Glue sticks, autumn leaves and centaur hooves

As a woman with a weakness for double-sided sticky tape, I can tell you with some authority that craft materials get very pricey. It’s all well and good the children recycling the living daylights out of old cereal boxes and toilet roll inners but the glue sticks they use to join this detritus together are getting so expensive I feel sure they’re made from the ground hooves of centaurs.

Oh and don’t try to tell me you can buy cheap, own brand versions, I need something that can stick surface A to surface B not something that will simply dampen and darken a surface whilst endowing it with the adhesive properties of a light drizzle. Thankfully, we’re in what some people call ‘autumn’ but which I call ‘free stuff falling from trees’. Yes, that’s right. Look around. We’re surrounded by multi-coloured craft materials in abundant supplies.

What’s more, if I nonchalantly pick up a few leaves and being laying them on the lawn my children become instantly intrigued. “What are you doing?”

Here I just shrug and mutter “Oh, you know, nothing really…”

That will do it. Within two minutes the kids will have taken over the job from this obviously incompetent adult and have created pictures with more creativity and imagination than I could possibly muster.

And not a glue stick in sight. Which is very good news for my purse. And a relief to centaurs.