A gloriumptiously good day

 In our household, we love a literary pilgrimage. We have done a fair few in our flexischooling career, be it transporting ourselves off to the land of fairytales, looking for the Lorax, meeting some of our literary heroes at Hay on Wye, celebrating Christmas with Michael Rosen and Charles Dickens, and we've even been known to travel all the way to Denmark to find Hans Christian Andersen..

Arguably though, one of the constants in Ferdy's long life of loving books has been Roald Dahl. He has been listening to the audiobooks since he was 4; he started reading with the Magic Finger and now reads them all and our latest, which we listened to this Friday, is Boy.

So when I found out that the museum had reopened, I decided we should take a trip there. We have no idea how much longer these amazing and vital places are going to stay open or survive.

Having travelled there the night before, our early morning countryside trail entailed tramping through the woods which inspired stories like Danny the Champion of the World, Fantastic Mr Fox and Billy and the Minpins. We encountered Wangdoodles, Snozwanglers, Hornswogglers, Vermicious Knids, had to run away from the blood suckling, tooth pluckling, stone chuckling Spittler (Gruncher for short), and even found the orchard and farm belonging to one of Ferdy's favourite baddies, Mr Bean (the lean one who only drinks cider in FMF).

Gil enjoyed leading the way on this walk by following instructions on our map and not getting too biffsquiggled. It culminated in us tracing the BFGs footsteps to Roald Dahl's grave where we had a little chat with the great man himself..

After some scrumdiddlyumptious food in the cafe, we went to the museum. Many things are a bit miserable at the moment; places seem like ghost towns and no one seems to be having much fun. But it is rather nice to have your own personal tour guide (a splendiferous lady named Helen who reminded us a little of Miss Honey) and a whole museum to yourselves.

Both boys churgled to see the mouse in the sweet jar from Boy and delighted in seeing Roald Dahl's actual writing room and to work out what character they were according to their height (Ferdy was George, Gil was an Oompa Loompa to his annoyance, I was Willy Wonka). We learnt loads of new stuff about Roald Dahl, (although Ferdy seemed to know rather a lot, occasionally taking over as museum guide) like how he had loved the Beatrix Potter books, how Charlie from the Chocolate Factory had originally been made of chocolate, how Oompa Loompas were very nearly called Whipple Scrumpets and how the BFG was based on Roald Dahl's very good friend with big ear lobes who had made his writing shed.

Gil particularly loved the ball of tin foil Dahl made from every chocolate wrapper he had eaten, and Ferdy very much enjoyed showing off all his knowledge of the characters in the stories (he was able to answer every question correctly) and stomping, flying and oompa loompering around the museum between the rooms.

On the way home, we listened to the rest of Boy and later we watched the whizzpoppingly excellent Fantastic Mr Fox and spotted Roald Dahl's chair and ball of tinfoil in Mr Fox's office in the film.

The day was made of zozimus for all involved.

Ferdy's trick taken from Matilda's book of genius