The usual warning applies here – if you’re not a geek the rest of this will probably bore the tits off you so best move along then…. Go on now…

Only 5 days to Harry Potter & THBP. Yes, I am one of those who queues at midnight, no, I don’t always need a small child with me (although I’ll have one with me this time) and no, I’m not sure why I’m queuing this time…

I came late to the series as a whole (read 1, 2 & 3 in a couple of weeks when they were the only ones around and they blew me away both as an adult and a child who read an unfeasible amount and had been biding his time while Mr Adult Pants had been reading bloody Salman Rushdie and Magnus Mills! Moron…) Goblet Of Fire really held me all the way along too even with the length and had queued for it when Order Of The Phoenix came along. And then she dropped the ball.

I suppose it’s not hugely fair to expect anyone to have perfect quality control in a seven book series but for a while there she had me believing the impossible was possible. Of course it’s not… OOTP didn’t completely disappoint me but it was fairly widely held to be overlong, underwritten and containing a lot we’d seen already in the series. Harry got far too angsty for my liking early on and was a surly little sod for most of the rest of the book and when we got to the moment that had been trailed for ages beforehand (A MAJOR CHARACTER DIES!!! SHOCK HORROR!!!!) it turned out to be a damp squib that should have been the most emotionally wrenching moment in the series. Felt short-changed I did.

So then we get to here – by the weekend two things can have happened. One – she can have pulled the iron out of the fire, shafted the temporary lapse (“how could we have doubted her?!?!?!”) and restored my faith in the impossible, or two – it’ll be average and Harry Potter will be relegated to the second division of literary kids fiction while Gandalf, Aslan, The Cat In The Hat, Peter Pan, Willy Wonka, Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog all shake their heads sadly from on high, tutting in resignation as they walk away.

R