Stood waiting to go through passport control at Manchester Airport on return from holiday, I had time to look around me at my fellow travelers. There were the usual gaggle of girls and boy returning from Ibiza, nursing hangovers and making plans for a return to the white isle, the families, weary and bogged down with bags and the business travelers, jealously looking at the tanned faces alongside them. Then I spotted her.
She was about five foot seven, approaching middle age with elbow length wavy hair in a center part. Hair Straighteners and gel had passed her by in the midst of time. She needed a trip to Specsavers, too. Her flower printed skirt was stretched over a barrel of a waist and hung down to her nobbled knees. Jesus sandals covered her lily white feet at the end of her sausaged cankles. It was, however, her mode of passing the time that labeled her out as sad.
The grown woman was engrossed in the final installment of Harry Potter. It is a children's book for crying out loud. To want to read the final book means that at some point you have got yourself into a stew over the antics of an 11 year old boy. It isn't alone in its ability to create new worlds. The world of Gormanghast, the writings of Terry Pratchett and the Lord of the Rings trilogy are all acceptable adult fiction in the same vein. The Greek classics, the works of Euripede's, Dante's the Divine Comedy and Shakespeare all offer brilliant scenarios, albeit harder to understand.
We ridicule grown men for being immature enough to buy porn, yet some adults think it is respectable to stand in a queue reading a book aimed at adolescents. It isn't. Like High School Musical and Myspace, it belongs to our youth. How the hell can we help them grow and mature if we won't do it ourselves? Let's applaud JK Rowling for getting more and more children to read but let's keep her as a children's author - or, if you must read children's books, keep the shameful secret to yourself. As my former teacher would say - it ain't big and it ain't clever.
