A Boy's visit to the Harry Potter Studio Tour

The Boy was incredibly lucky last week; his school had the opportunity to go to a preview of the Harry Potter Experience at the Leavesden Studios. Our (very) small claim to fame is living within walking distance of the studios. Sadly, they are excellent neighbours and I have never seen or heard anything interesting from the outside.

When The Boy told me about his day, pretty much every other word he used was 'awesome'. So, over to you, Boy:

• We saw  the trolley from the train, and you could eat the sweets, They had snakes to eat that moved in my mouth!
• There were chocolate cauldrons with caramel goo inside them that you could drink, and wands that dropped bits of licorish out of the end. They tasted delicious.
• We went into Fred and George's shop. There were actually fireworks! We saw Peruvian instant darkness powder that makes black smoke go everywhere. My friend went home covered in it. 
• The electric shock hand worked! 
• We met the actors that played Fred and George and they were really funny. They were jokers just like in the films.
• There was a cinema and we thought it was going to be boring but then the wall turned out to be the screen. After the film the screen went up and there were two huge doors. Everybody gasped and didn't move. Behind the doors was the great hall, with no roof. Apparently they only used candles in the first film because they kept falling on the children's food!
• In the tunnel I swear there was magic going on there, because there were lights on the walls and they moved around. You felt like you were walking upside down!
• We went into a huge room with 15 golden snitches to find. Finding the snitches was a lot of fun. They were... Stop! You can't tell people where to find the golden snitches!
• We saw Hagrid's Hut, Professor Dumbledore's office, the night bus, the Griffindor common room, the Slytherin common room, the dormitories for all the houses, the floor network and the Ministry for Magic.
• We got to drink butterbeer! It was really nice.
• There were wands that shot a bright light out of the end. I really, really wanted one to take home.
• There was lots of other stuff but the absolute best thing of all was wearing the quidditch robes and riding the broomsticks! You got to see yourself  on a screen. It was awesome! 
• I still wish our head teacher had let us get autographs from Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Ralph Fiennes. She had a load of paper and she wouldn't give it to us.

So, overall, good day out?

One of the best days of my entire life. I would recommend it to every single person in the world, and that includes people on Mars.

Thank you, Boy. The Harry Potter studio tour officially gets the nine-year-old's seal of approval. In fact, he wants me to take him again when it opens so that he can show it all to me. I think I might have to. I want to ride on a broomstick too.

An exercise in the procurement of a child passport:

1. Take child to be photographed. Obtain passport renewal form. Fill in form and append previous passport and two photographs. Give it to husband to take to friend who is deemed official enough to countersign form and photographs declaring that child exists and is not part of terrorist plot. Countersignatory makes mistake in her part of the form. Application rejected.

2. Get new form. Fill in new form, including countersignatory's part so this time all she has to do is sign it. Give it to husband to take to countersignatory. On return, notice that passport and photographs are now missing from envelope and part of her signature is outside the box. Form now invalid as it refers to enclosed passport.

3. Get new form, plus form to declare a lost passport. Fill in both forms. Append two more photographs. Give them to husband to take to countersignatory. On return, notice that form is signed but photographs aren't.

4. Send husband back with photographs to get them signed. Signature is in blue ink. Application rejected.

5. Head explodes.



Duration of exercise: 2 months.


Outcomes:

1. Brain matter everywhere

2. No significant progress in long term goal of reduction in pathological need to maintain excessive levels of control in all things.

3. Still no child passport.

Time to recognise the enemy within and conquer it

I'm rather embarrassed that it took me this long to work it out. I have a little bit of obsessive -compulsive disorder in me to go with the inner control freak that I accepted and embraced a long time ago. I can't tell you how much more I could have gotten done with my time if I'd realised this earlier.

It shows at work in the form of insanely complicated computer models which are far more extensive and detailed than needed. Not necessarily a bad thing, except I spend about three times as long on a job as anybody else. Still, they haven't fired me yet, so I'm going to call that a win.

Online, it shows as a determination to read all the tweets.

Like many newbie writers, I read the blog posts which tell you that you have to have an online presence; start now before you even have something to sell. You get infected with this sense of urgency, because you might be doing it wrong. It's all: Platform! Blog! Tweet! Do it now! And so the plan, devised on a computer with tick boxes and printed out and glued into a diary (because I'm that kind of scary person) includes Join Twitter. Develop an online web presence.

And there the compulsion sinks its claws in, because whenever I'm on the computer, it's nagging me that I haven't read all the tweets yet. It is a task uncompleted. I cannot tick the box and move on. I need to tick a completed box before I can move on. Seriously.

Now I'm not talking about all 200 million tweets per day, or whatever it is now, because I'm just a little bit nuts, not completely off my trolley. Just the tweets from the 270 some people that I follow. But even so, by definition it never ends. It's why I had to quit Farmville and Treasure Madness and make my facebook feed a game free zone. It's why I gave away my Playstation when gaming became more important than food or sleep.  I find I seldom tweet myself, because I'm too busy reading all the tweets. And worse, still, they're not even fun tweets, because most of my feed is from follow backs. I am paralysed into inactivity by a giant wave of I am a writer, buy my book tweets, which I don't even enjoy reading, because the compulsion to read all the tweets is there. I can't tick the box and move on. I need to tick the box.

But this morning, I feel... I don't know, awake. Objective. Looking at my twitter feed, I've noticed that one person tweets exactly every half hour to ask a random question, like 'what's the last colour you painted your toenails?' When I check their page, these questions never result in interaction, never turn into a discussion. So what's their purpose?

I like using twitter to engage with people about their lives. I want to know about the thing their kids did that made them laugh, about their new puppy, about the joke their friend told them. Really, truly, I don't want to hear about the review of someone's book that I haven't read and don't plan to. Not any more. I guess I could buy every single book promoted by every single person that followed me as a means of building their list of followers, but I'd end up in one of those smart white coats with wraparound arms.

I'm not going to quit twitter, because I like following authors whose books I've loved, and I like talking to people like Hagelrat, Mhairie Simpson and Margie McNulty, people who are happy to chat, but I think I'm going to cut right back on the other stuff. People have every right to promote their stuff on twitter, but it isn't for me.

The same as this blog is just a diary that people can read if they want rather than a writer's promotional tool filled with platform building content, my twitter needs to be social and not driven by the great god, Platform. It's the only way to stay sane and enjoy writing enough to want to carry on.

I'll never read all the tweets, but now I know the task ahead of me. I beat Farmville. I beat Treasure Madness. I can beat this. And to that end, this is what it looks like where I live this morning:

Pretty, huh? No doubt my son will be taking his sledge out when he gets home from school. Are your kids having fun in the snow? I really would like to know.

Their day will come

They may be beautiful, but I firmly believe some of these flowers are waiting for the day they will grow up and become triffids.


Life of flowers (Жизнь цветов) from VOROBYOFF PRODUCTION on Vimeo.


One day, when we least expect it, they will strike, and when that happens?

♫ The guy sure looks like plant food to me ♫

Word count will stay my problem up to and including my headstone

I finally pulled my procrastinating thumb out of my arse and did some writing, in that wonderful quiet spot between Christmas and New Year when you can live on leftovers and stay at home while the rest of the world hits the sales. I quite like my tale of satanic paper cats and their reluctant hostess.

Unfortunately, this was supposed to be my entry for an annual writing group competition with a word count of 2,500 to 3,500, and I'm at 4,500 and rising. Oops. It seems the engraved Writer's Block is destined to spend a year on someone else's shelf. It will probably be happier on a shelf that gets dusted more frequently anyway. I wouldn't want to interfere with the dawn of a new dust bunny species which is likely to occur in my house later this year.

Grinch alert

Okay, I have to hold my hands up to it: I'm a grinch.

Which is not to say I hate Christmas, heck no. I love the way The Boy's excitement increases as the open doors on his advent calendar add up. I love our little family walk with the dogs on Christmas morning, and the big family gathering in the evening. I love decorating the tree and baking mince pies with sweet pastry so thin they crumble in your hands.

Nope, it turns out, what I don't love is involuntary exposure to Christmas music. Christmas songs on the radio and in the shops drive everybody nuts, so I'm just going to add myself to the end of a long, long list there, and declare that the only Christmas song I can tolerate is Fairytale of New York. 'Nuff Said, and thanks, Tesco, for using it in your advertising and potentially spoiling that one for me too. If that makes me a grinch, then we are legion.

I might, however, be in a minority when it comes to choirs singing carols.

Now I quite like choral music. A friend sings in a choir and The Old Git and I go to their twice yearly concert. Good stuff. However, I don't expect it in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

It was the occasion of our Writing Group Christmas dinner (I do enjoy having four or five different Christmas dinners), and when the group on the next table broke into a rendition of Ding Dong Merrily on High, I thought it was spontaneous and wonderful.

Then they did another one.

And another one.

And another one.

And another one.

Then they did the first one again, and I looked over and realised that this was not a spontaneous outbreak of song. They all had songbooks in front of them, and they were set up for a night of wobbling their tonsils in public. And I started a slow, irritable burn.

I'm sorry, Pain the Arse Choral Society, but it's the noise inspector in me. It doesn't matter what you are choosing to sing, or how well you sing it. What bothers me is that you decided a crowded restaurant was the place for your singalong, regardless of whether the people around you wanted to hear it or not. It's the fundamental 'up yours' inherent in that decision. One carol, sung off the cuff would have delighted me. Planning it in advance? That's just rude.

I will retire with grinchly dignity to my kitchen, and start baking mince pies. When people open their mouths to sing in inappropriate places, maybe I can just pop mince pies in. I figure with a little bit of planning, I can be both grumpy and Christmassy.

It's Panto Night (oh no it's not!)

What do the following have in common?

• Ripperella, the East End tart whose fairy godfather, Don Corleone, set her up with a man called Jack,
• Jack the Intellectually Challenged, who went to London to become the Lord Mayor with the help of a pig called Trotter,
• Maid Marion, who left Robin to marry Aladdin, the man who could find her hood,
• Silvio, who helped grow the European beanstalk for the Banking Giant by fertilising it with used banknotes.

Answer: They were all characters invented by the deranged imaginations of the Watford Writers and assigned to me to ham-act for Panto Night. So, so much fun.

You guys have strange, warped minds and I love you for it. Poor Chris might not, since you made him be King Kong and ape his way across the 'stage' to have a discussion with Tarzan about loincloths.

The million dollar question now is whether the guy who came for the first time tonight will be back next week or whether he'll run away screaming.