A Boy Called Harry

I should probably be writing about something important and life changing, like the London riots that spread nation wide. Instead, I am going to write about Harry Potter. Important and life changing for me, much as I probably shouldn’t admit it.

Let me tell you about mine and Harry’s history. When I was 17 and working as a Saturday assistant in my local library, I got overly annoyed about the amount of people ordering a book so thick that the thousands of copies we were having to stock were clogging up all our shelves. This thick red tome was entitled Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire. “These damn people with their faddy reading!” I proclaimed, whilst trying to plough through The Lord of the Rings without so much as a scrap of irony.

So outraged was I that half the population of Newcastle under Lyme seemed to be reading a badly written cross between Mallory Towers and The Worst Witch (had the witch been a boy thus retitling this classic as The Worst Wizard) I made yet another grand proclamation.

“I’m going to read the first one, just to prove how shit it is!” And thus began my, to date, ten year love affair with a boy named Harry.

After a slow start, momentarily thinking I was right, I soon realised I was in love with this world. I actually wanted it to exist and, for a brief (read ‘drunk’) moment I might have thought it did. I bemoaned the fact I was a muggle as Harry’s world was by far and away better than my own. I entered it as often as I could and, though I realised there was much derived from other sources, I saw the skill. J K Rowling had managed to entice me in to a land filled with Bertie Botts Every Flavoured Beans, Hippogriffs and Chocolate Frogs.

I spent late nights curled up under the covers with my reading light on, demolishing books in a way I hadn’t done since the giddy early days of The Babysitter’s Club. I will also admit that, whilst I own and read many books, I haven’t read as desperately and earnestly since The Deathly Hallows came along and finished off the series.

When devouring The Prisoner of Azkaban for the first time, for example, I found myself at a crucial point in the story on the eve of an AS level exam. I needed to revise, but I couldn’t put the book down in the middle of this particular chapter, so I continued. Well, I would at least need to reacquaint myself with some key words and phrases before the night was through, but that would give me time to just finish this next chapter. In the end it became as desperate as “Well I will need to get 4 hours sleep before my alarm goes off.”

Needless to say, the exam was not my finest hour. But did I care? Not a jot because Sirius and Buckbeak had escaped and I was there to cheer them on.

Because, you see, Harry is like the boy you were always trying to impress at high school. Always there, always entertaining, and always calling you over to the dark side. The only difference being, the whole family likes Harry. To this day I think about what a shame it is that my Grandma never got to finish the series after loving the first few.

Amazing high brow literature this may not be, but J K Rowling did something astounding, she reminded people how exciting it can be to sit down and turn page after page. Boys and girls alike drew lightning bolts on their foreheads (Again, Drunk) and queued to buy the latest books whilst wrapped in Gryffindor scarves (sadly, Not Drunk). Children who used to come to the library to pull books off the shelves and hurl them across the building were suddenly coming in to read the books instead – and once they had finished with Harry they would move on to something else to tide them over until the next instalment arrived on our shelves.

And I found myself thinking how no thanks could be big enough for this world I now felt a part of. Knowing that someone could create all this and make it seem so real made me aspire to be something better, write something which might inspire one person in the way Harry has inspired millions.

And now it is over, there is no more Harry Potter. The Boy Who Lives now lives without the glare of the masses and I think to myself; No wonder there’s riots, what are we supposed to do now?

Sick Down my Shoulder and a Song In My Heart...

So, and here is the absolute truth, I wasn’t going to have children. I was going to be the super cool aunt who the nieces and nephews got over excited about seeing, with a lovely house. I was going to get a well paid job in London, hopefully working up to running a storytelling business. I was going to live in Greenwich, flitting around the market on a daily basis and now and again fitting in some work. Sitting in front of a roaring open fire at Christmas, looking out of the window of my huge central apartment I would watch the tourists bundled up in scarves and gloves marvelling at the place in which I lived. And I wasn’t going to have sick down my shoulder.

And so I sit, in Plumstead (it’s in the BOROUGH of Greenwich, I’ll have you know) and, shockingly, not that many tourists make it out here unless they want to know what the definition of the word ‘grim’ is. I am in an end of terrace house which is pretty well falling down, with my husband and our baby. The only bit of storytelling I have managed in the last year is for a friends 60^th birthday party (but who doesn’t enjoy reading Down the Back of the Chair to sixty 60 year olds? Genuinely amazing fun) and the most cosmopolitan thing I have done recently is shave my legs. And, incidentally, there is sick down my shoulder.

This is not, as it would first appear, awful. It is just so different to what I had anticipated when I used to come to London in my knee high boots and cookie hats thinking “Oh I can’t wait to slot right in to London life!” It is the dawning realisation that real life continues even when you think you’re probably, more than likely, about to live the life of somebody who only exists in a film. Bridget Jones I am not, no matter how big my pants are.

But this has led to the most exciting thing to happen in my life, apart from the birth of my Son of course, which is that I am going to university. I am going to study creative writing, who would have thought? A prospect which I always thought actually impossible, even in my make believe London world, but is even better than that of telling stories to children for a living. As you can tell, hard graft is not exactly my wont. And while I currently sit here with formula milk strewn about my person, raisins on the floor because I’ve not had chance to tidy up yet (apart from all the time I’ve spent writing this. Obviously), cracks up the wall which appear to be groaning open by the second, and a man standing outside my front door about to slot the fifth takeaway menu of the day through my front door even though it’s only 10:15am, I still couldn’t be more excited.

At the age of 27, Rachael, welcome to the beginning of your life. Embrace it with open arms! Then go and wipe that sick off your shoulder…

Big Society, Big Mistake

David Cameron thinks that the big society will help us all to become better people. He thinks that we will live in a world where people don't need money, because they will all volunteer to work in various public sector places and live off air.

I am a childrens team supervisor within a public library and I would like to mention a couple of the things I do as part of that job. I organise events for children within the library, I run story and rhyme sessions, visit schools to take assemblies and also help run groups for children who don't have very high reading abilities, go to post natal groups to advertise the library and Bookstart, manage staff and work on the shop floor serving customers. This is for the princely sum of £15,000.

What a nice little job, people say to me as I tell them where I work, I bet you get to read a lot of books! And I forgive the assumption, but what worries me is that seems to be the illusion our dear Prime Minister is under. I would like to tell him that it has taken me ten years to be able to do my job up to a standard I am happy with, I would like to tell him that I wouldn't have done that if I weren't being paid to do it.

I am not adverse to volunteers, we use them already to help us behind the scenes but what I am adversed to is people telling me that my job is not worth being paid for. I realise that because of libraries there are children who wouldn't be able to read taking books home with them, people who wouldn't have any access to computers emailing family members abroad, and people who wouldn't have anywhere else to go who are warm and have someone to talk to.

Libraries are not just an elaborate storage system for Mills and Boon, they are a hub for societies, places for people to meet and share their lives, to learn things they wouldn't know,or to find things they are looking for, or do things they perhaps wouldn't do otherwise. You need staff to facilitate these things; how are you going to organise all of that with volunteers? And what are you going to do when your volunteers don't show up? Don't get me wrong, I think a library run by volunteers is better than no library at all it's just that I am fairly certain one is simply a precurser to the other.

Big Society may sound like a wonderful idea in theory, but in practice it will make for a smaller, bleaker society. A society where mums will only be able to go to music sessions with their babies if they can pay for it, a society where older people wanting to learn how to email their children and grandchildren on the other side of the world probably won't get a chance to do it, a society where vulnerable people looking for a place to go to for company won't have one because it's a sunny day and all the volunteers are having ice cream in the park. Basically a world where David Cameron hasn't got a clue what he might be doing to communities in the real world. He may say that the responsibilities lie with the local governments because he didn't tell them where to save the money from, but when you're giving insane figures to people who also run schools and social services, what else are they supposed to do?

Well done, David, you got exactly what you wanted whilst managing to shoulder none of the blame. How lucky for you that we were financially screwed when you came into power, because lord knows you would have done it anyway.

Knowledge, wisdom, and a lack of hand-eye coordination...

Over the last couple of weeks I have been coming to something of a worrying discovery. This is that my four month old son is a little smarter than both me or my husband.

For example:

Last night, I put Toby in his cot, turned the monitor on and thought to myself "Ah, we are going to have a quiet night with a spot of dinner." As if reading my mind, Toby opened one eye, looked at me and smiled as if to say "That's what you think..."

Yesterday I put the tomato puree in the cutlery drawer and spilled a glass of wine all over the sofa.

This worries me, mainly because I am supposed to be teaching this child all he knows and helping him grow into a well rounded human being, but this morning I missed my mouth with a spoonful of cereal; how am I supposed to impart knowledge?!

Hopefully I am starting university in September and I wonder to myself, if I have this much trouble functioning now, how will I cope with uni as well? I suppose I will find places to cut back and Toby being in nursery will help. At least if we can't teach him to eat without throwing food all over himself, us, and various kitchen appliances, he may have some good influences from elsewhere? In fact, maybe he could show us where our mouths are and how to drink from a cup without spilling the entire contents down my top and into my bra.

I wonder what else he could teach us? Presumably at the moment he could teach us how to spend most of the day sleeping without letting anyone else in the household get more than six hours sleep in 24 hours. That's a skill in itself.

Also, I like to think of myself as up to speed with technology, but I am fully aware that by the time he is five he will be rolling his eyes, calling me stupid, and probably hacking into the mainframe of some giant company with one hand whilst choosing music on his iPod with the other. Last week I spent an hour and a half trying to work out how to upload apps to my iPhone without deleting the ones I already had on there. I could just about hear futureToby laughing at me as I wept into my laptop and hovered over the word "Sync" for so long I got cramp in my index finger.

So maybe in answer to my earlier question over what I could do to cope when I am at university, the answer is simple: I'll just get Toby to write this blog for me...