Call Me Sentimental

I was recently told that I am a "sentimental old thing." I've never really thought of myself that way but I suppose I am. I'm one of those girls who pours over old photographs, cries when watching old home movies and buys early 20th centutry embroidery because it happens to have my late grandmother's name on it.

Being sentimental isn't a bad thing I don't think. More than anything it shows how invested I am in the things that are important to me. One of those things is Harry Potter.

I went to see my last ever midnight showing of Harry Potter last night and am filled with the same sense of excitement and dread I felt when finishing the last page of the last book. Many people will say it's just a children's book/movie series meant for entertainment and nothing more. But it means more than that to me.

I can't claim to have grown up with Harry Potter. I was already in high school when I started reading it and was much older than the 11 year old Wizard and his friends, but I still connected with it. Perhaps this was because I chose to read it at a particularly tricky part of my life. It's impossible for me to know why I latched on to the series so much but whatever the reason, the outcome has been that I have been a devoted, and often times slightly obsessive Potter fan.

Perhaps the reason for J.K. Rowling's success (other than her great writing) is the fact that she created characters so three dimensional that the reader connects with them. I feel (and I'm pretty sure other do too) that I know these characters, that I've been standing in the background of this drama watching it happen. I watched the demontors attack, the battle of Hogwarts and the loss of friends. I felt the walls of Hogwarts castle, smelt the start of term feast and saw the flickering lights from the hundreds of Jack-O-lanterns suspended in the air on Halloween.

As a struggling writer myself I know the immense difficulty in creating a world that seems so realistic that the reader won't question it. Rowling's world, Harry Potter's world exists in the head of everyone who has read and loves the books. While the films have done a great job of bringing the world and characters to life and will forever remain some of my favourites, nothing can compare to the Hogwarts that exists in my head.

So I suppose this rambling and long winded post is really just my way of saying Thank You J.K. Rowling for letting me escape into your world. Call me sentimental, but I think I'll be visiting it a lot.