They're good stories with interesting characters when you're 7 or 8, but when you're 27 or 28 they're eye-opening works of Literature, capital L and all. I think that's how it is for a select group of children's books.
Don't get it twisted – I thought then it was a great book, and I adored it (and still do), but Charlie and his chocolate factory wasn't something I fully appreciated until I got a bit older. I didn't come to that realization then because Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was just a book I had read a few years prior and it didn't mean all that much to me. That's the joy of Willy Wonka, Charlie Bucket, Roald Dahl and anything else that lives in their world: we never know what's real and what's not, and that's okay. I didn't realize this back then, and shame on me for it, but I realize it now: that was the feeling Charlie Bucket must have felt when he stepped inside Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for the first time. We visited the Hershey chocolate factory later, and the smell was so sweet and satisfying you could feel it in your milk chocolate-y bones.
When we got to town we rolled down the windows by hand – you young whippersnappers wouldn't know anything about that – and the town faintly smelled of chocolate. My family visited Hershey, Pennsylvania, when I was a kid. It was another story, however, that solidified Dahl as one of Britain's best writers and as a pre-eminent children's author across the globe and as someone worth naming shit after, and it came out fifty years ago this year. It's safe to say those responsible for naming locations in Cardiff and picking locations for popular science fiction shows had at the very least an admiration of or appreciation for Roald Dahl, the late British writer responsible for stories such as Fantastic Mr Fox, James and the Giant Peach and Matilda, all classics of children's literature.
Any nerds reading this will recognize the plass as the location of a spatial-temporal rift in Doctor Who and the location of Torchwood Three in Torchwood. The plass – the Norwegian word for plaza, a nod to its namesake's parental roots – was derelict from World War II until the 1980s, when the municipality decided to regenerate the area into what it is today. Roald Dahl Plass sits in the revitalized Cardiff Bay area in Cardiff, Wales. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.