I have been trying to find the time and energy to tell you all about our trip north but in recent weeks the spirit has been indifferent and the flesh reluctant. Now we are off to France for about a fortnight, if the Channel Tunnel lasts till Friday, leaving this island behind and with it any chance to write gripping blog entries. This island, this playground of technocrats, this cradle of binge drinkers, this general area of joined-up taxation. Well what else is all this permanent drinking culture thing about? Or is it making work for our empty Casualty departments and underused Magistracy?
I am sad to leave behind the cricket and the prospect of another gripping contest starting tomorrow. We will take our stumps and bat and trust to luck that our French cottage will have a flat area suitable for a few overs. I am also sad to leave behind our nice red and white training ball which languishes still in a neighbour’s garden, awaiting extradition.
Jake has a head full of cricket again and with ball in hand he alternates between Andrew Flintoff and Shane Warne. His Warne impersonation runs to spiking up his hair, initially with water but now with mousse as his ambitions advance. We have even had him with ice cream on the end of his nose in the absence of suitably white-looking sun block.
Zoe won two prizes, for results in SATS and for accumulated Merits. This has given her £15 to spend on (two) books and thus an opportunity to stand in front of bookshop bookshelves for long periods complaining alternately that she can't choose and that adults are interfering.
We finished the Potter. JK Rowling has 1.3 billion pounds, or something. That's one for every Muslim in the world, or for every person in China. I would be a fairly rich man if I had a pound for every time someone in the wizarding world pulled their clothing tighter round themselves. I seriously wonder how the great Potterthon will finish. Harry must win, surely, or Evil will flourish. At the very least Voldemort must lose and be destroyed. But what then? Harry will be the greatest wizard ever, having defeated the current holder of that title. If he perishes in the attempt then we have a sad book, unless somehow the nobility with which he faces his own death is so inspiring, his knowledge of wider purposes so compelling, that somehow we weep not for him but applaud and accept his demise as The Greater Good.
Somehow I doubt it because Potter, like so many other mythical magical quest tales, has absolutely no wider perspectives at all and is oddly bereft of any moral discussion beyond "Bad is bad" and "He made me do it". Also I think a death of that kind would make for a distinctly hollow Potter Film 8, which we have been led to expect. Surely JK will stick with the brand: surely the movie moguls didn't buy an option on a dead kid.
And what will he do, our undefeated Harry, as the Greatest Wizard Ever? What a record! Seven fights, six draws and a knock out. The Headmastership of Hogwarts will be his for the asking. Or will the magic be broken or sealed away in a cave somewhere, or buried as it was in a particularly moving episode of Noggin The Nog? Tolkien sent his magic away over the Sea, leaving the fate of the world in the hands of men, with a silent post script saying "And look what they did with it". Only two more years to wait. Well at least till Potter Film 4 is out, for the Potter calendar is designed to avoid clashes, much like the gentlemen's agreement between the Olympics and the World Cup.
So off we go to have a bit of exotic summer. I plan caves and canoeing, and a spot of eating. A bientot les amis.