A Narnia Experience

Hello, thank you for popping in. Have you had lovely weather this weekend?  Tick.  Have you stayed up late watching Glastonbury and/or the football on the tellybox?  Tick.  I am pooped.  I have had a busy weekend, visiting the Shrewsbury Food Festival yesterday and Narnia today.  Please allow me to explain.

If you are wondering what on earth I am talking about, The Chronicles of Narnia are a series of seven children's books written by C.S. Lewis in the 1940s and 1950s, the most famous of them probably being The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.  I read the books when I was twelve years old and I loved them, I saw TLTW&TW at the Westminster Theatre in London in the 1980s and I watched the BBC television series not many years later.  More recently, films have been made but I haven't seen them, possibly because my children thought they were too old or possibly because I'm a bit of a purist!  

 

Oh come on, surely you knew that I would still have them? 
 

So, when we were invited to a Narnia Experience at St Lucia's Church in the village of Upton Magna, I couldn't resist and nor could some of my friends: eleven of us went, aged 4 to 70something. 

 

 

From the outside, the church looks like this -

 

 

However, once we had been ushered through the wardrobe doors and past the fur coats hanging on the rail - if you are familiar with the story you will understand why we had to enter this way - the inside of the church had been transformed to look like this -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People gasped.  A lot of hard work had gone into this and I reckon that every artificial Christmas tree in the village is now in the church.  We were ushered round by stewards as the story unfolded in a performance by adults and children which lasted for about 45 minutes.  There was a LOT of applause at the end.  However, that was not the end of our Narnia Experience.

 

Back in the community centre, there was tea and cake, good cake -

 

£1.50 for a cup of tea and a slice of cake like this -

 

That's not all, there were also family craft activities: I could have made a lion mask like Aslan, a set of panpipes or a shield like Peter's -

 

 

 

Two of us painted rather lovely plaster animals.  These were apparently made by a dental technician, hence the perfect attention to detail -

 

 

 



 I could have had my face painted.  This teenager painted her arm -

 

As I said, I could have had my face painted, but I didn't.  However, two of us couldn't resist it, especially the lovely lion who had never had her face painted before!

 

 

And the cost of all this fun?  £2.50 for adults, £1 for children.  It was less than half the price of yesterday's outing and I had more fun.  So thank you to everyone involved, to Di for inviting us, to St Lucia's for hosting.  They are holding a Narnia-themed family service at 9.30am next Sunday, 5th July, if you fancy it (I'm afraid I can't make it). 

 

 

 

What a weekend: to Shrewsbury and back again via Narnia, with Glasto thrown in on the tellybox! 

 

See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x