Saturday 4 September 2010

Harry Potter and the Old Lady's Shoe

I heard the crash of a foot, my head snapped to the source of the sound and I saw a little old lady staring down at her slipper, the kind that old people call a shoe. She then scraped her foot vigorously along the ground, narrowly missing her oversized handbag as her leg flew into the air, she may have overdone the scraping a little*. As she hobbled along past me she muttered “Hah! Killed that wasp.”, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve witnessed in a very long time. I felt that justice had been served to that particular menace to society. I have to wonder how many wasps she'd tried to splat before she succeeded with 'that wasp' though. At least she got one of the blasted things, I suppose. I hate wasps. And pear drops, they’re disgusting.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was Harry Potter. I’ve been re-reading them, and in the first book, I found this “there will be books written about Harry- every child in our world will know his name!”, which made me smile, JK Rowling wouldn’t have believed, when writing that, that her creation would have such phenomenal success. I don’t think there has ever been anything like Harry Potter before, and I don’t suppose there ever will be again. It’s a shame in a way, Harry Potter got everyone reading, and showed the power that literature can have, but it’ll probably never happen again. It takes something really special to make the world notice in the way Harry Potter did.


*I understand this makes it sound like the old lady kicked her leg so hard that it came off, but I’d just like to assure you that no old ladies were harmed in the making of this blog post, her leg is most definitely still attached. (unlike the wasp's)