that when I got my camera out to take a photo of the bonfire, my hands were so cold I could hardly manipulate the tiny buttons. Early June, indeed!

On our way down the hill in the dark, we could see other fiery beacons punctuating the ridge of distant hills. This was actually my favourite moment of the Jubilee celebrations. It felt as if we were back in Elizabethan times (I mean Tudor Elizabethan) when beacons were used to pass messages quickly across the counties.