The End.

So. There you go. I have read the final installment of the Harry Potter saga. I am filled with conflicting emotions. Harry has been a constant companion since I began bookselling around the time that HP & the Philosopher's Stone was released. I have seen the face of children's bookselling transformed beyond recognition, from a largely moribund collection of Shirley Hughes resissues and dull "football stories for boys" into a bizarre and gloriously flourishing garden wherein one can just about get away with anything. This I attribute to Mr. Potter. I have seen successive age groups enter the bookstore as successive generations of students have entered Hogwarts. I have heard a common language evolve.
He has, of late, assumed a strange and tenebrous reality for me, as if I have furnished myself with some teenage egregore. He is like a person I met once, on an overnight coach journey perhaps; we said profound things to one another and then never saw each other again. Sometimes I think I see this person in a crowd and suddenly I'm back on the coach, hurtling through the night between unknown locations... you get the idea.
I am not sure I am fully satisfied by the conclusion to the series. (I will not provide details, don't fret, my dears). There is an empty feeling inside my belly, as if I had cast my Patronus and it had run away and not come back. It is, I realize as I type, *exactly* the feeling that one had on the last, ever, day of school, when you made meaningless promises to keep in touch, old enmities were glossed over and pretended to be healed, and you wandered about as if it were a normal day, still playing your role, but it was anything but a normal day - and inside, you were screaming to yourself, "Wake up! Pay attention! This is the last day, and nothing, nothing will ever be the same again."
School's out for the last time. Mr. Potter, I raise my hat to you.