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?