HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF WITTED BLOODY PRINCE

I have two children who have gone awol. One in South Africa (although I have finally had a very short text confirming that he is still alive and loving every minute) and the other, having recovered recently from swine flu is making up for lost time and seeing all the friends that thought she might die.

So. That just leaves child number three.

I can’t walk down the road with him now without him doing his cricket bowling practice at all times. My oldest son used to do this and it made me want to cross the road and pretend he wasn’t with me… and now I’ve got it again. He was asked to play in a cricket tournament yesterday for the under 10’s – the year above him – he was completely delighted and felt very important – I didn’t like to tell him it was mostly because everyone else was away. He’s a pretty good bowler – he took a wicket and caught two people out – is that the right terminology? You’d think I’d understand the game by now. I was married to a cricketer. Which perhaps explains why I bloody hate the game. As a young mother with three small children I used to hugely resent the amount of time it took to play – what a shame 20/20 hadn’t caught on then.

My youngest is very good at catching and throwing, but could be faster. We’re still working on reducing his weight. It’s not easy. Check out the underlying theme of his birthday cards:-

This will give you a general idea of his greatest love. Having just come back from France, he is now more determined than ever to become a chef – mostly because the husband of a great friend of the people we were staying with is a Michelin star chef. Such antisocial hours though – he was always just going off to work just when we were thinking about having our first drink and his wife tried desperately to convince my son that it would be the worst choice in the world and to do architecture instead.

He was the only child there to want to go to the supermarket with us, to be involved with the lunches, to know what we were all eating next – the problem was that he told me he was a little upset that all the kids were calling him “a fat twat”.

Yesterday I let him go down to the local shops on his own for the first time. There are no major roads to cross and he’s been desperate to go on his own for ages. He often goes down with his sister or brother so he’s very competent (and way too big to get kidnapped). He bought a fountain pen the other day that didn’t work and was desperate to take it back so I agreed to let him go. I gave him the receipt and told him what to say and off he went, armed with a phone in case of emergency. Half an hour later he was back in a fury “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT – THEY WOULDN’T GIVE ME A NEW PEN. I WAS REALLY CROSS. THAT IS RUBBISH”. It turned out that he hadn’t taken the broken pen with him – he didn’t realise he had to give that back, I felt a bit bad that I hadn’t checked, they must have thought it was hilarious in the shop.

I took him and a friend (of his, not mine!) to see the 6th Harry Potter movie “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” and quite frankly (in my opinion) it’s rubbish. I am full of admiration for JK Rowling and the whole phenomenon, but you can’t keep churning out the same film. Presumably if you are a huge fan of the books, it works, but I don’t think it stands on it’s own as an impressive film at all. There was nothing new. The magic has died. It was boring, with one of the worst endings to a film I have ever seen. Well, there was no ending – even the boys commented on the fact that there didn’t appear to be a proper ending…it just petered out. Imagine working on those films. How bored would you be filming bloody full length Quidditch matches and making people fly about on trapezes – I really didn’t see anything I haven’t seen in all the Harry Potter movies. Perhaps that was why the cinema was empty. The next one will definitely have to be 3D in every cinema to make a significant difference.