Chit Chat

Ok, here it is. The long awaited next installment of Chat. In this latest offering, I’m going to concentrate on the Top Tips, which are absolutely phenomenal. Fasten your seatbelts because it’s going to be a rollercoaster.

Ok, top tip number 1….

Store your special crockery in plastic bags, we are told. Just go and bloody do it, alright! Put your crockery, the special stuff, not the normal stuff, this is important. Put it in plastic bags. Why? you may ask. Well, isn’t it obvious?! When you usually get the special crockery down to use and you give it a quick rinse before using it then dry it off and put it on the table, don’t you ever think about how irritating that thirty second process is? O goodness, that was the longest thirty seconds EVER! I wish there was a way to cut down on that rinsing and drying time. Dah, dah! Chat to the rescue! By wrapping your special crockery in plastic bags, you will be able to unwrap it and use it straight away, without having to wash it first. Wow, what a revolutionary time-saving idea.

Next up, the non-flowering plant solution.

Ever had a plant which wouldn’t flower? A cactus, perhaps? Ever had some artificial flowers hanging about the house, no longer of any use? Well, you can do what this woman has done and snip the heads off the flowers and simply glue them to the plants which are being naughty and not flowering! What a marvelous solution! The keen eyed among you will notice that this helpful reader has even glued some big plastic ladybirds to their naughty unflowering plant too. There’s nothing I like to see better than a real cactus with artificial flowers and ladybirds glued all over it. Such beauty.

The next unbelievably good tip is as follows: “Drawer stuffed with tops that crease? Attach small hooks to your wardrobe door and hang them up.” Now I’m not one to point out the obvious but, just this once, I think I’m going to speak up. Is this reader in fact suggesting to us that we attach small hooks to wardrobe doors to enable us to hang our tops from them by the straps? And is that, or is that not, the basic premise of a clothes hanger? Have they in fact suggested, a rudimentary clothes hanger-esque device which, actually, is less convenient as it is attached to the door, whereas a clothes hanger offers the versatility of being able to transport the top around, still hanging straight, to whatever destination the chooser should see fit? Is that what’s happening here? The top tips section has given itself over to the ramblings of mental patients who’s best offerings are rubbish versions of things that already exist?

I despair.

Why I would be no good in Narnia

I definitely wouldn’t have gone that far into the wardrobe, for starters. There’s nothing Lucy likes so much as the feel of fur, we are told. So she climbs in the wardrobe and gets in among the fur coats, pushing her way further in so she can feel the furry goodness all around her. I, on the other hand, am not so passionate about fur. I might have stuck my hand or arm in for a second or two, then left. I certainly would not have physically climbed into the wardrobe.

I’m not that keen on Turkish Delight. Don’t get me wrong. Turkish Delight is fine and nice in its own way but I definitely wouldn’t have gone to the extremes that Edmund did to get some more.

I don’t say “Blast and botheration” enough. Digory, in The Magician’s Nephew says this line fairly near the start of the adventure, at a point where I would have said something like, “This sucks,” which I don’t think is child-friendly reading.

Even if I had gotten all the way into Narnia, I probably would have explained it away by saying I must have found my way outside in a freak snowstorm and never gone back.

Instead of going off to find Aslan and make friends, I probably would have concluded that lions are not the safest creatures to have as friends and stayed home, leaving everyone else to the adventures.

I don’t eat enough large spreads of bread, butter, freshly caught fish, currant buns and tea, made for me by woodland creatures. I much prefer something beautiful and dainty and, so far as I know, no-one in Narnia has been awarded a Michelin star yet. You probably can’t even get truffles.

Susan would annoy me too much. She’s always moaning.

Once inside the wardrobe and having found Narnia, I would have had to nip back to this world to get a book to read and probably would never have got back in again.

If I’d have found Aslan and he’d said I had to fight a battle against the baddies, I probably would have insisted he got the army in to do it and pottered off to the castle to wait for a text message to say they’d won.

When crowned, I would have requested that I be called Laura The Abominable Snow-woman, just for fun, which would have annoyed serious Peter and boring Susan, I think.

There aren’t enough mentions of cups of tea in Narnia.

Narnia and I

Our relationship goes way back. Anyone who knows me well, knows about my Narnia-love.

I had probably read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe at some point as a child but then my dad got me the box set in my teens and I read all seven chronicles. It took over my existence for a while. I rejoiced when they defeated the White Witch, when Caspian beat his uncle and reigned over Narnia, when Jill and Eustace broke Prince Rilian free from his spell and when Peter triumphed in the last battle. I despaired when Aslan was killed on the ancient table, when Nikabrik tried to overthrow Caspian and when Edmund and Lucy were told they had to leave Narnia. And I wept for the second half of the last book because I knew the end was nigh.

When in the Narnia zone, it becomes a very real place to me. It is the pleasant background to my normal day. Things are just generally nicer and more storybook, even when I’m just at work.

Right before going on our gap years, my friend Joe and I had walked from his house into Reading, which had taken about four hours. We had talked about Narnia a lot. It was one of those lovely days, early in our friendship when everything we said or did became a nice memory, stored up to take away with me. He left for his gap year before me so I sent him all seven books in the post to China and, miraculously, nothing happened to them along the way. I took a copy of the books with me to Africa and we started to read them on the 16th December, countries and oceans apart, to prepare for Christmas.

In fact, one day, whilst discussing Narnia with a bit of alcohol in our systems, two friends and I jumped into the rather big wardrobe we had in our room in Namibia, and searched around in the back for some snow or trees. We found neither.

Every year since then, I’ve started reading them on the 16th so I’m usually on book 4 or 5 by Christmas Day, and I keep reading till I finish them.

When my friend, Jay, started basically living on our sofa when we were at uni, I had started reading them as usual and I would always stay in the front room with her, on the other sofa. And we used to read the books to each other, a chapter each, until she got tired and I would keep reading until she had fallen asleep.

So last night, a few days later than usual, I picked up The Magician’s Nephew and started to read. All the lovely feelings of being on familiar ground and being in for a great read were ignited and I sipped my cup of tea and smiled.

“This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. It is a very important story because it shows how all the comings and goings between our world and the land of Narnia first began….”

Disappointing

So far, this holiday has been quite disappointing.

Yes, dinner was lovely, but where was the burglary from the till at gun point?

Yes, the garden is huge and very impressive but where was the old war hero, hiding out in the disused chicken coop because he’d been rejected by society?

Yes, there’s a lamppost at the end of the garden path which is EXACTLY like the one in the forest in Narnia and I got really excited, but where’s the old wardrobe that transports you there?

And yes, the weather was quite nice and sunny, but where was the exciting thunderstorm that we could all be a bit scared of?

And ok, the drive here was great fun and we all sung very loudly to silly pop songs from our childhoods but that is beside the point! Where was high speed car chase and the lorry crash?

Yes! I am in book heaven and there are more books than I can count in this lovely house, but where are the strange voodoo dolls and torture equipment?

There have been no crimes, no mysteries to solve, no forays into another world and no inexplicable natural phenomena.

So unfortunately, thus far, it’s just been loads of fun and really nice.