It was so much more than that: dancing women in woad, waving antlers to ancient gods of fertility. Children wearing self-woven blossom and wicker May coronets roaming among picnickers. And, of course, the high point of the night – the burning of a specially built, 30ft-high Wicker Man, stuffed with scraps of paper on which we had written our hopes for the coming year. A large crowd, children perched on shoulders, pressed closer into the insistent heat for a better view as leaping flames licked the man’s torso and consumed his legs. And then he shuddered, buckled, and collapsed sideways down into the dark Hampshire earth. The Pagan watchers reveled in the grisly ritual. The Wicker Man is dead; summer is a-coming in. Afterwards, we all trooped home through a wet field, oddly elated.