It’s been a weird week, one where it has felt more as if I’ve been living in my car than anywhere else. As per usual work has me running all over the country (something that I enjoy), often from one side to the other on consecutive days. I’m in the office this morning, hence my ability to post, but again this afternoon I’m off to the place that is increasingly becoming “The place that shall not be named”. That it shares the same initial as the previous “Place that shall not be named”, the same contractor and a similar developer I’m taking as a grim portent.
I might be wrong however.
The only problem with living in your car is that you begin to realise how untidy it is and if you’re anything like me that starts to bug you. I will make a concerted effort this weekend to clean it (or more accurately, get someone else to clean it), in a similar way in which I’ll make an effort to go out on my bike at least one day – its nearly a month since I have now due to various illnesses and the like.
Moving on, I finally finished Potter mid week but only now have had the chance to write about it, spoilers lurk below (and this is the first time I’ve used the cut feature as well)…
Overall, I really liked it. Rowling has managed to finish off the series in style and in a manner that all but the most demented on Fan-fic writers should accept. Unlike the two previous books the length of this one felt right, things weren’t there just because they were part of the school year and the whole sequence in the woods worked well.
Yes, its vicious. From page one we get the idea that no-one is safe (there are moments when I thought any of the primary three could have been killed), deaths occur off panel and sometimes we aren’t even allowed to see the corpse. Dobby hit me like a brick – the classic “We’re safe – oh shit!” moment and led to one of the most moving parts of the book, digging his grave. None of the other deaths came close to that although for one brief moment at the start of “A Fallen Warrior” I really thought that it was going to turn into a book with a major fatality every fifty pages.
The epilogue – some people have complained that it doesn’t provide enough detail, but I think that may be the point. We know that after seven years of risking their lives the three principal characters have now settled into domestic bliss and have grown up. They felt like normal people who took the kids round to each others gardens each weekend for a BBQ, who didn’t crave excitement.
I’ll be interested to see what she does next. I hope that it will be as far away from Potter as possible and possibly aimed at an adult audience. However we all know that she could well retire now and just live off the proceeds of the books, films and merchandise and no-one would think the worse of her.
Midland Film Monkey 