Harry Potter and The Best Week Ever

Hello all,


This week has been quite the emotional rollercoaster. Sure there were dramas at work, sleep deprivation and a mysterious illness but that's not important right now.


This week, (or rather, the last nine days) I have been to see a Harry Potter movie every night. Eight of these were at the cinema. All of them were amazing. The cinema in town made the genius marketing decision to show each of the Harry Potter films in order, culminating in the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 on Friday. 


We spent a week at Hogwarts, transported to world of Hippogriffs and Horcruxes, Dragons and Dementors, Slytherins and Snarfaluffs. It was magical, in every sense. Every night a new adventure was waiting for us, an adventure that would shape the characters that grew up before our eyes and form the relationships between them with a subtlety and deftness that can only be truly appreciated when watching the films in order over a short period of time. I was captivated, completely immersed in this world which is so like reality and so crushingly different and I found, as the week went on, an overwhelming sense of melancholy and, dare I say it, dread.

Don't get me wrong, I did not leave the cinema on Friday hysterically wailing that, 'I just can't believe it's all over!' But the end of the series is more than that to me, and to so many other fans of the books and the movies. I am 23, so was 9 when the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was released in 1997. Although I only read it in 1999 after my brother had brought home The Chamber of Secrets from school. I was 11, therefore, when I, like Harry, entered the magical world of Hogwarts, Diagon Alley and Platform 9 and 3/4.


So, with the last film comes the end of my childhood, I suppose. There is no new Potter to look forward to anymore (at least once the DVD has come out). It's a strange, sad feeling, a feeling which was only somewhat ameliorated by how jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly gorgeous Ron was in the final film. Gosh.


Mischief Managed.


Lizi