The To Do List!

Monday 7 July 2014

7. Harry Potter Movie Marathon

7.  Harry Potter Movie Marathon
starring...
Anett as Harry
Phil as Hermione
Lotti as Dumbledore
Carla as Hagrid/Snape
Carly as Malfoy
Tino as He Who Shall Not be Named
Spike as Dobby/Ron



On paper this one sounded pretty simple: just watch all 8 Harry Potter films over the course of a weekend.  Job done, right?  Not in our house!  What followed was a full weekend of Harry Potter themed activities, fancy dress, drinking games, too much sugar and of course 19 hours of sitting on the sofa.  Oh and we did a lot of knitting.  A lot.

As all good bank holiday weekends do, it started with an early morning shopping trip in the rain.  Thanks England.  As a further complication, it turns out that shops in Clapham don't open until at least 9:30 on a Saturday morning.  Still eventually we stocked up on all the essentials and only started the marathon an hour late.  Carla and Carly had arrived with two tiny dogs in two tiny costumes so it was time for the rest of us to get into costume too.

Doggy Dobby and Doggy Voldemort

Hermione
Harry


Of course no Harry Potter outfit is complete without a good scarf in house colours, so Anett and Carly had to teach Carla and I how to knit while Lotti quietly got on with her Dumbledore scarf (alas she did not take on my suggestion that she knit herself a beard).  I'll not dwell on the result of mine and Carla's knit-off but I will say this: size matters.


Sunday's section was much more even
Given that we started at 11am with the Hogwarts kids aged about 10 years old, it seemed appropriate to kick off with some HP-style snacks.  We had Every Flavour Beans, jelly Scabbers, homemade chocolate frogs and some rather dubious house-themed snacks (cheesy puffs for Hufflepuff, cherries for Gryffindor, eggs for Ravenclaw and jelly snakes for Slytherin).





Once we hit film number 3 though it was time to hit the Polyjuice potion, get out the sorting hat and play the world's most complicated drinking game.  It was a 4-player game with different rules for each person.




We complicated it further with another rule: every time there was polyjuice potion in the film, we all drank a shot of polyjuice potion (a concoction containing various quantities of vodka, apple juice, green food colouring and anything else we could think of to chuck in), put our rules into the sorting hat and drew out a new set.  We also added in a couple of rules, resulting in almost constant shouting of 'SEXUAL TENSION!' throughout the last 4 films.

Around 2am we finished film number 5 and decided we needed a sleep break.  We intended to restart viewing at 6am.  We actually woke up at 8am.  Saturday's rain had cleared and the outside world was looking like an increasingly attractive option.  We were starting to worry about DVT.  The only possible solution was to get through the last 3 films as quickly as we could (still about 7 hours) and so we pushed on, pausing only to make a video that has to be viewed to be understood...





Finally, video made, Voldemort defeated, scarves knitted and Harry Ron and Hermione all grown up and much better at acting than 19 hours earlier, it was all over.  We were all by this point completely desperate to get out into the sunshine and run off some of the excess sugar so that's exactly what happened.  

Harry Potter Movie Marathon list trumps!

Cost: 4/5 (Only £25 for all 8 films from Amazon, but we did get carried away buying sweets and wool and stuff)
Originality: 4/5 (OK we're definitely not the first people to do this but dogs in costume, knitting, drinking games AND a video is a pretty unique combination)
Fun Factor:  4/5 (Games were fun, video was fun, films were classic but let's face it, after 19 hours of sitting watching TV and knitting we all had cabin fever)

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