Harry Potter Meets Academia, Revisited

Since noting this meeting way back in May, I finally caught up with the Guardian report on the first U.K. Harry Potter convocation.

More than 200 hardcore fans have come from 25 countries for Accio! Britain's first Harry Potter convention. (Accio!, in wizard-speak, means "Come!") They flew to Florida in 2003 for the Nimbus Convention, they broomsticked to Canada last year for Convention Alley, but this year it is the Reading University campus that hosts a three-day orgy of Potter symposia, Potter disputation and pointy hat wearing.

I love that Brit sense of humour. Dry, veddy dry.

Comments

[Michele]

I do wish newspapers wouldn't send reporters with no sense of humour to things like Accio! Potterheads and Potties - how childish is that ? I'm quite glad, now, that I didn't attend - no one does scorn at cult-ish enthusiasm quite so well as an English journalist !

Michele
Blog: http://scholar-blog.blogspot.com/

[Susan (editor)]

I see it as dryness rather than scorn; "broomsticked to Canada" conveys a sense of fun, for example. Perhaps some of the more personal remarks (a tall woman looking like "a slightly cross kitchen knife") could have been edited out. What is a cross kitchen knife, after all? All in all, I thought that she did well in representing an outsider's perspective. I do like dry humor, however.