Sometimes you plan things for ages, and other times an idea just hits you from out of the blue. I was browsing through one of the girliest shops in the world in the town of Arundel in West Sussex, when I found this:
In case the picture is unclear, it is a phial of glitter which says 'Fairy Dust'. Costing about 50p, it was irresistable to a mum with two small girls of 3 and 6. The possibilities! Bear with me on this one...
While growing up in the wild moors of Lancashire, believing it to be the back end of nowhere, (subsequently proved by the long journeys back from civilisation later in life), I couldn't wait to leave and live in a big city. I was never sure which city, but I knew it was going to be a bigger and more interesting place than the rainy wilderness of home.
Of course, when I had my own children I was very excited to be bringing them up in London. WOW, I thought, how lucky are they to live in such an important and cosmopolitan place? The history, the culture, the museums, the markets, the endless life opportunities. A truly enthralling place?
So I was very surprised when my daughter announced that she thought Tottington, the Lancashire village I grew up in was the most amazing place in the world and that she was going to move there when she grew up. They do say life comes full circle! Curious to find out more, I asked her why Tottington was the best place in the world to live. She replied that it was because there was more magic there than there was in London.
I realised that when we had visited Granny there, the girls had got to make spells in the garden and, by magic, some gifts from the fairies appeared when they got up the following day. Now of course, spells had never worked at our house in London, and we had speculated that there weren't any fairies in our garden. However, when I found the fairy dust, we wondered together if it might make our spells work? Obviously Granny must have her own magic which Mummy can't do?
So we tried:
The girls had a pot each, and collected an assortment of grass, leaves and other ingredients from the garden. They mixed them up with a stick, and then we added the fairy dust to see if it brought any fairies overnight?
Well, the next morning we checked:
The fairies had been! Well, my 6 year old confided that she had started to think that fairies didn't really exist, but this confirmed that they did. The rest of the fairy dust went a long way. We made magic wands using real magic glitter, we made the teddies move, and we even made facepaint out of it later that day.
All in all a magical midwinter day.
