In front of the band cavorts a long-legged "Lady Marshal", and then the Town Crier gives the signal, and up starts that pulsing cushion of sound that no one can resist.

You've got no choice now. It's impossible, when a jazz band goes swaggering down a street, to do anything other than fall in behind and keep your ears full.

Under an undulating canopy of multicoloured umbrellas (whether in rain or shine) the throng flows down Broad Street.

In a shop doorway a young longhair has been pouring a warbling stream from a clarinet. As the band comes past and drowns him out, he, on the principle of "If you can't beat them join them", crosses the street and falls in among them, picks up his part alongside the elderly saxophonist, and everyone has even more fun. —This did happen one year, but the next year I noticed that there was no busker, indeed realized that I'd seen no other spontaneous music or other performance in Lyme, and started suspecting that somebody had passed some damn ordinance against it. The town council office thought that yes, intending performers have to apply to the West Dorset District Council for a licence. But a gentleman at the W.D.D.C. licencing department assured me that no, they don't, unless raising money for a charity (reasonable, it might be a bogus charity); and the police would move them on only if they were on private property or causing an obstruction. So, unofficial musicians, magicians, mimes, tumblers, clowns, mountebanks, fortune-tellers, story-tellers, and orators of the world, come to Lyme and lift our liveliness toward that of Kampala or Marrakesh!

The jazz rolls down Broad Street, around Cobb Gate, diverts for a while into the battlemented space around the cannon, forms a circle there and performs two numbers, then takes off again, along Marine Parade . . .  Let's make a jump in time, if not in spirit. It has become a torchlight procession . . .