If you’ve not read Harry Potter, you’ve certainly got a wrong impression of it! Before 2003, I used to think exactly like any non-Harry Potter fan or anti-Harry Potter persons (well, they do exist). “It’s just another story about wizards and witches - what’s new in that? They’ll be saying a few magic words and then what? I have friends who are obsessed with it. Well – I think they’re just wasting their time.”

March 2003 proved me wrong. I saw a Harry Potter film and, after some convincing, I decided to read the books. It was a revelation. Once I’d read the first one, I couldn’t stop. I read the next three within a few weeks and waited three painfully long months until June for the fifth one to come out.

Now I’ll tell you what’s so great about Harry Potter’s world. Harry Potter is a boy who spent eleven years with non-magic people (called muggles - by the way, it’s in Oxford now) before being invited to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for his secondary school studies. At Hogwarts, they have a 7-year course similar to ours’. There’s an equivalent of SC in the fifth year (OWL- Ordinary Wizarding Level) and HSC (NEWTs - Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests) in the seventh year.

While all this corresponds to our world, the school itself is very peculiar. The building dates back to a thousand years ago, when it was founded by four of the greatest wizards, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slylierin. At Hogwarts, the stairs rarely lead to the same places on consecutive nights in the seven-storey building. Portraits on the walls are also interesting. They’re made of lively characters who regularly give useless advice or make rude remarks (with hand gestures as well) and who can move between frames. Another interesting population at Hogwarts is its ghosts. They’re wizards who were afraid of death and then died to become ghosts. They walk around the school at all hours and you feel very cold as you walk through them. One is a poltergeist who sometimes ruins school property and enjoys throwing water bombs at people and using foul language.

The student population is divided into four houses, named after the founders of Hogwarts. The portrait of a fat lady guards entry into Gryffindor Common Room and the dormitories. Access can only be gained by giving the correct password but the fact that portraits are allowed to move between frames means that you sometimes sleep outside when she’s on a visit somewhere (you can’t open the entrance).

Even the subjects they study are utterly fascinating: Potions (concocting of magical beverages - they have lots of notes like in Chemistry), Transfiguration (changing things into others, e.g: turning rats into mugs), Charms (to make things move by themselves, for example, in the wizard world people do not handle cutlery in the kitchen: they simply supervise all the knives, saucepans and spoons, which work of their own accord), History of Magic (a boring subject), Care for Magical Creatures (handling magical animals such as unicorns, dragons and a horde of creatures from fables), Herbology (obviously, the study of herbs) and Divination (a completely useless subject that also happens to be the least accurate branch of magic).

Then there’s the Weasley brothers. They’re the most humourous twins and the best troublemakers you’d find in the world (magical and muggle alike). Their tricks far outweigh the poor ones we’re used to at school (writing and drawing fine arts on the wall, breaking things, playing truant and passing comments to disturb the class - well, they do that last one, but much more professionally). They mess about with tarantulas and the like, they let off dung bombs to ruin classes, they know secret ways in and out of the school to smuggle in illegal goods such as forbidden drinks for illegaI parties or equipment to carry out their school law-breaking operations. Finally, they decide to open their own joke shop. Happy reading! See you next week.

<B>Nawal Husnoo,

Gryffindor Tower, Hogwarts</B>