After the final dinner, we gathered around a campfire to listen to drumming and singing by professional Berber musicians.
Participants had taken over the outdoor back bar of the pub for a huge party that appeared to have the dual themes of Abba and Priscilla and the beer was already flowing and the stock whips cracking around a campfire lit to combat the evening chill.
One other difference is there are now places to eat – useful when the thought of another campfire supper palls.
I love not only the fromage on the stage but the capacity of the event to create a campfire around which we can all gather with conviviality and good will.
New for this year is a programme of bushcraft workshops, where over-eights can learn how to make shelters, fires and campfire gadgets.
Billie Joe Armstrong and co gave a pumped-up, stage-hopping performance – free of freak-out moments like the one that infamously marred their I Heart Radio performance last year and ledf Armstrong to rehab – but the feeling around the campfire was that the energy was sadly unreciprocated by the crowd, which was made up largely of school-leavers celebrating/commiserating their A-level results.
This week, a judge ruled that the band had indeed nicked it from the campfire song Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.
Then it would be time for a dehydrated meal for dinner, a chat round the campfire, and another session with the stick.
Politics and economics were addressed around the campfire, with quiz nights on the countries we'd visited.
But Dr Wiessner thinks fire may also have invented people in a different way, by affecting how the brains it created are used.In this section Dust to dust Fireside tales Browned off Grand openings ReprintsAs the chart shows, conversations she recorded as a young researcher demonstrate a division of conversational labour between daylight hours and evening gatherings around the campfire.
But if an organised group such as the Girl Scouts wants to put the song into a collection to sing around the campfire, or if a filmmaker wishes to show people singing the song in a movie, the situation is very different.
