After driving through village after village after village on an unsuccessful quest to find a cafe or tearoom, I declared that Sunday in this quiet patch of Suffolk must still be a day of rest. Halesworth, too, was deserted, the shops along the pedestrianised Thoroughfare shut tight against the wind. But The Angel was doing business, so we ordered a large pot of tea. A few locals propped up the bar. Bits of their conversation hooked and snagged around me as I sank into the world of my novel - a ragtag community of people living on the Thames barges in the early 1960s. In my book, Nenna was going to visit her husband.

Better take a cheap all-day ticket, the bus conductor advised, if Nenna really wanted to get from Chelsea to Stoke Newington. “Or move house,” he advised.

A young woman stooping under a huge backpack came into The Angel for a bite to eat before catching a train to Bristol. “Bristol!” exclaimed one of the locals. “That’s a long way.”

I beat a hasty retreat. “Snake-it’s-a-snake!” The snake, a skinny dark-coloured thing about two feet long, made its own slithery exit into the hollow base of a nearby tree. We’d returned to the ruins of the Minster to try pitching our new tarp and I’d been about to tie it to that very tree. I felt rather less inclined to do so under the beady gaze of a snake - even if my tweeted plea for identification (thanks for your responses, Dru and Suffolk Naturalist) and a bit of subsequent Googling clarified that it was a non-venomous juvenile grass snake. While the other trees might also have had snakes in them, my ignorance to that fact made them much more approachable.

It was our tarp’s first outing and time for us to put our knowledge to the test. We’d been practicing our knots in front of the tarp DVD for the last week, trying to memorise forms and names - bowline, slippery clove hitch, guy-line knot, that knot with the loops, the one where you go around the tree twice and do the twists. We started with a flying-V (that’s a tarp pitch, not a guitar), hitching one corner high up on a tree trunk and using a walking pole to add a bit of extra room inside. The knots held. Not bad. This was the quickest, easiest, most spacious pitch we tried. Next, we attempted a basic A-frame pitch, slinging the ridgeline between two trees. We were much less successful with this one, fumbling with the angles and tension until we gave up. We then experimented with a much more enclosed pitch, with the back of the tarp pegged down and the front rising in the middle on a single walking pole. This pitch may have a name, but I don’t know it. It gave a lot of privacy and would probably work quite well in a campsite. In the end, we decided to sleep within the ruined walls, in the grassy enclosure. We used a kind of lean-to pitch, with half the tarp acting as a groundsheet.

The sun set as we ate our tea, filling the sky with pink clouds, underlighting trees in glowing orange and washing the Minster in purple shadow. We crawled into our bivi bags, snuggling down into the soft grass. The whine of mosquitoes proved rather distracting - that’s something we didn’t have to worry about when we were sleeping out in winter. Moths fluttered against the tarp, tawny owls called and dozens of little bats emerged from the trees. “Come on, bats,” I whispered. “Lots of mozzies down here for you!” We fell asleep watching the bats scoot above us, crisscrossing the darkening sky.