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I have a good friend who is a complete Harry Potter nut. Anyway, on Friday night, she confessed that she was going to go and queue outside her local Tesco's and get the new Harry Potter book, which was due to go on sale at midnight.
This sounded completely crazy to me. So, naturally, I came up with a better suggestion: why don't we go see a late film at Bluewater and then go and buy the book from Waterstones...
As Bluewater is a rather more salubrious place than Thornton Heath, my friend accepted my suggestion with alacrity. It made sense to go the whole Hogwarts, so we managed to get tickets for the new Harry Potter film: The Order of the Phoenix.
Even for a Friday night, Bluewater had a very strange air about it. For a start, there were far more parents and children around than usual for 10 o'clock at night. The feeling of weirdness was heightened by the fact that I met several former students. One was on the ticket desk for the cinema, a group of lads bumped into me by the Krispy Kreme Doughnut Shop, and another student greeted me from the queue for the bookshop...
It was about 1am when the film was over. I wasn't sure if Waterstone's would still be open, but the queue was still up and running. We got chatting to a very tired sales assistant who was carrying her shoes - she had been on duty only since 10pm, but informed us that her floor manager had been on since 12noon on the Friday afternoon. The queue, she told us, had been something to behold: people had been lined up all the way round the main hall. My friend and I were lucky: arriving after 1am, we were pretty much the last customers, and we only waited about 15 minutes. As I paid for my book, another very exhausted sales girl asked if we were the last. I was able to assure her that there were only about two people or so left.
I drove my friend back to her house, and then drove back to my flat.
I didn't get to read the book until after lunchtime on Saturday. Don't worry - I don't believe in putting up spoilers. I found the book a little disappointing: it was very slow to get started, and the ending left me feeling a little flat. However, I do think it's a good series of books. I know that some people object to the witches, wizards and spells, but
The Hobbit, the
Lord of the Rings trilogy and the
Narnia books also had magical elements. And while a lot of critics (especially on Radio 4) bang on about how J.K. Rowling's work isn't great literature, I just remember that, when teaching in an inner-city Comprehensive School, I saw young boys of 12 and 13, who had problems remembering to bring their exercise books to school, lugging around hardback volumes of the latest Harry Potter. This is something the more "realistic" and "relevant" (ie. more miserable) books written for teenagers never managed.