This Saturday, The Sights On My Excursion and I headed way out West to Hampstead Heath, to finish off a trip we'd begun way back in October. On that occasion we'd had a big walk and then gone to Kenwood House to look at some ART, but we'd only ended up looking at the ground floor of the museum. We'd promised ourselves that we'd go back another time to see the upper floor, and so that is what we set out to do.
On the way there we passed through Mirabelle Gardens, a small park near chez nous, and heard a BURD singing in one of the trees. In the past couple of years I have realised that if you HEAR a bird singing nearby then there must BE a bird singing nearby, and if you look you can usually see it. I know this sounds BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS but it's been a bit of a revelation to me, as I've realised that there's all SORTS of birds all over the place. This time we stopped and looked and were astonished to see a GOLDFINCH. Apparently these are super common but I've never seen one before, so we stood AGOG. Later on that day, on Hampstead Heath, we saw a GREEN WOODPECKER, something else I'd never seen before. "I wonder how many birds I COULD see," I wondered to myself, "perhaps noting them down in a book when I have seen - or 'spotted' - them?" Luckily I realised what I was thinking before I had gone too far - I do NOT need another hobby right now!
Hampstead Heath is an AMAZING place to stomp through, it's like a wallop of countryside dumped in London, with all sorts of different parts all over the place so that (as happens most times we go there) we managed to get LOST. We eventually found Kenwood House where we DID go upstairs and saw The Miniature Room - lots of tiny portraits, including one that looked like a HOLOGRAM, also jewellery and BUCKLES - and then The Suffolk Collection, which is a room full of ancient paintings of posh people. It was Quite Good but didn't GRAB me in quite the same way as Paolozzi the other week, which probably definitely means I am SUPER MODERN.
And that was IT! It turns out the upstairs has SIGNIFICANTLY less things to look at than the downstairs so we were able to wander out and stomp back across the heath for our meeting with a woodpecker. It was a RUDDY DELIGHTFUL way to spend an afternoon and it only cost us a few quid each for the TRANE too. Sometimes That London can be pretty flipping GRATE!
