"We're going to go listen to the music and watch the fireworks," our captain announced to his teenage daughter (whom we were leaving behind with her friends, all of whom were going to camp out on the turf beside the pub). I wondered whether I had enough layers of clothing to sit comfortably on a boat and listen to the 80's music that had been drifting upriver from the castle all night. I turned out neither to have been to cold nor to have been likely to care.

As we neared our drifting place, an announcer was barking the next band's details. At first, I could make nothing out. But when he said the words "and 'The Look of Love'!" I realized that either ABC or an ABC cover band was about to perform. And ABC (or some incarnation thereof) it turned out to be. I have never been less pleased not to have my own mobile phone with me, since the thing I really wanted to do was to call my brother--and then to call him again when they played their finest song. As it was, I wouldn't have gotten him even had I been calling, so it's perhaps best that instead I occupied myself with trying to capture visually my excitement about this utterly bizarre turn of events.

Never would I have predicted that I'd end up hearing a live performance of "The Look of Love" in the middle of the night from a boat on the Exe River.

Fortunately, one other person on the boat knew the words to the song, and so I had someone with whom to sing when the time came.

As if the whole day--because all of this was happening on Saturday (cf. "Epic," below)--hadn't already been enough, the people on the boat nearest to us then began releasing fire balloons, about which more later.

Ultimately, the fire balloons thrilled me more than the fireworks that had been the ostensible aim of our motoring down over the night-dark river--though I would have been sorry had there been no fireworks.

(Too bad I didn't spend a little time after that earlier fireworks show reading up on how to photograph these things. Saturday was all about impressions, in any case.)