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I have finally been to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Am I the only one that thinks Imelda Staunton did a damn fine impression of Maggie Thatcher as the toad-like Dolores Umbridge? Helena Bonham Carter was in fine form as the evil Bellatrix Lestrange but I wish the director had told Emma Watson (Hermione) that constant deep breathing and eyebrows with a life of their own do not a convincing performance make.
The other thing that grated was the amount of munching and slurping going on. Harry Potter films are long – yet the sense of being at a midnight feast persisted throughout. Has the nanny state so shamed the UK’s junk food eaters that they now only dare indulge under cover of darkness at the cinema?
Perhaps the eating was a desperate ploy by parents trying to keep their children quiet. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. After the first half hour, the small people because restless and talkative. There were children there who were far to young to be able to follow the plot and were patently lost.However, I enjoyed the film and enjoyed the trailer for the first of the His Dark Materials films, which will be out later in the year. Though why Northern Lights has been renamed the Golden Compass I do not know. I just hope they haven’t messed about too much with the story.
I like to tell people I went to school at Hogwarts. It’s not actually very far from the truth – my Latin room was but a stone’s throw from the cinematic version. Sometimes, my mind wandering from Caecilius or Pliny, I would gaze through the glass and see a Roman soldier walking up the road. I’d blink and shake my head, then reality would return. Obviously, someone was filming at the castle again.
I met my first famous person standing in front of the castle. At the time, I had no idea who Brian Blessed was. To me, he was great bear of a man wearing a crown. I knew who Rowan Atkinson was, though; I’d seen him on Not the Nine O’ Clock News. The filming of The Black Adder added further texture to my first term at high school.
The following summer, it was the turn of Robin of Sherwood. Michael Praed gave me his autograph: he wrote like a girl. But that was the only girlie thing about him; he made my teenage hormones quite giddy. Shortly afterwards, he decamped to Dynasty and I knew I’d been in the presence of greatness.
Northumberland’s castles have starred in numerous films and TV dramas. Alnwick also made an appearance in Disney’s The Spaceman and King Arthur when I was small, and more recently, featured in Elizabeth. Bamburgh – my favourite castle – was also a location in Elizabeth.
The county’s cinematic successes are nothing new: when my mum was young, they filmed Beckett at Bamburgh. It starred Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. Elizabeth Taylor was there with Burton and she gave Mum her autograph. Burton, however, refused because he was “busy”. I have never liked the man.
Our Friends in the North was shown when I was living in Norfolk. It made me dreadfully homesick. Daniel Craig played the drunken bum Geordie; unfortunately that means that, tight swimming trunks or not, I can never consider him to be a sex symbol.
I am feeling rather excited. I am about to become reacquainted with someone for the first time in almost two decades. Her name is Prue Sarn and she appears in the pages of Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. I first read this novel when I was at university. I remember going to the bookshop with my friend; she bought Precious Bane and I bought EM Forster’s Maurice. Once we’d read our own books, we swapped. I hadn’t thought about Precious Bane for years until something put it into my mind last week. I looked on eBay; there it was and it arrived today. A small, navy blue hardback volume dating from 1927, three years after the novel was first published.
I adore books. I read in bed, I read in the bath, I read on journeys when I am not driving. I was banned from reading at the table when I was a child, so as soon as I left home, I started doing that too. I read all sorts – I have shelves full of racing thrillers and I have helped add to JK Rowling’s fortune, as well as reading ‘proper books’. My all time favourite is Brideshead Revisited. It always makes me laugh - and cry.
There will always be so many books and so little time, but I do enjoy re-reading certain volumes. A fleeting thought, the weather, the time of year – any of these can send me to the shelf looking for a particular book. I keep promising myself that I will read 1984 again soon. I read it in 1984 because I thought I ought to; I think I’ll get more out of it this time around.
My brother hates old books that have already been owned by someone. I think that’s part of the charm. My copy of Rebecca had a paper dust jacket (which I have managed to lose) that said ‘Price Held in Spite of War’. On the flyleaf, it says ‘Nora E Holdforth. October holiday 1940’. I hope she had a good holiday and I hope she enjoyed Rebecca as much as I did.
Anyway, I have to dash: I have a book to read.
There are literally dozens and dozens of magpies living near St James Park in Newcastle. I always wonder who was there first – Newcastle United or the birds? Did the club copy the black and white of the birds for its strip or did the birds flock to the area after the club was created? It’s a real chicken and egg question.
Giving your football team the same nickname as a bird widely regarded as unlucky strikes me as rather odd. I always salute and say “Good morning Mr Magpie, how’s your wife?” when I see a single one and am unaccountably relieved if I see a couple. The ‘bad’ conations of magpies had always puzzled me, because up close, they’re really rather beautiful, with blues and greens glinting among the black parts of their plumage.
It seems the superstition stems from a belief that the magpie refused to enter Noah’s Ark, and later, refused to wear mourning at the crucifixion. The Scottish tradition has it that magpies carry a drop of Satan’s blood under their tongues.
Along with the stems of superstitions, we have lost the meaning behind some of our more colourful phrases. I thought that grinning like a Cheshire Cat was a Lewis Carroll invention, but it’s not. His contemporaries would have known that Cheshire cheese was often made in moulds shaped like grinning cats.
I like the fact we call hair bands Alice bands; I like the fact that Wendy wasn’t a name until it appeared in Peter Pan. I wonder if any current children’s literary inventions will last for generations? Anyone for Quidditch and the Hogwart’s Express, or do you prefer daemons and armour-clad polar bears?
