This month, I found myself positioned at several strategic vantage points around town (purely for journalistic purposes, you understand) as Welston hosted its annual Adult Easter Egg Hunt—a tradition that continues to answer a question no one has ever felt the need to ask: what happens when you bind grown adults together at the ankles and encourage urgency?

For the uninitiated, up to fifty pairs take to the streets, each sporting a homemade Easter bonnet of varying size and ambition, in search of twenty laminated ‘eggs.’ Each egg offers a clue to the next along with a number or a letter. When the letters and numbers are assembled, they reveal the location of the Golden Egg. This year’s prize—a £500 travel voucher—proved sufficient motivation for otherwise sensible residents to abandon both dignity and spatial awareness.

Early signs of trouble emerged outside the estate agent, where a team arrived and immediately disagreed on the meaning of a clue displayed in the window. Each member set off with great confidence in opposite directions, only to be brought to a sudden and rather painful halt by the realisation—too late—that they were still attached. The resulting pause in proceedings required brief but decisive first aid, administered by a St John Ambulance volunteer.

Matters took a more philosophical turn at St Crispin’s, where one half of a competing pair insisted on showing proper respect while crossing the churchyard, lowering their voice and moderating their pace accordingly. Their partner, with one eye on the prize and the other on a rival team disappearing up the lane, ensured the compromise achieved neither reverence nor speed. The vicar, observing from a discreet distance, folded her arms in quiet disapproval.

Meanwhile, outside the Golden Phoenix, three teams converged upon the same clue with admirable simultaneity but poor coordination. What began as a polite attempt to allow one pair through the doorway quickly devolved into a bottleneck of elbows, apologies, and increasingly firm suggestions about who had arrived first. At one point, a fourth party arrived and, with admirable pragmatism, used the staff entrance to avoid the scrum.

The most committed display of determination, however, belonged to a pair who decided to take a more ‘direct route’ across the mud flats. Within seconds, one shoe was lost, followed shortly by the other. Undeterred, they pressed on, emerging some minutes later as though they had mistaken the mud flats for a beauty treatment. They maintained—quite firmly—that they had made excellent time.

For those less inclined toward victory, prizes were also awarded for the most original and largest Easter bonnets, the latter category being won by a creation that required its own turning circle and, at one point, briefly obscured a lamppost.

As ever, proceeds from the £10 entry fee went toward the St Crispin’s Belltower Restoration Fund, ensuring that, while ankles may suffer and bonnets may fall, the town itself continues to stand on rather firmer footing.