Summer Holls part two

On Monday, being close to London, we all went off for a trip to Diagon Alley. 

Yes we did!

I have the pictures to prove it; look, Flourish and Blotts. The camera never lies.
Click on the pictures to enlarge

It is all real but you have to know how to find it.   We were able to get on the Knight bus and looked around Hogwarts, bought some butterbeer and had a look at Privet Close, although the Dursleys have moved out now. 
If all this is meaningless to you, then all I can say is for goodness sake go out and buy the Harry Potter books, or at least watch the movies, but the books are better.
To get to J K Rowling’s world we had to drive from Kent more or less half way around the dreaded M25.  This under funded and under laned motorway was originally planned to be much wider but in its wisdom the then purse string holders decided it was unnecessarily expensive to make it more than three lanes so they then had to spend much more than it cost in the first place to add extra lanes when it proved inadequate.    It was not too bad for our trip, because we travelled outside rush-hour but it was still busy by anyone’s standards.

We needed to use two cars for the whole family and had allowed plenty of time.  Of course, Diagon Alley is a part of the Warner Brother’s film set that was used to make the Harry potter series of films and we had booked a tour for the saucepan lids (kids) at the Warner Brothers Studios in Leavesden Green.  This ex airfield is close to where some of my cousins, and in particular for those cousins reading this, very near the flat where your Mother and Father lived.

We rendezvoused at South Mimms services to buy lunch which we planned to eat on arriving at Warner Brother’s car park.  I love that name South Mimms and often wonder what it is derived from and since there is a South Mimms, is there  a Mimms, or a North Mimms?  I have never seen them on a map.
A few years ago my two sons and I were travelling to see my mother who still lived in Clacton.  As was our habit, we had stopped off at South Mimms services to have a comfort break and a coffee, when the fire alarm went off.  No 2 son had just gone to the toilets and I was half way through a coffee, but No 1 son and I went out hoping No 2 had enough sense to do the same.  As we passed a fast food franchise, we could see the cause of the alarm, a chip fryer was blazing away merrily.   Outside we found No 2 son and watched as the place was evacuated.   Many of the people there got in their cars and headed for the exit, creating an instant traffic jam, so realising it was impossible to leave for some time and it being a nice sunny day, we hung around and watched as the fire spread and the fire service arrived. 
I was impressed by the building’s design.  When the fire service arrived in their red fire engines, they took one look and realising the cause was not an easy fire to deal with safely, simply cleared everyone back a few dozen feet and let it burn itself out. 
What impressed me was how long it took for the fire to spread.  A chip fat fire is a very intense and sustained fire, but the whole place took well over an hour to become engulfed.   A credit to the designers of a public building that it gave the occupant plenty of time to get out before the place became a death trap.  Very different from the fire that happened at Bradford football ground in 1985, which became a ferocious killing fire after only three minutes!
South Mimms is now rebuilt and I hope the same safety standards went into the new building that was so obvious in the earlier one.

Harry's bedroom

One of the tables in the Great Hall

In the studio, we were able to wander through the various sets.  These had been left standing, firstly because they were used over and over for about ten years whilst the eight movies were filmed and secondly because they now form the Harry Potter experience and are earning money as a tourist trap.  Both kids have read Harry Potter from beginning to end and are familiar with all the movies so they were very keen on this trip and were delighted to be photographed in various recognisable sets from the movies.  Us older kids were quite enthusiastic too, having read all the Harry potter books and watched all the movies as well, so it was rather like seeing where an old friend lived.  The studio has all of the props that were not actually destroyed during the making of the movies and we were able to get a good look at things which were pure fantasy up until then.

The teacher's podium in the Great Hall

The Gate to Hogwarts school, a favourite photo call for visitors, but Boo from Monsters inc seems to have wandered in from the wrong movie

The Knight bus

The tour took us about three hours and the entry was at pre-booked and timed so that it never became too crowded.  It was very impressive seeing the workmanship that went into the props.

Butterbeer

Privet Drive but no Dursleys

Harry's jacket in various states for different scenes

Some of the pre-production artwork was fine art in its own right

This picture is of Godricks Hollow pre production

Most impressive was the set piece at the end of the tour which was a scale model of Hogwarts.  I am not sure to what scale it was built, but it was easily over fifty feet across.

Another part of Diagon alley

The huge scale model of Hogwarts

 The kids loved it all almost as much as us grownups.  And of course we found ourselves in the souvenir shop at the end of the visit and I am now the owner of a rather special wand that I can assure you, chose me just as Mr Olivander would surely tell you it would.
 We managed to hit rush hour on the way home but were able to make it back in reasonable time for the Fish and Chip shop to still be open.

More to follow in our next, stay tuned...

A holiday for a flower

As I have mentioned in one of my comments on another blog, I have an Amaryllis that must be nearly thirty years old. We were given it one Christmas around 1982 and it flowered beautifully that year. I found it fascinating because when the flower stalk arrives, you can almost see it grow. It put on about an inch every day and then finally four huge blooms appeared. I was instantly smitten by it and decided that I would try to nurture it so that it would bloom the following year. It had been the general opinion of my family and circle of friends and acquaintances that these packaged bulbs that turned up in the shops before Christmas were rather ephemeral and were usually chucked out with the Christmas decorations on twelfth night.

Twelfth night had more significance when I was a child because on that night the decorations were taken down and burned along with the Christmas tree, on the assumption that it brought bad luck to keep them after that date. We all made our own paper chains from strips of coloured paper before Christmas and they were not something you wanted to keep nor would they be in a fit state to reuse and burning was an accepted way of disposing of combustible waste.
This may sound very wasteful now, since the new generation of adults have re-invented Salvage and now call it recycling, but in those days much of our day to day stuff was re-usable, milk bottles, not cartons dish cloths, not kitchen rolls, towelling nappies that were washed and reused and wood and paper ash was dug into the garden to treat the soil. As well as all this, Salvage, paper and old clothes, metal and glass was collected regularly by the Rag and Bone man.

More recent paperchains arrive pre-gummed.  

We used a big pot of paste and a brush to stick ours together and I would get in a real mess with mine.

Partly because of the twelfth night tradition, no one seemed to expect that their Christmas Amaryllis would bloom again the next year, so defying all my friends and family’s wisdom, I looked up how to treat them and found that they would last for several years if you treated them correctly. Following the guidelines I managed to get it to flower again the next three or four Christmases.

For some reason it got later and later each year and eventually stopped flowering altogether. Disappointed I waited each year and as year followed year with no bloom, I experienced an increasing sense of failure, perhaps they did not last very long. 

However, after some thought, I decided that maybe it had grown larger and needed a bigger pot, so I replanted in in a new one and added some fertiliser and waited.
A few weeks later it went mad, growing a new set of leaves and it then sprouted a bud which shot up in the amazing way these things grow and I waited with impatience for the new blooms to appear.

That must have been around about 1985/6, because we had been taken on a small black Labrador/border collie cross, (free to a good home) female puppy that we had named Lucy. When she was just about eight or nine months old and very bouncy, Lucy had come to believe that she was a very fierce dog whose response to potential burglars was to bounce around in an excited manner barking loudly at anyone she could see, including us. When one morning someone came to the front door, using her infallible self taught technique to deter burglars, she bounced round the room and onto the windowsill where the plant was and knocked the rather fragile head off.
I was not pleased, it had been so long in blooming again and the ‘blooming’ dog had destroyed it before it had a chance to come out out.
I did not strangle the dog there and then and we were eventually able to train her not to bounce and bark when we had callers, but she always had the last word. She would hide behind the settee, in order to avoid seeing the visitor and make the sort of muffled wuffing noise of a dog that could not quite handle the idea of silence, when all her instincts were urging her to let rip.

A more mature Lucy

Despite Lucy’s act of decapitation, the amaryllis recovered and the next year it bloomed again and from then on, with almost total regularity, it came out each year, although never at Christmas any more, only missing a couple of times until recently.

The Amaryllis in its original pot

Lucy died in 1999 at the age of thirteen, not too bad for a small dog. Having a dog pass away is always a sad event, even one that nearly destroyed your favourite flower. She had been my sole companion for a few years since my first wife died and so I was somewhat more affected by her passing and remember exactly when she died. This has allowed me to be fairly certain of the age of the amaryllis.

Re potting the amaryllis became a regular job every few years, getting a slightly larger pot for it and each time it would put on a spurt of growth and reward me with a larger than usual blossom.
Despite a recent re-potting, for the last five years the ancient plant has refused to bloom and I had come to believe that it had reached the end of its life and it was finally too old to flower. I had not got around to retiring it to the compost heap and sending it to the great flower pot in the sky, because I was putting it off. After all it had been with me for a long time.
The very day we were going off for a week in Stratford upon Avon, I saw that a new bud was coming out. An amaryllis is very fussy about watering; too much at the wrong time and it dies, but it needs a lot when it starts to bloom and I knew that if we went off with it just starting to bloom, I would probably find a dead plant when we got back.
By chance we were going to stay in a self-catering house in Stratford, and so the only thing I could do was take it with us. This makes it the only plant I have ever taken on holiday, but it seemed to like the change and survived and a few days after we got home it flowered properly for the first time in five years.

The new blooms