July

1st. Warm, cloudy day followed by a clear, sunny evening. The pea plant has lots of flowers open now and is looking bright and lovely. Read the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Hogwarts

Realized that Hogwarts is in Scotland and not the north of England as I had thought. The marginalia in the charity edition of Fantastic Beasts [Scamander, N. A. F., Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Obscurus Books in association with Bloomsbury] imply that the merpeople in the lake are either Scottish selkies or Irish merrows and that the colony of giant spiders in the Forbidden Forest is the Acromantula colony in Scotland which is mentioned by Scamander. I suppose it should have been obvious that Hogwarts was in Scotland as it sits atop a mountain surrounded by other mountains, but I thought of that as a fairytale landscape rather than a Scottish one.

[See the Encyclopedia Mythica entries for selkie and merrow for more information about these kinds of merpeople.]

Rowling says that when she was asked to write a couple of short books for Comic Relief she said, "I'm not very good at 'short'." You're not kidding, Jo—Goblet of Fire is as big as a fair-sized dictionary! Not that I'm complaining. Encyclopedia size next time, please!

Last month: Celebrity interview
Below: It was driving me Knuts!

Bath

Had a bath—sort of. Every time I have a bath I'm exhausted for days and it takes me a week to recover fully. So this time I tried washing myself out of the bath then having the shortest possible dip to rinse off. The result? Just as exhausting as usual. Thirty seconds in tepid water and it takes me a week to get over it. Riddikulus!

Slug

5th. Cloudy and warm. Intermittent rain through the evening. During one interval in the rain I picked a nice fat slug out of the flower box and put it on top of the bird feeder to see if one of the birds would eat it. That wasn't very nice of me, was it?

6th. The slug is gone this morning, though whether as a tasty snack or under its own steam I can't tell.

Pea plant

8th. The pea plant now has buds, open flowers and forming pea pods. The future peas are visible as rows of dark spots in the thinner pods or as tiny bumps in the thicker pods.

The Opening Spell in print

Received the Summer 2001 issue of Perspectives, the journal of the ME Association. When I looked at the Contents I was excited to see

The Opening Spell By C. Taylor ............... 31

But when I turned to the page and started reading my story, I was disappointed to find that they had not only removed the asterisks separating the three sections of the story, but also omitted all apostrophes and quotation marks. This makes it distinctly difficult to follow the story. You keep overrunning the boundary between narrative and dialogue. When you realize that what you've read doesn't make sense you have to back up and see where the open or close quotation mark should have been; then you can continue reading—only to have the same thing happen again a few sentences further on.

It's a pity they did that. I hope people will still be able to enjoy the story. It's over a year and a half since I submitted it, so I'm glad it's been printed at last. I do like the page heading (shown at the beginning of this entry).

How the story is supposed to look: The Opening Spell

Castro

Heard a curious news item on the radio. It went something like this:

There has been concern about the health of Fidel Castro since he fainted during one of his famously long speeches. He has since appeared in public once, but spoke for less than ten minutes instead of his usual six or seven hours.

Six or seven hours?!! What on earth did the man find to talk about for that long?

Lightship

Looked over an old lightship with a friend. You have to admire the dedication of the lightship crews, living in those cramped quarters with the constant thrumming of the generator vibrating the whole ship. I wouldn't like to do that even with the ship stationary, let alone on a storm-tossed sea.

On the way back we tried to go down to the beach, but the strong wind was whipping up the sand and blowing it in our faces, so we turned back and with sand grains crunching between our teeth we returned to the promenade. Then we walked back along the promenade, watching the sand below us as it raced across the beach and formed ribbons and twisting snaky shapes in the wind currents.

14th. Beautiful wispy cirrus clouds in the sky this evening.

It was driving me Knuts!

In his foreword to the charity edition of Fantastic Beasts, Professor Dumbledore mentions that the 174 million pounds raised by Comic Relief is equivalent to 34 000 872 Galleons, 4 Sickles and 7 Knuts. In addition the price of the book is stated on the cover as "£2.50 (14 Sickles 3 Knuts)". I reckoned that putting these two facts together it should be possible to deduce the value of the Galleon in pounds, the number of Sickles to a Galleon and the number of Knuts to a Sickle. By the end of an evening of calculation, I had established that the Galleon was worth about 5.1175 pounds, there were 29 Sickles to a Galleon and between 15 and 20 Knuts to a Sickle. I then belatedly thought of looking in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and was somewhat put out to discover that in chapter 5 ("Diagon Alley") Hagrid tells Harry, "Seventeen silver Sickles to a Galleon and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle, it's easy enough." I couldn't find any way of squaring this with the equivalents given in Fantastic Beasts. I nearly gave up the attempt to make any sense out of it. But then I had an idea.

This is my best guess as to what has happened. The wizarding equivalent stated by Professor Dumbledore was calculated by Rowling using the ratios in Philosopher's Stone. Someone else converted the price of the book into wizarding currency and got the 29 and the 17 the wrong way round. Thinking there were 29 Sickles to a Galleon and 17 Knuts to a Sickle, they would have deduced from the equivalent given by Dumbledore an exchange rate of 5.117 515 734 8 pounds to the Galleon. Then applying this exchange rate and the incorrect ratios to £2.50 they would indeed have arrived at a wizarding equivalent of 14 Sickles and 3 Knuts. If this theory is correct then the real exchange rate is 5.117 515 683 5 pounds to the Galleon and £2.50 is actually 8 Sickles and 9 Knuts. A Sickle is worth a little over 30 pence and a Knut is just over a penny.

Above: Hogwarts
Next month: Doing a Hagrid

Birds

21st. The sparrows have been busy feeding their fledgelings from the bird feeder. I also saw two larger brown birds in the patio; I think they were young starlings. One used the bird feeder—with some difficulty: it was really too big to use it comfortably. The other had evidently just had a bath as it was wet and bedraggled. It sat on the fence drying itself in the sun. Later in the day a pair of collared doves came and sat on the fence, preening.