I was so pleased to see that an essay had been posted at hp_essays at last. And then I read it. Sigh. It’s so strange that there is such a constituency of people who dislike and disapprove of the Harry Potter series and yet remain fascinated by it. Why is this? I used to listen to ‘The Archers‘, but when Brian Aldridge had an affair with Caroline Bone, I decided I’d had enough. It was a shame, because Brian was my ideal man, being a farmer with a wine cellar, but it was over and I didn’t hang around.

But really, what is it about Harry Potter that upsets everyone so? I blame Buffy. And all those tv series that go on so long that the story gets forgotten and it’s all about how everyone loves each other and how they’re all nice and bearing heroically with their pain - even Spike. (How Drusilla would have sneered!) ‘That’s my Draco Malfoy!’ the fan girls yelp. Except that he wasn‘t. There’s also this idea that has come from god knows where that you have to discover just how unworthy you are and wallow in your unworthiness in order to be a hero. ‘Severus, Severus!‘ cry the Snapewives, swooning. But I’m afraid not. There’s just Harry, who you know would prefer to be playing PS3 and eating Krispy Kreme Donuts while his mum hoovers up around him. (‘Ah, bless!’ I smile indulgently.)

But you know what I mean. Draco was a coward and a git, Snape was unworthy, Voldemort was an evil bastard, Dumbledore was a manipulative, arrogant genius, and Harry was an ordinary boy - and it was just fabulous! The wizarding world was a mess, and it carried on being a mess. Political correctness and health and safety hadn’t been invented. Christopher Lee walked with Enid Blyton through Royston Vasey! Or something! How could you expect any sense to come out of that? It’s as likely as finding the philosophers’ stone in your pocket, bloody hell!

Pretty much the first moment on my own this year. School started a week ago but my littlest one has had a tummy bug and only went in today. I've thought about closing the lj - I've never done much with it, and HP discussion is thin on the ground now. There's always deathtocapslock, I suppose…

I’ve been looking at a non-lj HP community over the last couple of months that is, I guess, the complete opposite of deathto, http://thehogshead.org . People there are interested in discussing the ideas expressed in HP, and their sources. The community comes at HP from a Christian perspective, by and large, and its attitude to HP is positive. This doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting to anyone with different views, or that there isn’t lively disagreement among the participants.

HP is characterised by contrasts and contradictions, and by come-downs and reversals. This is something that really interests me: does it make or break the series? For deathtocapslock it breaks it - it’s indicative of the author’s incompetence and wrong-headedness. For the Hogshead I’m not sure how much of an issue it is, because of the persuasive strength of the richness of the ideas referred to by HP. I’ve just bought Travis Prinzi’s new book on HP, which I’m sure will enlighten me!

Barack Obama has been elected, the Bank of England has reduced interest rates, Labour have won the Glenrothes by-election, but I’m going to have a moan about an obscure lj Harry Potter community, deathtocapslock.
( But HP is over, isn't it? )

You read something, have some idea or ideas about what you’ve read, start writing, and the ideas multiply and zoom off all over the place arguing with each other. Then you realise that there’s an awful lot you don’t know, and that you misunderstood something essential in the thing you read anyway, and off you go again.

Anyway, there’s been some discussion about academic analysis in fandom and "The Death of the Author" has been mentioned. What was Barthes on about, and why did he have such a bee in his bonnet about the poor author? I thought I'd better read his article. ( What happened? )

Just when I was becoming seriously disillusioned with the Labour Party along comes J. K. Rowling and reminds me what it's supposed to be about. Hope it reminds the Labour Party too!http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7626589.stm

This morning the garden was ablaze with sunlight. It was more ablaze than ever before because we've had to fell the large ash tree that has shaded it for the last fifty years and more. It was a hard decision, but turned out to be the right one because the tree was quite badly rotted a fair way up its trunk. There are four houses within falling distance. We now have a huge pile of wood waiting to be chopped into small logs for the woodburner, and stacked neatly ... somewhere. There's enough wood for four winters, at least. Felling the tree has revealed the garden as the desert it really is, and now we have to knuckle down to some serious gardening. We'll get another tree asap, not quite as big as the old ash.

The other evening we saw a bat flying around the garden! I'm so pleased! I've been dying to see one ever since we moved here! It was small, but chunky, and very bat-shaped!

It nearly made up for my disappointment with Italy in the European Championship. I think I'll have to support Spain now because I'm fond of Fernando Torres, who plays for Liverpool. But the Russians are a fab team, and one can't help cheering on the Turks. Yes, Germany were great, but they're Germany.

If I lived in Haltemprice and Howden just now, I'd be getting ready to vote Tory. Crikey.

A lovely surprise - the rhubarb plant that I thought we'd killed by putting it in the wrong place in the garden (not enough sun and overwhelmed by wild garlic) has come back to life. I must go out and give it a hug!

Last year my iron ended it all with a spectacular leap into the vinyl flooring. If only it had talked to the dishwasher! The dishwasher long ago worked out how to deal with the stresses of everyday life. Every year or so it just doesn't wash. You put in the dishes and the dishwasher tablet, glance at the rinse aid level, turn the dials to the usual settings, close the door, and ... the dishwasher doesn't wash but chants rythmically for the duration of the programme. If you gently remove the unwashed dishes, and give the dishwasher some space for three days, it then works again as helpfully as ever.

It's rather an elderly dishwasher, a Miele, with 'Made in West Germany' on its front. We got it second-hand, twelve years ago, from a friend renovating a substantial house in Chelsea.

I have finally gone completely mad. In 'hp essays' I got drawn into treating seriously a joke in the epilogue to DH, and discussing it at length. Well, it wasn't entirely serious, but somehow I had come to believe that one has to treat any bonkers comment with respect. Help!

While I was internetless there was a discussion on LJ about the epilogue to HP that has caused my mind to meander...
( wends way )

is that England cannot play 4-5-1.

I'm not sure why Fabio Capello doesn't know this. I hope he's worked it out before the second half starts.

I’ve just had a week and a bit without the internet, eek! It was a bit trying. I think I’m an addict. But now we’re re-connected, with another isp – AOL, lured by the promise of a free laptop.

I bought a fabulous book from the local Oxfam shop, The Battle of Land and Sea on the Lancashire Cheshire & North Wales Coasts and the Origin of the Lancashire Sandhills by Wm. Ashton and published in 1909. It has this lovely paragraph in it:

Nothing more geologically recent than the alluvial plain of West Lancashire is known in Britain. If one journeys from Southport to Wigan, the start is made upon blown sand; the peat moss is reached at Blowick; triassic rocks lie close to the surface at Burscough and Hoscar Moss; at Parbold we reach the millstone grit; and at Wigan we are near the coal measures which overlie the millstone grit, both belonging to the Carboniferous period.

You can make that journey by train. From Southport to Parbold (about 10 miles?) is flat – the railway seeming to make an entirely straight line between rectangular fields with black, black soil, and curlews and lapwings, then a secluded, pretty valley between two wooded hills (Parbold Hill and Ashurst Beacon), which the railway shares with the River Douglas and the Leeds-Liverpool Canal. At Gathurst, railway, river and canal run close together beneath a high and elegant motorway viaduct, then there’s wild, scrubby land with factories and warehouses till you get toWigan. Well, that’s what it was like in the 1970s anyway.

On page 128 of the book it says, We now approach the crux of the problem which it has been the main purpose of this enquiry to elucidate. On page 128!

Lovely to hear of Russian foreign minister calling Britain's attitude 'colonial'. Perhaps he meant to say 'polonial'?

It’s a new year but I remain just as obsessed with – I mean, interested in, in a perfectly rational way – Harry Potter as I was in 2007. I’ve finally read Lindsay Clarke’s novel The Chymical Wedding, which I found for sale by chance, in a huge bookcase (formerly the property of a nearby RC church) in the antique market up at Crystal Palace. It’s interesting reading it in comparison to HP. (It actually has a potter in it. HP, in return, has a wedding.) It’s much more straightforward and explicit in its treatment of alchemy, one of its purposes, really, being to explain alchemy. (An anti-alchemical purpose, this! HP is the more truly alchemical work.) It’s a book for grown-ups so is interested in sex and the sexual imagery of alchemy, and male - female oppositon. It competes with, and on occasion outdoes, HP in the Grand Guignol stakes. It’s a very male story, and a bit dated maybe, but powerful and evocative. It tells two interlinked stories, one 20th century and one 19th. The three main 20th century characters are, perhaps, not altogether believable, or should that be all too believably the inhabitants of a 1970s polytechnic? But the subsidiary characters are lovely, and Louisa from the 19th is a loving take on Dorothea Casaubon from Middlemarch. I really enjoyed it. I’m sure a great film could be made out of it. Something a bit hallucinatory.

Over the last few days a Greater Spotted Woodpecker has been visiting our garden, attacking the strip of rotten wood on the trunk of an ash tree in search of food. I've seen a Green Woodpecker in the garden from time to time - usually digging about in the ground with its beak - but it's more than five years since the only other time I saw a Greater Spotted. I'm a bit worried about the ash. Its trunk was badly damaged by fire before we moved here and it has been valiantly trying to grow new bark over the damage. A long, bare strip remains, however, and is quite rotten, and also sodden after all the recent rain, making it easy pecking for the hungry woodpecker. Chunks of wood fly off as the bird pecks, and there's no sound at all, the wood is so soft. At this time of year, without its leaves, the ash is an endearingly ugly tree that has obviously taken a few knocks in its time. It's pretty big - at least 45 feet tall. There's a small elder bush growing out of it about half way up. I hope it's as tough as it looks because it's lovely in the summer and our garden would be stark without it.

I saw a programme on tv the other night about Hugh Everett, the physicist who proposed the ‘many worlds theory’. In the programme they talked about the double slit experiment and Schroedinger’s cat. I’m sure it’s not straightforward trying to explain quantum physics to the ordinary person like me, but I had, like, real problems with the two experiments.( Boldly go )

Yesterday my revolting fluorescent green iron died after making a spectacular leap from the ironing board onto the kitchen floor. I don't know what it was trying to prove. Perhaps it really could not get on with the hideous new vinyl flooring and was trying to stab it - it landed point first. And then slowly separated into pieces. The vinyl didn't so much as flinch. I never liked it anyway, and it has been replaced already with a monstrous Rowenta made-in-Germany thing that's curiously boxy, sort of reminiscent of one of those enormous cruise ships that look like blocks of flats, and weighing about the same, I think. I can hardly pick the bugger up. It has a "stainless steel precision tip, designed for immaculate ironing down to the smallest detail".

I laughed out loud on p. 186, cried a lot some time later, and have gasped on several occasions.

I'm enjoying reading the book and wish I could just sit somewhere comfy on my own with a cup of tea and some cake, rather than reading a chapter here and there in between ironing and cooking and washing and shouting at children! It might have helped to have got more than three hours sleep on Friday night, too.

It's just like the other books in that it has gone off in a direction that could not be predicted from the book before.

Well, back to the ironing etc, with time for a bit of reading before sleep.

Went to see OotP by myself this morning. Almost empty cinema, great seat in circle, cappuccino. Still a bit disappointed because I hoped the film would be as labyrinthine as the book. There was the usual difficulty (impossiblity) of fitting everything in. Realised that the DoM is rather like IKEA but less well-lit. Harry wore the same t-shirt as in PoA, and the film pretty much payed homage to Cuaron's. Cardigans, first introduced by Cuaron, were quite a theme. Harry and Sirius were obviously up to no good off-camera. Sirius looked disconcertingly like Jason King in the creepy station waiting-room scene. The Dursleys were more frightening than the Dementors. Imelda Staunton was ace. Daniel Radcliffe was teh pretty, and was very good in the tapestry room, Sirius death and Voldemort possession scenes. I loved the pieta! Overt alchemical reference: fire, water, earth - Voldemort actually said 'earth' - and air in the DD/LV duel. What must have been missing scenes from earlier in the film appeared during the possession. Voldemort's nose had been worked on and was an improvement. I wanted more Voldemort/Harry angst. Both Snape and Lucius were a bit thick about the middle. Lupin for some reason looked distorted. Tonks tripped-up very convincingly. Some dialogue made things too obvious, spelt things out too clearly. Can't wait for the DVD!