It’s okay, no spoilers here. Today I finished reading ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’. No, it’s not just for kids, why should it be? I was slightly concerned that after all the build-up, the intricate detail of the preceding books, it would be a disappointment – that some detail that seemed so important and left us all hanging would be glossed over, be poorly explained, or just turn out to be plain rubbish. Nope, not in the least. Everything was pieced together, everything worked, and the conclusion was very satisfying. Quite a few surprises, although my guess about Snape was right (that’s not a spoiler, I was just right about Snape, that’s all).

Now the big problem for Warner Brothers… turn it into a decent movie. The Harry Potter movies to date have been pretty good and entertaining, and you couldn’t expect them to go into the minute details that the books do. So they have skipped some large portions of action and sub-plots, and there’s a general feeling of the approach being “well, we have to make this into a movie so let’s get it done” and hey presto, another Harry Potter movie rolls off the conveyor belt.

In ‘The Deathly Hallows’ there’s a lot of skipping to different locations (unlike the mainly Hogwarts-based ‘Order of the Phoenix’) and there’s a lot of flashbacks, a lot of action, and a lot of detailed explanatory dialogue. Miss out that stuff and the movie will be a confusing turkey. But it’ll still be better than ‘The Matrix’.

Alright there dadams fans. The couple of weeks of silence was due to the fact that myself and the wife and offspring have been holidaying on the sunny island of Menorca. Two and a bit weeks of swimming, sitting in the shade, reading (the latest three books in Simon Scarrow’s absolutely top-notch Roman saga) and picking fights with people who smoke in restaurants. Well, okay, just the once, and it wasn’t really a fight. There we were, enjoying dinner at Dinkums in Cala Fons… four people arrive and sit nearby and before we know it this complete git has lit a cancer stick and the fumes are engulfing the wife and my daughter. Needless to say this p*ssed me off big time, the red mist descended and I said something to the effect of “either you move or put that thing out”. The sh*t-head then attempted to defend himself by saying he thought they’d finished eating, to which I replied that it didn’t matter whether they were eating or not, they didn’t want to breathe in his smoke. At this point he turned his back on me and held the ciggie away from us, and the wife persuaded me to drop it. Regrettably, unlike enlightened Britain, there are no laws against this kind of behaviour in Menorca (smoking I mean).

So, here we are back in old Blighty. The weather seems to have improved a bit. I still have a further two weeks off thanks to an old clause in the Lotus employment contract (a four week sabbatical after fifteen years of service) which IBM had to honour. Time to read the final Harry Potter volume (released the day after we left) and decorate the fourth bedroom.