*dances around the box set*

*glances at the picture on the back cover - a gathering of main characters*

*more dancing*

*realises Nate is not there and the others are dressed in black and look sad*

*gathers this means Nate dies in this series. Staggers with anger at having it spoilt, and a little grief for a fictional character*

*stops dancing*

*gets over it already. dancing continues*

*opens box set. is FORCED to glance at the paper inlay on which Brenda is wearing a wedding dress.*

*curses EVIL PEOPLE who draw the pictures. Mental plan for letter to draw-ers comparing the pictures to internet Harry Potter spoiler is drawn up. Resolves never to dance again.*

*breaks resolve as the title music plays, and a little tree sprouts magically from the ground*

He! Did! Not! Did!

(Not!)

That was the perfect ending, quite possibly. I admit a tear of happiness came to my eye (the left) when 'mouldy voldy' lay there on the ground, dead. And then more tears of happiness (from the right) when Dumbledore cried (tears of happiness from BOTH of his portrait eyes).

Ahaha, and they have CHILDREN!!


(On a totally unrelated note, if the weather stays like this until the sun goes down tonight, this will be the SECOND day of sun in almost two months.)

I promised for there to be no more flurries of exclamation marks, so there won't be.

Twenty minutes and then Harry Potter The Very Last comes out. I feel bad being excited. I tend to stay away from hype. I guess chair dancing and stalking JK Rowling via her website is a very mild form of excitement in comparison to camping outside Waterstones for three nights. Now that is silly. And dangerous. Especially in this weather. I saw a photo earlier of a girl sitting inside a plastic shell thing, brandishing a torch in the one hand, and Harry Potter the Penultimate in the other. I saw no breathing holes in the plastic shell. And there was rain.

So I am not queuing up. I will, however, be at Morrisons not long after 8am. My aim is to read it before anyone has the chance to ruin the ending for me. Having to work tomorrow ruins this a bit, unless my customers are very understanding about me having my head in the book whilst serving them. My hope is that the town will be dead, because the vast majority of the Newcastle-under-Lyme population will be ensconsed in their homes. Reading.

I wonder how it feels to be the author of a series of books causing environmental concerns with regards to excessive paper usage.

I am so incensed that I only just restrained myself from starting this post with a flurry of utterly incensed exclamation marks.

£17.99 for a BOOK? What?! Why???? I. Have. No. Words. to put across how shocking it is that we will have to pay what is for me the equivalent of four and a half VERY painful, VERY boring and VERY MUCH dreaded for the rest of the week hours of standing and smiling at people and running up and down a flight of disgraceful, lethal obstacle course-esque stairs. Which leaves me exactly one and a half hours of pay to live on for the rest of week.

And what about all those poor kids who are not old enough to stand painfully and smile at people, or perhaps even to tip accidentally red wine over a posh person's £223 beige leather skirt (deceptively known in the trade as 'waiting on', for which one gets paid around £4.35 an hour, ish, if you are under 18)? Hmmm?

Imagine their little faces when they get to Waterstones and realise that despite having saved up for TWO WHOLE STUPID YEARS since the last one came out, they STILL don't have enough! Imagine the ... heartbreak. And the temper tantrums. Imagine the debt parents of big families will be driven into when each of their 7-child clan wants one NOW, or risk seven little people jumping up and down on the spot in a public place screaming their little red faces off. Perhaps even rolling around spectacularly before large displays featuring the be-spectacled Daniel Radcliff looking out mockingly with an owl perched on his little finger, knowing he could afford tens of thousands of the aforementioned ridiculously over-priced book if he wanted them.

We'll be paying three pence per page for this seventh book. Will each page be worth that much? It'd better be very very small (yet new and exciting) font. There'd better be a lot going on, per page. I imagine there will many, many disillusioned readers reaching the end of a page full of waffle and thinking 'That's three one penny sweets I could have had there. I think reading this book will be like drinking a glass of the most expensive wine there is out there.

"Come on," you will say, sniffing the wine delicately to put off the drinking "this is wine from a bunch of Holy grapes, pressed by the feet of monks from the year 129 BC. This HAS to be the best glass of wine I've ever tasted. I have to MAKE it the best glass. Oh god, SMILE and bear it and ignore the sour-grape taste. For God's sake, no-one must ever know this wine is corked!" That's what it will be like, reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. We will all be so conscious of how much we've paid, that there will be a humungous effort put in to extrapulate the equivalent to the money in enjoyment levels. And no-one has much fun when they're forcing themselves.

I am contemplating not buying it until it comes out in paperback, although I know it is impossible for the world to keep quiet about the ending for much longer than all of the two hours it will take the speed-readers to get through the doorwedge of a book, perhaps even for the thirty seconds it will take some killjoy to flick to the last page.

On the other hand, I might just go to Asda.

!!!!!!

A smudge of ketchup trailed violently across the tiled floor; the highlight of the evening. They dragged him away by his arms. His feet were the last part of him to be seen, and then his toes. And after his toes, a faint impression of something which had two seconds before been there but now suddenly was not. An excess of air, dispersed and thinner somehow because of a lack of feet (and then a lack of toes).

When the lights went up, I hung around outside and waited for a lift back. Two actors walked past with beers. I have to say, their hairstyles sans-wigs were not a huge improvement. Fuck, said one, gazing narcissistically at a black and white photo of himself in which head was propped on fist, as if head had not the power to support itself.

An actor friend, Paul, wandered by. I heard you laughing, he said, Slightly worrying!

Worrying?

You're too young for such cynacism! How I laughed. I didn't tell him I was born cynical.

There was a moment of quite rare music-liking synchronisity today when I introduced my father to Feist's Sea Lion Woman. He listened in rapture, and made me promise to get him the album immediately. I was pumelling away in the kitchen at my baby, my made-from-scratch elastic-y squishy smooth pizza dough, and my father was frying mushrooms and reducing a mean tomata sauce for the topping. In a keep-me-busy bid, I had made a mix CD earlier, mainly for the shop, but when better to try it out than when cooking?

It is a song of magnanimous proportions. It evokes an image of a woman with a sea-lion tail (do sea lions have tails?) flopping around on a rock drinking tea and coffee at the same time, two straws in two mugs in one mouth. Dressed in green. Or maybe blue. Make up your mind, woman! The video doesn;t quite live up to the image in my head, but the black and white is extremely pleasing.

On a slightly different note, I have to urge you not to wolf-whistle if yours is one of those thin, watery whistles. It's not a good start, really, whistling like that. If anything, it lacks potence. It reflects very badly on the rest of you. Please refrain. And that screaming at your two year old kid isn't all that impressive, either.

It was worth the wait. Feet aching, legs throbbing, pressed into strangers like too many sardines in an already packed can (a sell-out), we all moaned and shuffled and tapped our feet impatiently. But then they were THERE. The Thrills. I was three metres away from the lead singer. His chest hair peered over the neckline of his white T-shirt, forearms poked from his misfitted black jacket. Deep set eyes under dark, crazy eyebrows, and he carried with him a purple towel. He sweated a lot, and did this thing with his shoulder, jerked it rhythmically in time to the music, that made me want to dance.

The drunk girl in front of me waved her arms ecstatically, crashed into the man infront of me who crashed in turn into me and my friend. She pressed thumbs and forefingers together to make a heart, closed her eyes and swayed embarrassingly.

They played Whatever Happened to Corey Haim right at the end, and everyone went crazy. So put on that dress tonight, you see, we just can't stop it.

I have become slightly obsessed with Mathieu Chédid. The triangle of hair gelled down his forehead is possibly the most beautiful thing I've seen in a while. And he is the ONLY person in the world who can sing about Cornflakes and not sound ridiculous. I think I'm in love!

Here is the cornflake song in all its glory. What cracks me up are the people in short skirts dancing in a sultry manner before the stage repeating 'cornFLEKS' emphatically, and occasionally, 'popCORN'.



I will make my mother buy Cornflakes this week.

PS - Elisabeth, get your sexy self to England ASAP! I know it's not quite as beautiful as Norway with its fjords and lakes, but come anyway! We have TEA! And RED TELEPHONE BOXES. :-(

We had the old Cat Stevens argument last night, my mother told me with a weary sigh this morning. His older album was lying there on the table. Looking up at us sort of accusingly was a young child with crossed legs. Meditating.

He warbled Morning Has Broken at me in the most vile, mocking way he possibly could, until Len told him "it's okay, look, she's switched him off now."

Cat Stevens and incense sticks are two things strictly only allowed when my father is out of the house, for fear of major breakdown vis a vis the parental unit. I swear I heard the words "Islamic hand-hacking off music" muttered under the breath. I am taking a moment to pray for the return of sanity.

I really did. I almost died several times due to crushedness, mobbed by sweaty bodies punching one or both fists into the air in time with the pounding of the drums. The space of two bodies separated me from the metal barrier and the stern, bored security guards. Beer soaked bodies.

Green plastic bottles were thrown after every song out of sheer excitement. I gave up on keeping my hair perfectly so (as fly-away eighties as it did look, it was orchestrated laborously with the help of enough mousse and spray to make me flammable and a danger to others in the case of nearby cigarette-lighting). I gave up on my top, slipping from my shoulders. I gave up checking my phone. Grabbed onto my friends and jumped along, using my elbows to secure just about enough breathing space. Propped up the inebriated man in front of me from time to time, who swayed rapturously, a look of pleasurable delerium on his face, and made no effort of his own to stay on his feet.

They went off, after almost two hours. The crowd panicked. The band stayed off longer than normal, perhaps out of revenge for the beer some not very clever person sprayed over the electrical equipment. People stamped. Sang. Shuffled impatiently, flattening the plastic bottles under their feet with a terrible noise not unlike the dragging of nails down a blackboard. After what seemed like half an hour, they returned. Finished off with The Day They Caught The Train. I almost died of happiness, strobe lighting fragmenting faces and grins.

I have no voice left.