The Prisoner of Windsor

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Because this is a complex novel, it probably makes more sense to listen to it on the highway than on surface streets. There’s just too much going on and too many little details for paying attention to while also turning right, left, stopping, pulling into parking lots, and so on. Also, you’ll find a 100-foot Totem Pole was a gift from the Canadian people to Queen Elizabeth II in 1958. It was gifted to mark 100 years of British Colombia started under Queen Victoria. There is one foot for every year and it weighs a whopping 12 tonnes. The Loch that Hagrid is facing is actually a mix of Loch Eilt’s small island of Eilean na Moine superimposed on the impressive Loch Arkaig in Scotland.

I've always loved Mark Steyn's journalism and especially his more surreal takes, like his Harry Potter/Hillary Clinton mashup, so I was intrigued to see how well he could carry off a whole book. The answer is 'brilliantly'. I was delighted by the reaction of Mark Steyn Club members to the audio version. Nancy Hawkes wrote from Virginia: Steyn has a great handle on the adventure style of the late nineteenth century—and in the form of people like Anthony Hope and Alexander Dumas, who knew how to make their wordy texts both compelling and fast-moving despite the wordiness. Updating such a style for modern readers is very difficult to do, but also very rewarding... At one point, the King of Ruritania, who makes his living as a celebrity impersonator, is impersonating the Prime Minister well enough to be the Prime Minister, which inflames a mob that hates the Prime Minister. To save his and the Prime Minister's wife's life, he impersonates a celebrity impersonator impersonating the Prime Minister on top of being a celebrity impersonator impersonating the Prime Minister (this is not a spoiler, as it drastically under-explains what's actually going on in that scene).It was carved by Chief Mungo Martin from the Kwakiutl tribe out of a single log of Western Red Cedarand weighs 12 tonnes. Virginia Water café& facilities This inversion takes place in post-modern (by about a Max Headroom 20 minutes, I’d guess) England. The deposed king of Ruritania acquires an invite to the coronation of the next king of England (Arthur, of course) and finds himself lost in an England where Ruritanian content farmers control the plumbing market. Or at least, where everyone thinks Ruritanian content farmers are the new Jews, and Ruritanian plumbers are doing the jobs English plumbers won’t do. There are many places that you can visit aside from chasing Virginia Water Harry Potter filming locations! But it’s otherwise extraordinarily funny, on an incredibly layered level, and not just with the shoutouts to The Prisoner of Zenda and other popular culture (I gave up trying to figure out which pop-culture icons in the narration were real-world and which were made up for the story). At one point, the King of Ruritania, who makes his living as a celebrity impersonator, is impersonating the Prime Minister, well enough to be the Prime Minister, which inflames a mob that hates the Prime Minister. To save his and the Prime Minister’s wife’s life, he impersonates a celebrity impersonator impersonating the Prime Minister on top of being a celebrity impersonator impersonating the Prime Minister (this is not a spoiler, as it drastically under-explains what’s actually going on in that scene).

London also has many filming locations including Leadenhall Market as The Leaky Cauldron and Kings Cross Station for Platform 9 3/4’s. Cecil Court and Goodwin’s Court are thought to be inspirations for Diagon Alley. The main joke centres on the groom to be. Poor Little Willie (John Sheerman) develops a stammer, which means that he is unlikely to be able to satisfy the demands of his future wife (Philippa Peak). This is where Rush (Rupert Mason) comes in to help poor Bertie (sic).The only place where the book bogs down is when the main character, as Prime Minister, gives his “big speech”. It’s not nearly as big as a real speech, but it’s a lot longer than a novelized speech. And it sounds a lot more like Mark Steyn than like the character giving it.

The Roman Ruins from the city of Leptis Magna were installed in 1826 under George IV as the Temple of Augustus named after him. Well, it could have been worse. Years ago, I read The Remake, a novel by the late Clive James (who was very kind and generous to me in my salad days). It was a dazzlingly written, densely literary and very self-referential tale in which at one point a successful celebrity author living in the Barbican (as both Clive himself and yours truly did at that time) makes an aside about "a flaky writer of some kind called Clive James". I thought that was a cute joke, and I was going to put a line in The Prisoner of Windsor about my chap lifting his speech from a column he'd read on the Internet by a flaky writer called Mark Steyn. But then I remembered that that was the point in Clive's book where the infuriated reviewers had hurled the thing across the room... I was delighted by the reaction of Steyn Clubbers to this audio entertainment. Nancy Hawkes wrote from Virginia:

This item contains adult content

Meanwhile, in tonight's episode of The Prisoner of Windsor, Rudy Elphberg's nemesis explains to him why lookalikes are so passé: Steyn has a great handle on the adventure style of the late nineteenth century—and in the form of people like Anthony Hope and Alexander Dumas, who knew how to make their wordy texts both compelling and fast-moving despite the wordiness. Updating such a style for modern readers is very difficult to do, but also very rewarding, both for the writer and the reader, as I learned in The Dream of Poor Bazin. There is a Virginia Water Lake Pavilion cafe that is right by the front entrance of the main car park. They serve up light refreshments and drinks throughout the day. But, because of the pesky Highland midge, the close-up footage of these Dementor’s kiss scenes was filmed at Virginia Water Lake. If you were chasing Harry Potter filming locations, then you couldn’t be in a better place to find them!