This afternoon I took a gang of youngsters to see the final Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II. The event was enlivened by the fact that we watched the film in a converted military riding school in Givet (France), Le Manège, and in French (‘Hogwarts’ becomes ‘Poudlard’, for example). Well, leaving aside the quality of the film (it’s actually rather good, though they could have cut the scene where a seemingly dead Harry meets Dumbledore in limbo) and of the story (the complex and apparently treacherous Severus Snape is a brilliant invention and, of course, brilliantly played by Alan Rickman), it was end of an era stuff. N° 1 sprog read the first book and watched the first film when she was seven; she is now seventeen. The actors playing the three children are now fully-grown adults. Indeed, I wonder if we will come to refer to the ‘Harry Potter generation’, so dominant has J.K. Rowling’s creation been. I hope e.j. thribb has written a suitable epitaph.