Rules

I could go on for ages about Harry’s various character flaws. What made it worse, what really compounded him into someone I could really enjoy hating, was that everyone bloody loved him. Week after week, year after year, him and his friends were not only not punished but actively rewarded for being in the school corridors after hours, leaving the grounds unauthorised, assaulting teachers and fellow students etc. The list goes on. And they were worshipped for it. ‘Oooh Harry, thanks for saving the school by breaking several rules, there’s fifty house points. Oooh Harry, I see you’ve ridden that broomstick when you were explicitly told not to, have a brand new broom and the most important position on the Quidditch team, which, by the way, you are too young to play in. Oooh Harry, thanks for murdering that teacher by grabbing his face. We’ll never mention it again and here’s another fifty house points while we’re at it.’ Needless to say, this new system of wizarding rules confused me. Judging by Harry and his friends, I assumed that there must be an unspoken inverse system whereby students were rewarded for breaking rules. Acting on this assumption (and hopefully gaining house points and garnering myself both teacher approval and some new friends in the process), at the next feast I kicked a passing house elf in the face, hilariously knocking him unconscious and face first into a bowl of mashed potato. Twenty five points from Slytherin AND detention! Last time I conspicuously broke the rules. Favouritism is what that is.

Back to Business

But back to Hogwarts. (I realise at this point it might seem odd to jump straight back into it after many months as a fugitive but I’m settled now and I’ve got regular access to wifi. All sorted, move on)

Honestly, Harry always got on my nerves. There was absolutely nothing I found attractive about him as a person. He was arrogant, he constantly broke the rules and he managed to force his way into situations, that as far as I could tell had absolutely nothing to do with him, like he was the only solution. Half the time he was the cause! AND HE WAS ONLY ELEVEN! Turning up to dangerous situations with his leather pants on and playing with his nipples like, ‘hey there, group of adult wizards, I’ve heard there’s a huge monster in the castle. You guys must need my help.’ No, no we fucking don’t. We’re qualified teachers who’ve been practising magic for decades. You’ve been at this school for less than a month. Fuck off. But nobody ever said that and he’d ‘help’ anyway, manage to luck his way through life-threatening instances and – to my slight annoyance – survive. Every bloody time. And what was he doing there anyway? You know what I would have said if I was invited to one of his school-saving escapades? ‘Do I want to come and smuggle a dragon, go back in time, stab a massive lizard or fight a bald maniac, needlessly putting myself in harm’s way and endangering my life in the process? Err… no. I’m going to go back to my dormitory, cast spells on my penis to try and make it bigger and masturbate over Professor McGonagall. Like I do every night.’

I had to lie low because Ministry assassins were coming for me but I’m shit at spells so it was hard af to hide from them

Sorting hat

Sorting hat? Sorting shite, more like. Had I have known what a debacle this was going to be at the time I would have requested an interview or at least some kind of consultation before an item of clothing (maybe not even that, is a hat just classed as an accessory?) made a decision for me that would last seven years.

The sorting hat put me in Slytherin. There was no back and forth with it in my head though, like I’ve heard some people have. Just popped it on and it shouted ‘Slytherin’ instantly, like it didn’t have the time of day to think about it properly. With no prior knowledge to the workings of Hogwarts or its housing system, this was fine for me at the time. However, about twenty minutes into the fancy brunch they put on for you I had discovered this was basically the house for twats. Everybody I talked to at that table seemed to either be mean, stupid, or ugly, supercilious or smugly rich or have parents in prison for murder or torture or something equally as heinous. There were no normal kids. Honestly, not one. They were a fascist group waiting to happen. And what’s worse, they were all prejudiced towards me because I was muggle born! (Mugglist? Anti-muggle? There’s not even a word for it. It’s still a massive issue and it just gets swept under the rug.)

So I’d been put in this house full of people quite proud to be a bunch of wankers because, at worst, I was moany and a bit sarcastic, and they wouldn’t even talk to me. When I tried to sit with the friendlier, less Pansy-Parkinson-looking kids (dreadful face, that girl) on the Ravenclaw table they told me I had to go back and sit with my own house. Naturally, I took issue with this. I thought I could at least get into Hufflepuff, possibly even Gryffindor. It was a brave act in itself to ask to be moved – a prerequisite for admittance into the Gryffindor house – and I’d helpfully point out that insight to whomever I had to ask for a transfer.

I was informed I had to take my case forward to the head of house, Professor Snape. Unhelpful to say the least. Apart from the fact he told me the word of a battered old hat was essentially infallible, in the time he took to tell me this one small fact I felt like it should have been Christmas. He was a slow speaker that man. Very slow. And boring. Not pleasing on the eye either. And a terrible head of house. He’s been dead for ages now though, so swings and roundabouts.

So there I was. In a school where segregation was practically encouraged, stuck in a house of reprobates with no way of ingratiating myself with the less noxious groups of children, eating my admittedly delicious meals alone. And I hadn’t even started to learn magic yet. But when I did, there was one boy whose contributions in class were a particular detriment to my wizarding education. The Boy Who Lived…

(Just to clarify, the boy who lived is Harry Potter. Although how he ended up with that name is a bit of a puzzle to me. Lots of boys live, not many are noted for it. Should it be survived? I don’t know.)

Platform 9 3/4

So I'd got books and robes and all that sorted in Diagon Alley. (Just a side note, I was very wary when I first saw my uniform - giving an 11 year old boy something akin to a dress was always bound to trigger alarm bells - but man alive did I grow to love it. Those robes are seriously comfortable. There's a healthy breeze rolling around your leg regions at all times and wizarding fabric conditioner makes you feel like you're sitting in a pile of dry clouds, if such a thing were a possibility. Eventually I just stopped wearing boxer shorts with them. It lead to a few embarrassing moments on windy days but I think the risk of my nuts being exposed to the elements was worth it. I've got pretty nice balls too, so I was pretty comfortable with people gazing at them in admiration. Shame about my knob though. Horrid, that thing is. Horrid and small.) My parents dropped me off at the train station which, to be honest, felt like a bit of a dick move by them because I was looking for a platform that, to their knowledge, didn't exist. As it happens, it was fine because a crowd of mad looking people with a menagerie of animals were bottlenecked in a very specific part of the station, running through a wall. This seemed like the place. Even if nobody saw literally hundreds of strangely dressed families sprinting through an actual brick wall, how the presence of all those people concentrated in a very specific part of the train station didn't attract the attention of at least a health and safety official is beyond me. This was all pre 9/11 though, so security wasn't as tight and I imagine the parents and students have to do it differently now. Tell people it's a flash mob? I don't know. The train journey was mostly uneventful. I sat by myself and didn’t buy anything off that cart that everyone seems to talk about, so I can’t comment on that. Why would I want a pasty filled with pumpkin? It’s not magic and it’s shit. Seriously, when I think about it I still get annoyed at this. You’ve taken a classic and hearty snack and replaced the meat and potato with fucking pumpkin?! Fuck off. Fuck right off. Take your pumpkin pasty and shove it right up your magical dick. I was already in a panic at this point if this pasty situation was anything to go by. What other tried and tested formulas have these lunatics been tampering with? Mercifully, I had something to distract me from this line of thought: my horrific allergic reactions to the many animals on board the train. I've always been bad with cats. Worse with horses, but thankfully they weren't on the approved list of pets. Would have been a hassle fitting them on the train anyway I imagine. But the cats were enough anyway and I'm sure the owls and rats weren't helping. The toads were fine. Didn't have an issue with the toads then and I still don't to this day. I like quite a lot of amphibians. Have you ever seen bumblebee frogs? They're pretty cool. Anyway, after my face had swelled up to the point that it looked like a cross between a dirty pumpkin and Hagrid's giant bollocks (which I imagine don't look too dissimilar in truth), some unknown hero got their wand out and fixed me. Could have been Flitwick, could have been Voldemort, I couldn't really see very well at the time though so that's still a bit of a grey area. Slightly exhausted from my ordeal, I lay back in my chair, too tired to remove the dozens of cats still fighting to make their home on my face and torso. I drifted off to sleep, my dreams punctuated every now and then with a cat clawing at my face or a stab of anger at the thought of non traditional pasty fillings.

How it all began

​Apparently it isn’t interesting enough that I attended a school that less than 0.01% of the population of England are able to do so (percentages, by the way, not a skill I learnt at Hogwarts, but I’ll get to that at some point), people only ever ask one thing: ‘did you go to school with Harry Potter?’ Yes, I did. I was in the same year as him actually. We even had some classes together. But before I talk about him again, I’d quite like to talk about myself. Partially because I think my story is interesting enough – whilst I didn’t defeat the most powerful evil wizard of all time, I still went to a secret school for magic – but mainly because Harry Potter gets right on my tits. I came from a muggle background. My mum worked in a bank (ran by people, not goblins) and my dad did something with computers. The acceptance letter from Hogwarts was, as I’m sure it is with most muggle families, a shock. And a much more arduous transition than most muggle-born students in Hogwarts would have you believe. It took months of fact checking before my dad was satisfied I wasn’t being admitted into a themed child sex ring. And even then, what parent wants their child to take a pass on English and business studies and stuff to go to a boarding school for learning magic? I mean, my dad likes his life laid out in black and white. Even after an entire year there, I can still remember his utter confusion. ‘So you’re a magician?’ ‘No dad, I’m a wizard.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘I can do real magic.’ ‘Bollocks. Do some.’ ‘I can’t. I’m not allowed.’ ‘Health and safety?’ ‘Yeah dad. If you want.’ ‘Waste of time.’ But anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Of course, I was beyond excited to learn magic and the run-up to the start of term was like ten Christmases rolled into one. No maths? Magic wand? Yes please. But I had friends from primary school that I didn’t want to leave. Why couldn’t they come? ‘Because they aren’t wizards,’ my mum would say. ‘I’m not a bloody wizard.’ I didn’t say ‘bloody’ though. I didn’t want to risk my place at Hogwarts and I was already on thin ice after my mum caught me shoving a ham sandwich into the VHS player to see if it would come up on the tv screen. N.B. it did not. ‘You’re not a wizard yet,’ she continued, ‘but you have magic inside you. That’s what Professor Dumfries said.’ [Professor Dumfries, by the way, was a supply teacher who also dealt with the majority of the admin. Not a lot of people know he worked there at the time.] ‘Strange, unexplainable things would happen to you… because you’re a wizard.’ I’d heard about these things. My mum wasn’t the only one Dumfries had been educating on the matter. Falling out of windows and bouncing down the garden path and uncontrollable hair and stuff. But nothing like that had ever happened to me. I wasn’t about to hurl myself out of a window and my hair was always impeccably side-parted. I once had an erection for two hours after a particularly nice Sunday dinner at my grandma’s house but I wasn’t about to tell her that. ‘Well, you’re quite double jointed, aren’t you?’ she would then say. And the conversations would continue like that until we inevitably arrived at the conclusion I couldn’t take my non-magic friends to Hogwarts. I’m still not entirely sure why a couple of my closest pals couldn’t have attended though. The selection criteria for this school was nebulous at best.