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2024 marks the anniversary of D-Day and earlier in the year, the BBC had a report on The Longest Yarn – a knitted tribute to D-Day was on display in Carentan, France. 80 x 1 metre long panels featuring iconic scenes from the film, The Longest Day.
The exhibition was going to come across to the UK in the autumn and go on tour around the UK. Luckily for us, it would be on display at The Garrison Church, Aldershot for three weeks which was close enough for us to visit.
It was something I knew Mum would be interested in seeing so we headed down to see the exhibition.
Tesco was the recommended place for car parking – however, it was a max. of 3 hours and I’d heard that it can be a bit of a wait but the other car parks were much further away. The church was a 10 minute walk from Tesco.
We arrived and were told it was an hours wait … more likely to be 90 minutes. The queuing though was inside the church and the pews did have cushions. We had come prepared for a wait and time did actually pass quite quickly. In the end, we waited patiently for 2 hours and 15 minutes.
It was a bit of a tight squeeze to see all the scenes but everyone made it work. Everyone got the photos they wanted and marvelled at the artistry before them. The attention to detail was amazing. Tiny figures eating or smoking.
It was also incredibly touching to learn that Piper Millin’s son had donated one of his dads favourite jumpers to the cause and the panels that featured him used the wool from his jumper!
It took about an hour to snake around the exhibit – you couldn’t linger too long as you knew just how long people were waiting.
We were 45 minutes over the car parking limit so we are expecting a parking fine to land on our doorstep. We’ll worry about that and split it when it arrives. Was it worth it – yes. It was a privilege to see all this hard work.
