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We went to Harry Potter World today and when I got home I found that £350 had magically disappeared from my bank account. But as long as some of that is going to JK Rowling then I am happy. I’ve been worrying about how she is going to make ends meet.
I won’t be happy until she’s made enough to build her own personal Gringott’s bank in her garden, including the ridiculous railway line to her vault. And gold that doubles every time you touch it. Which to be fair is a spell she seems to have mastered.
The place was packed and everyone seemed happy to be shovelling more money into this absolute cash cow. Catie and I were here 10 years ago and I am sure it’s been this packed every single day ever since. It must have been a slightly bold decision to turn over all this studio space to a tourist attraction but it seems to have paid off for everyone concerned. To be fair it’s a pretty astonishing attraction, packed with stuff and you could easily spend a whole day there and not see everything. I don’t even really like Harry Potter and have some issues with JK Rowlings’ politics, but I still enjoyed myself. The kids had a fabulous time. Ernie asked in the goblins in the bank set were real and then later, in the shop, sidled up to one of the assistants and said “Excuse me, where are the *real* magic wands?†He’s wanted a working magic wand for a while now, but suspected that the ones put out in the store are just for the rubes, and that Harry Potter World must have a secret under the counter selection for real wizards. The assistant was awesome and replied that the wands were all real, but you have to be eleven before the magic starts working. Which totally satisfied Ernie who was now happy with his purchase. Hopefully by the time he is 11 he might not expect wands to be magic or on that day I might be coming back to this shop and asking for a refund. He seems keen to use the wand to kill people with though, so I think that maybe it’s good that they keep the real magic wands away from the muggles.
The queues to pay more money for videos of the kids riding on broomsticks or food or to buy possibly magic wands suggest that everyone there was shelling out far more than the pretty hefty entrance fee, but although we were all having our pockets picked by the wealthiest people in the world, it was still an immensely enjoyable afternoon and possibly even worth the money. The spontaneity of the decision to come here somehow made it even more exciting.
I appreciate how lucky we are to be able to splurge that amount of money at this difficult time, but it certainly didn’t look like we were the only ones.
Hopefully one day there will be a similar sized tourist attraction based around Twitch of Fun.
Annoyingly I forgot to check that my hand was still the size of Emma Watson’s hand (I didn’t see the handprints this time). But her handprint can’t have changed and I don’t think mine has. So the hand lookalike business is still going. Total customers in the last ten years are zero.
