What Actually Is the Plan?

Overall, the plan is for me to get better physically and mentally. Right now, I live with Lasse and his parents until my health improves enough for me to live on my own.  I’ve mentioned pieces of the plan here and there, but I wanted to put them together in one place.

Step 1: Build My Strength Back
My physiotherapist comes to the house every Wednesday, and I do my exercises on my own between visits. We started with four exercises and added three more after a couple of weeks. Some of them look small on paper, but they’re helping me work towards everyday things I want to do more easily and safely.

Step 2: Make Daily Life More Manageable 
I’m working on routines for eating, showering, getting dressed, moving around and keeping my space reasonably tidy. I’m also getting help from a dietitian. The aim isn’t to suddenly do everything perfectly; it’s to find ways of looking after myself that I can keep doing.

Step 3: Keep Working On My Mental Health
My OCD and anxiety affect ordinary parts of life, so physical progress is only one part of this. I need to keep using the support I have, be honest when things are difficult and practise doing more without pushing myself so hard that I end up back at the beginning.

Step 4: Get the Practical Things in Place
Before I move, I need to know what I can afford and what help I’ll need with everyday life. That means making a realistic budget, working out the costs of a new home and talking through any support I might need. I want to feel prepared, rather than trying to figure everything out after I’ve moved.

Step 5: Find a Home When I’m Ready.
I do want a place of my own. Lasse would still be part of my life and help me, but the goal is for me to be able to manage my home and my days. I’ll start seriously looking when I’ve made enough progress to feel that moving is a step forward, rather than more than I can cope with.

I don’t know exactly how long any of this will take. There will probably be good weeks and difficult ones. But that’s the plan as it stands: work on my health, build a life I can manage, and eventually have a home of my own.

Cauldron Cakes & Butterbeer Latte

 

I remembered I once tried this old Tumblr recipe for cauldron cakes back in 2013, so I figured, why not try to recreate and possibly improve them? I never tried the pastry bit in them, so this was my first. They turned out absolutely horrendous, but tasted really good! And of course, they were served with Butterbeer Latte. 

Warner Bros. Studio Tour London - The Making of Harry Potter ϟ Throwback

 

Inside Gryffindor Tower

After spending yesterday down in the cold, dark dungeons for Potions, today we're heading somewhere considerably warmer: Gryffindor Tower.

This was another part of the Studio Tour that felt instantly familiar.

The Gryffindor common room is one of those Hogwarts sets we've seen so many times throughout the films that it almost feels like somewhere we already know. It's where Harry, Ron and Hermione spend countless evenings doing homework, talking by the fire, celebrating Quidditch victories, arguing, plotting and occasionally making some fairly questionable decisions.

Seeing the actual set in person was wonderful.

Everything about it feels warm and lived-in. There are mismatched armchairs, worn rugs, old wooden furniture and deep reds everywhere. Nothing looks particularly perfect or polished, which is exactly why I love it. It looks like generations of Gryffindor students have actually been using the room.

The costumes make it even easier to imagine the characters there.

Harry, Ron and Hermione's clothes stand in the middle of the common room, surrounded by the furniture and props we saw around them throughout the films. It's strange how immediately recognisable their everyday clothes are. You don't necessarily think of a jumper or hoodie as an important Harry Potter costume, but seeing them here brings back specific moments from the films.

And then there's the furniture.

I love that it doesn't match.

The chairs look as though they've been collected over decades rather than bought as one perfect set, and everything is slightly worn and cosy. There are books and little objects scattered around, and the whole room has that wonderfully cluttered Hogwarts feeling.

It genuinely looks like somewhere I'd want to curl up in an armchair for the evening.

Just beyond the common room is the Gryffindor boys' dormitory, which might be even cosier.

The four-poster beds are surrounded by those beautiful dark red curtains, with clothes, slippers and personal belongings left around them. Again, it's the tiny details that make the set so convincing.

You can even spot the students' initials on their trunks.

HP for Harry Potter.

And RW for Ron Weasley.

I don't know why I love details like that as much as I do, but I really do. 😂

They're such ordinary things. Of course Hogwarts students would have trunks. Of course they'd have their initials painted onto them. But seeing the actual props sitting underneath the beds makes the dormitory feel less like a film set and more like you've somehow wandered into their bedroom while everyone is downstairs.

The dormitory also shows something rather funny about filming a series over ten years: the beds didn't grow along with the actors.

They were designed when Harry and his classmates were still children, so as the cast grew taller, filming had to work around the increasingly small beds. By the later films, clever camera angles helped hide the fact that the actors no longer really fitted them.

I think that's part of what makes seeing these sets so interesting. On screen, Hogwarts feels enormous and completely real. Here, you get to see both sides of it at once.

You can see the tricks.

You can see where the set ends.

You can see that Harry Potter's trunk is just sitting underneath a wooden bed.

And yet somehow, when you're standing there looking into the Gryffindor dormitory, there's still a tiny part of your brain thinking:

Harry's bed. That's actually Harry's bed.

Warner Bros. Studio Tour London - The Making of Harry Potter ϟ Throwback

 

Potions Class at Hogwarts

There are some Hogwarts classrooms that you recognise immediately, and the Potions classroom is definitely one of them.

Hidden away in the dungeons, it's dark, slightly creepy and absolutely packed with things. Cauldrons cover the workbenches, shelves disappear beneath hundreds of bottles and jars, and almost every available surface seems to contain some mysterious ingredient or piece of equipment.

Basically, exactly what you would expect from a Hogwarts Potions lesson.

Seeing the actual set at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour was one of those moments where I wanted to stop and look at everything. There is so much going on that it's almost impossible to take it all in at once.

And, of course, you can't really look at the Potions classroom without immediately thinking of Professor Snape.

The black robes standing amongst all those bottles and cauldrons are instantly recognisable. Even without Alan Rickman actually standing there looking disappointed in everyone, the classroom still has that wonderfully intimidating Snape atmosphere.

The set also includes Professor Slughorn's costume, which makes such a contrast beside Snape's. It's another little reminder of just how much this particular classroom changed depending on who was standing at the front of it.

What I really loved, though, were all the tiny details.

The shelves are filled with bottle after bottle of potion ingredients. Some contain liquids, while others are packed with strange plants, roots and other things that I probably wouldn't want to identify too closely before lunch. From a distance they simply create the cluttered appearance of the classroom, but when you start looking at them individually, you realise just how many props were needed to fill the set.

Then there are the students' workbenches.

Cauldrons, scales, glass bottles, mortars and pestles, books and all the little pieces of equipment are laid out as though somebody has simply stepped away in the middle of a lesson. I especially loved being able to photograph some of these details up close. They are exactly the sort of things that disappear into the background when you're watching the films but make the set feel completely believable.

There was even an open copy of Advanced Potion-Making.

Of course, that immediately made me think of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry's suspiciously brilliant year in Potions thanks to a certain heavily annotated textbook.

Seeing things like this is probably my favourite part of the Studio Tour. The huge sets are incredible, but I'm equally fascinated by the things somebody could easily have decided didn't matter. A textbook still needed pages. Bottles still needed labels. Shelves still needed ingredients. A student's desk still needed to look as though somebody actually used it.

All those tiny details add up.

Standing in front of the Potions classroom, it doesn't look like somebody simply assembled a backdrop for a film.

It looks like generations of Hogwarts students have been sitting at those tables, chopping ingredients, stirring cauldrons and desperately hoping Professor Snape doesn't decide to inspect their potion next.

Although, having now seen the classroom in person, I think I've reached an important conclusion:

I'd absolutely want to study Potions at Hogwarts.

I just wouldn't particularly want Snape grading me.

Warner Bros. Studio Tour London - The Making of Harry Potter ϟ Throwback

 

Building Hogwarts: Portraits, Staircases & Secrets

One of the things I loved most about the Warner Bros. Studio Tour was getting to look beyond the big, instantly recognisable sets and notice all the smaller pieces that made Hogwarts feel like an actual castle. When you're watching the films, you don't really stop to think about how much had to be designed and built simply to create the background of a scene. At the Studio Tour, you finally get the chance to do exactly that.

The Hogwarts portraits were especially interesting. The walls of the castle are absolutely covered in them in the films, and seeing them together up close made me realise just how much work went into something that could so easily have been treated as simple background decoration.

Even better, many of the faces hiding inside those frames weren't random. Members of the Harry Potter production team were immortalised in Hogwarts too. The Portrait Wall display showed where some of them appeared, including producer David Heyman, production designer Stuart Craig, producer David Barron and prop master Barry Wilkinson. I love little details like this. It feels like a lovely way of quietly putting some of the people who created the wizarding world into the world itself.

And then there are the moving staircases.

They're such a familiar part of Hogwarts that I don't think I'd ever really considered what was physically there during filming and what was added later. At the Studio Tour, you can see part of the staircase itself alongside the portrait-covered walls. Some of the portrait spaces are green screens, allowing moving images to be added during post-production.

It's strange seeing the trick exposed and still finding it magical.

There were also some much bigger pieces scattered around the tour, including the enormous Hogwarts clock mechanism. This was one of those things that made me stop for a proper look because the scale and detail are incredible. There are so many parts of Hogwarts that appear on screen for only moments, yet someone still had to design them, build them and make them fit into the visual world of the castle.

The same goes for the statues and architectural details. I got a close-up of one of the huge winged boars, which is much more imposing when you're standing directly underneath it than it ever seems on screen.

And then there was something considerably less welcoming: the Chamber of Secrets door.

Seeing the enormous circular door in person was brilliant. The snakes spreading across it are so distinctive that you know exactly what you're looking at before you even read the information beside it. It's one of those props that immediately takes you back to a particular part of the films.

I think that's what I enjoyed so much about this section of the tour. Hogwarts isn't made believable by one enormous set. It's the accumulation of thousands of details — paintings in corridors, stone staircases, clocks, statues, doors and decorations that might only sit in the background for a few seconds.

When you watch Harry Potter, all of those things simply become Hogwarts.

Walking around the Studio Tour gives you the chance to separate them again and appreciate how much work went into every single piece.

And somehow, seeing how the magic was made doesn't ruin it at all.

It just makes Hogwarts even more impressive. 

Warner Bros. Studio Tour London - The Making of Harry Potter ϟ Throwback

 

Stepping Into the Great Hall

And then you get to enter the Great Hall.

This is probably one of the first moments of the Studio Tour where it really hits you that you’re standing inside the world from the films. You walk through the enormous doors and suddenly the Great Hall is right there in front of you – the long house tables, the stone floor, the teachers’ table at the far end and costumes representing the different Hogwarts houses.

And this isn’t a recreation made for the tour. This is the actual Great Hall set.

It was one of the first sets built for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone back in 2000 and went on to become one of the most important and recognisable sets of the entire film series. It was used for everything from Hogwarts feasts and Sorting Ceremonies to the Yule Ball and the Battle of Hogwarts.

There are so many little details to look at once you’re inside. At the front of the hall is the teachers’ table, along with Dumbledore’s lectern, and behind it you can see the enormous House Points Counter filled with thousands upon thousands of tiny glass beads.

Even the floor beneath your feet is part of the original set. Rather than using something that only looked like stone, the filmmakers laid real York stone because the Great Hall needed to survive years of filming and hundreds of students walking across it.

One detail I particularly love is the house tables. They were deliberately aged for the films, but some of the graffiti carved into them came from the young actors themselves. Production designer Stuart Craig actually encouraged it because Hogwarts was supposed to be a real school – and what school tables survive generations of students without somebody carving something into them?

There is one thing missing when you look up, though: the enchanted ceiling.

The physical Great Hall obviously couldn't have an endless magical sky above it, so the enchanted ceiling we see in the films was created with visual effects. Even the famous floating candles eventually became a digital effect. Real suspended candles were originally tried during the first film, but the heat caused problems with the wires holding them up, so the filmmakers turned to visual effects instead.

It’s also strange seeing the Great Hall without hundreds of Hogwarts students filling the benches. It somehow feels both much bigger and much smaller than it does on screen.

But standing there, looking towards the teachers’ table and knowing how many iconic Harry Potter scenes were filmed in that exact room, is incredibly special.

For a few minutes, you really do get to feel like you’ve walked into Hogwarts.

Warner Bros. Studio Tour London - The Making of Harry Potter ϟ Throwback

 

The Studio Tour Begins

Once you’re inside, it doesn’t take long before you start seeing things you immediately recognise from the films. One of the things I love about the Studio Tour is that it isn’t really trying to feel like a theme park. It’s much more about stepping behind the scenes and seeing the actual sets, props, costumes and tiny details that went into creating the Harry Potter films.

And one of the first familiar sights is a particularly small cupboard.

The Cupboard Under the Stairs

Before you’ve even properly started the tour, you get to see the Cupboard Under the Stairs at Number Four, Privet Drive – Harry’s rather miserable little bedroom before Hogwarts came along and changed everything.

It’s such a simple set compared with some of the enormous things you’ll see later, but that almost makes it more special. It’s one of those instantly recognisable pieces of Harry Potter history: the tiny space beneath the stairs, filled with Harry’s belongings, where the story begins before he has any idea that he’s a wizard.

Seeing it in person also gives you a completely different appreciation for the amount of detail that went into the films. Things that only appear on screen for a relatively short amount of time were still carefully dressed and designed to make Harry’s world feel real.

Number Four, Privet Drive

Later in the Studio Tour, you get to see something even more familiar: Number Four, Privet Drive itself.

The exterior of the Dursleys’ house sits in the Backlot alongside several other iconic outdoor sets and props. After seeing Privet Drive so many times in the films, there’s something wonderfully strange about suddenly standing right in front of that very ordinary-looking suburban house.

And really, it’s the perfect Harry Potter location. The whole story begins in one of the least magical places imaginable – a painfully normal house on a painfully normal street, occupied by a family determined to pretend that magic doesn’t exist.

Then the Hogwarts letters start arriving.

Standing in front of Number Four is one of those moments where the films suddenly feel very tangible. You’re not looking at a replica inspired by Harry Potter. You’re surrounded by pieces of the filmmaking world that actually helped bring the story to life.

For something as ordinary as a little house on Privet Drive, it feels surprisingly magical.