by Kate Wallis

First, before telling you my great disappointment, you need a bit of background knowledge of what I’ve done in my 4 week summer holiday. (Yes, I only get 4 weeks of holiday; it’s a sore point.) In the first week, I went on guide camp. I like camping, it was fun. I had a record 6 days at home, and then I went off to Scotland with my friend Kirsty.

Scotland was good: I went horse-riding for the first time, went fishing for the first time, hit a golf ball for the first time - oh, and went to Scotland, you guessed it, for the first time.

Anyway, my friend's parents have a timeshare in a chalet up there; it’s really nice, and the little village nearby is incredibly cute. So this is where I spent the last 10 days. This holiday is why my editorial is late as well - not that I expect anyone sat at home with bated breath waiting for my writing. (I’m week one if anyone wants to do so in the future, though!)

This chalet is on the ground of a country club – a nice country club with a swimming pool and stuff, very swish. And most evenings, there is some kind of entertainment. Sunday night is Quiz night.

It was really quite good: music, general knowledge, TV, film, all these things. Then there is ‘The Wipeout Round.’ This round consists of 10 questions, each worth 3 points; you can answer as many or as few as you want. However, when the round is being scored, there is a catch. If you get one question on the ‘Wipeout’ round wrong, you Wipe Out. (I think that’s why it’s got this name; I’m not sure…) This means you don’t get a single point in the entire round, not even for ones you got right! So it’s best that you are certain of your answers before you write them down.

I will point out now that the team I was in for 27/30 on this round wasn't sure of one answer – well I was, just no one believed me – but we got all the rest of them right! :D :D We were one of 6 teams not to wipe out, so bearing in mind there were something like 30 teams, we did quite well.

There were varying topics to these questions. For example some were talking about dartboards, alcoholic drinks, songs, countries. You name it, it was there. Including a Harry-Potter-based Question. (See, here is the Harry Potter reference; you knew it was there somewhere, didn’t you?)

The question was as follows:
Which character from the famous Harry Potter series of books and films owned a large, ginger, fluffy cat named Crookshanks?

I’m sure right now you just shouted ‘Hermione!’ at the screen. I scrambled for the paper and wrote it down, but effectively it’s the same thing. I am proud to say that our team, obviously, got this question right.

My greatest disappointment of the whole holiday (other than that I didn’t see anyone wearing a kilt) is that 3 teams got this question wrong! 3! I was appalled.

These teams weren’t individual people, either. I was shocked that in teams of 8 or more people, not a single one had read a Harry Potter book or seen a Harry Potter film.

I understand Harry Potter isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, just like Lord of the Rings or Twilight. However, with the vast amount of publicity and fame surrounding Harry Potter, everybody in the western world should know the answer to this question! EVERYBODY!

So I guess I needed somewhere to vent, and here seems as good a place as any.

Hope you enjoyed reading my babbling!

Kate.


You can contact Kate at kate@accio-potter.com.