“I’m crammed into a burrow so small that my knees are up around my ears and the boom mike keeps slamming into my head, inhaling the potent scent of toffee-apple brandy and trying to drink a talking mouse under the table. But is it really the boom mike that’s making my head pound? I know for sure that my camera man doesn’t usually have two heads. I have to face facts. The mouse is winning.
Yesterday, I thought I knew what to expect from Narnia: good solid English cooking spiced up with the odd unusual ingredient, and good solid English people spiced up with the odd faun. And centaur. And talking animal. I’d longed to visit Narnia when I was a kid, but every time the notoriously capricious entry requirements, such as the bizarre and arbitrary lifetime limit on visits, relaxed the slightest bit, it would get invaded, get conquered, get re-conquered by the original rulers, or get hit by some natural disaster. The “Hundred-Year Winter” put the kibosh on the one time my parents even considered it.
When, by some bureaucratic miracle, my crew and I were permitted entry, I wondered if I was too old and jaded for Narnia. Maybe I’d been too old and jaded by the time I was twelve. Narnia is supposed to a land of clean living and old-fashioned values, where men are men and women are women and you have to go to Calormen to find anything more spicy than mulled wine. Not my kind of place at all, really.”

Fan fiction at archiveofourown.org