I flew my Crane Rokkaku with the Carp streamers and was surprised to see a large white inflatable angel kite appear from behind me and even more surprised to see it being flown by Martin Lester – I’d forgotten that he’d moved to Cornwall from Bristol some years ago.

On Saturday I commentated on a trick flying display in the arena with Chris Goff and Piero Serra performing the tricks I called out to order.

On the Sunday there were a lot of people flying Benson Deep Space kites so we decided to do a group photo – 16 in all, although I think there were still one or two flying on the far side of the field.

The Scratch Bunnies (the current world champion kite team, on the day comprising Carl and James Robertshaw, Chris Goff and Sasha Reading) put on a great impromptu display. I think it was the only event in the arena to get a spontaneous round of applause from the crowd during their routine. Precision flying at its best.

You can see some of the images in my Cornwall collections at Flickr and animated versions of the panoramas here.

The gallery is very light and airy and you can see Jethro at work in his studio at the rear.

About 100 metres down the road is the beautiful little church of St Michael which stands right on the coast at Porthilly Cove with views of Padstow across the Camel Estuary. It’s a fantastic spot and well worth a visit if you’re in Cornwall this summer.

We had hundreds of visitors to the festival, due partly I’m sure to the live interviews with Bob Colover and myself on Radio London’s Lesley Joseph show on Sunday morning.

We’ve had people travel from as far as Devon to come to the kite day in past years, but this year we had a group of fliers who’d come from Thailand to show off their beautiful Chula and Pakpao kites. The Chula is the male kite. It has three bamboo barbs attached to its line for snagging the Pakpao female kite. The Pakpao is quite small and fragile. It is highly manoeuvrable and flown with a long tail with which it attempts to snare and tangle its male opponent.

Some of the invited guest fliers had pulled out at the last minute, so we were a bit worried that we might not have enough going on to fill the arena, but in the end everyone mucked in and there weren’t too many dead spots.

It was nice to meet Mike Slocombe of Urban75 after having been an admirer for several years.

You can see more photos of the day at the Streatham Kite Day Gallery or my Flickr account.

• Kombo
• Rolling Susan
• Yo-Fade

The animations are made in Swift 3D and exported and tweaked in Flash using a model of a Benson Phantom Elite originally made with (the no longer available) Amapi.

My laptop still has that abomination Vista installed as the postal strike seems to have held up the delivery of the Windows 7 upgrade, which I can’t wait to get my hands on.

The kite on the wall is a carp which I’ve been told in Chinese sounds like profit so hopefully it will give me good luck in business.