So it’s a month ago, longer. I’m sat in Luton airport and have just found out that my flight has been delayed by an hour. I am flung once again onto the hard spike that is the real truth that underpins the theory of relativity. An hour is not a fixed unit but a form of currency, it has an exchange rate. An hour in bed is short change, an hour in bed with someone you love is scant minutes, an hour alone in Luton airport is the longest hour you will face.

A girl walks past hauling a suitcase almost twice her size. This is no exaggeration since she is tiny, a teenager, on her own, I force myself to stop looking at her, realising it’s rude and probably intimidating for one so young all alone in Luton airport. Snail like she seems to carry her world on wheels as she disappears into the crowd.

I am flying to Jersey. Or rather, I am hoping to fly to Jersey at some point this morning. The hour passes second by second, each one astonishingly horrible to taste, an over-sweetened medicine full of synthetic fruit flavouring and the insane dazzle of lights that threaten me with a full english breakfast for only ten pounds. TEN POUNDS. I’m not in Jersey. I’m in Luton. You can’t charge me TEN POUNDS for breakfast in Luton. Everything is expensive in this building, every second is expensive.

A man is smiling at me. I am in the holding pen, at the front of the queue to get onto the plane, my fellow travellers and I all lined in anticipation. From the front of the queue behind mine a man is smiling at me. Not nonchalantly like one might perhaps smile at someone who one doesn’t know who one might have been accidentally staring at. Not, for instance, how I would smile, friendly and apologetic, at the small girl with the massive suitcase who, I now realise, is there at the far end of the queue for the Jersey flight. No, he is smiling at me as if he either knows me or is trying to sell me drugs.

I smile back in what I hope is a polite refusal of drugs and return my attention to the doors through which I can see the walk to the plane. I love the walk to a plane. I don’t much care for flying, emotionally it upsets me, physically it tires me, psychologically it freaks me out and intellectually I disprove of it… but the walk to a plane, rich in anticipation and that starry sense that you are needed somewhere only a plane will take you, your shoes on that soft dark tarmac, that is as delicious as stepping into fresh snow.

Behind me two women are talking about perfume. Their conversation is all I can hear. I have to admit that perfume is not something I regularly think about, it is, I realise, as I listen to their passionate comparison of their favourite scents, my loss. I turn to try and see who they are – the small man is still trying to catch my eye. I turn back to the walk. Soon I’ll be doing the walk.

Sat on the plane a hand is thrust my way… “Excuse me…” I look up, it’s the smiling man from the holding bay “You’re Ben Blaine aren’t you?” I panic and probably say something fatuous like “usually”. “I’m Phil Dixon from the Canary Wharf film festival, I screened your films!”

The relief is immense. He sits, we talk and he doesn’t try and sell me anything. However before the flight finally departs the third seat in our row is taken by the small girl, now free from her luggage. She too is bound for the Branchage film festival on Jersey, she is an actress and star of a short film playing in the same programme as mine. She is actually in her twenties but has been blessed with a casting bracket nearly ten years younger than her.

At the other end of the flight we are all picked up by one of the festival drivers, me, Phil, Ellie and the two women who were discussing perfume, one of whom, it turns out, is also a filmmaker bound for the festival.

In short, and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time to reach this conclusion, but, in short, that holding pen was nothing more than my own personal establishing shot for the weekend to come. Some how my subconscious edited out all the other non-festival attending crowd in the room and just drew my eye to three who would later play some sort of role in the story.

I mention this purely to illustrate something I think of as the integral truth of the Branchage Film Festival on Jersey. It is not just a festival of films, the whole crazy thing is like one long cinematic dream.

I could be completely wrong (I often am) but I think the Branchage Film Festival on Jersey has basically been willed into existence because somewhere on the island someone has started wondering why the Isle of Mann has a film industry and Jersey doesn’t. If this is the case then they’re very smart because I can think of no better advert for the island than the Branchage Festival, easily the best and most exciting new film festival I’ve been to in years.

There are two things that attract filmmakers – money and ideas. Jersey has money. This is inescapable the moment you smell the air. Inescapable when you use a cash point and are delivered a massive fistful of their astonishing currency, which still includes one pound notes and has the “I’m a millionaire” feel of monopoly money. Perhaps I was lucky to have had my first introduction to the place on a sun-kissed afternoon in what had otherwise been a dreary autumn; it certainly felt like I had stepped out of a land of darkness and wind into a paradise of sun light transforming the windows of expensive cars into sheets of pure gold. Here at last is a land full of people where ‘tax incentive’ doesn’t refer to working cash-in-hand.

But what was so really attractive was the atmosphere of the festival. Again, perhaps I’m biased because I’ve been spending the past months in virtual isolation struggling with a feature script that was refusing to obey. As a jazz musician will tell you, a change is as good as a rest, and a weekend surrounded by people who love, hate, fight and understand film as much as we do was exactly the inspiration we both needed. All too often writing ends up being a solitary task (he typed, alone in the bleak white light of a November morning…) and Branchage was full of people. Amazing people. Delightful people. From the scattering I met on the plane to the sweating, heaving mass of the Spiegel Tent which formed the hub of the festival – Branchage was a collection of supremely fascinating people. But what really made it good was that they were all on the same tiny island as I was.

The real magic of the Branchage festival was, I think, that you had to cross water to get to it. As a result there was no hiding place. You can’t just go watch a film and then go home – you’re here, you’re stuck, you’re on an island. As a result rather than all the creative and fascinating people who attend a festival disappearing off back into their own private worlds, Branchage saw everyone flung constantly together.

What was also nice was that we were also flung into the arms and houses of the natives. Far from being a bubble of the film industry floating out to sea, this felt like a community celebrating film, celebrating it’s own odd sensibility (the musical runner up in the prize for best film by a Jersey resident gave me an insight into life out there the like of which I’d never quite imagined) and welcoming the world to it’s bosom.

Inspiring people, on an island, celebrating the ludicrous act of telling stories with pictures and sound. Far more than any of the island’s financial wealth, what Branchage so effortlessly proved was that Jersey is a place that can inspire you, a place where you could make amazing films.