Not about today

I wrote this post on Thursday, but haven’t posted it yet due to a severe case of involuntary falling asleep the last few evenings. So, not about today.

J.K. Rowling announced the publication date for the final Harry Potter book today. It is amazing how the news of this has put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes, leaving a buzz everywhere it goes. I am very excited. I am also dreading the day, when it will all be over. And I have a morbid terror of JK giving it the ‘wrong’ ending, or forgetting to tie up some loose end and no-one ever knowing.

I have loved very many books very much, in many different ways, but to really, deeply love characters and the worlds they live in beyond the book’s ending—that feeling of affection and familiarity and warm joy at being with them—they generally have to be part of a series. I feel that way about Narnia, and Green Knowe, and Lord Peter Wimsey. I sort of feel that way about Sherlock Holmes, and I think I once felt bliss at being in the company of the Famous Five. There are probably one or two others I could think of if I were standing in front of my bookshelves, but not many.

And… Harry Potter. Harry Potter is not fixed and complete with a dead author. Harry Potter is still being written. We have had to wait always for the next one, knowing that the end was not yet known to the world, and knowing with each book that there was more to come.

I don’t think such things are just a little piece of your life, which, changing, change only that little piece, utterly. They are (also) some colour in the background light, and change all the colours a little. It will be very strange, the irreversible instant when still yet becomes no more.

Also today, my boss arrived back from Africa. I am feeling less and less happy about the appallingly slow progress I am making with a huge heap of no-fun-at-all work. At some point, I feel like it’s all going to explode in a horrible mess of things not being done that had to be done months ago and it all being my fault.

Also today, it was windy—step outside and blown and blustered into life windy. I wished very much I had a kite—a proper stunt kite with two strings, to loop-the-loop and dive bomb and make me feel as close to flying as I can feel without my feet leaving the ground. Even though it isn’t very often sufficiently windy here, I feel that was my most dismal packing oversight. Though I suppose I would also have needed to have packed a willing slave to help me launch it...