My blooming good idea about sunflowers became a golden family day out

It is not often that one conceives and fulfils a lifetime ambition in one morning but today I achieved this momentous feat.

- Lucy Mangan

Monday To wit: over breakfast I read about the great sunflower fields at Westgate Farm near Walsingham, Norfolk, which for the two weeks that the mighty blooms are in mighty bloom across its 16 acres invites people to come and pick their own for a small fee.

Have you ever heard of anything better? Desire - no, need - filled me. I demanded that my husband - the driver of the family, for Walsingham is a short car trip away - abandon his desk; I crowbarred my son out of bed, and by 10am we were looking out over 16 acres of sunflowers under an azure sky.

And do you know what? It was even better than I had imagined. It's just sunflowers, you see. Sunflowers almost literally as far as the eye can see. All facing the same way, because they are - get this - flowers that follow the sun.

We headed along the little dusty tracks that led through the fields, which wind about so that eventually you are facing the flowers and they are facing you and the effect is so joyful and uplifting that even your family hostages begin to break into smiles.

We picked our allowance of five each and were home by lunchtime.

They are now in a massive vase I was once mocked for buying, but which I must have known somewhere deep in my soul was meant for this, and life is good.