The joy of long weekends

I'm really settling in to this lovely long weekend -- and there's still another day of it to come. I'm long past the must-do stage, past the might-as-well-do stage as well and am bedding down into the why-not-try level.

So I've done a little doodle to experiment with sealing things onto paper with gel medium. Everyone else in the immediate family has reacted with exaggerated horror at my picking up feathers on our walk today, as if I was going to be bringing bubonic plague into the house. I've always picked up feathers and don't think of them as particularly dirty or bacteria-laden -- perhaps they know otherwise.

     For our walk we went to the Sundon Hills, which for somewhere so close to Luton is absolutely gorgeous (nothing against Luton, but you know what I mean -- it's surprisingly unspoilt). This field was absolutely full of cowslips and clumps of speedwell. If anyone from my area (some of my Postman's Knock friends) should have happened to see a hunched hobbling figure this afternoon, it could well have been me, as the walk found all my weak places (legion) and nobbled them. I was rather pathetic and only got through the last third or so by imagining I was on one of those Red Nose Day celebrity challenges across the Kalahari or some such ("Fearne Cotton is plodding up behind me, Gary Barlow is just up ahead...").