With Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows not being published for another four agonising days, Harry Potter fans worldwide are champing at the bit to discover exactly how Hagrid, Herimone and Harry Potter meet their messy ends.

Up until now the wait for Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows has been so excruciating that many Harry Potter fans have been forced to develop addictions to hard drugs just to have something else to think about than whether or not Harry Potter gets killed by a deathly hallow or whatever. But now the wait appears to be over, with claims that a copy of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows has been leaked online. Of course, hecklerspray cannot condone the illegal downloading of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows prior to its release date because a) illegal downloading is both illegal and unethical and b) it's Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows for God's sake. What are you, a child?

Here's a word of advice – don't bother going out on Saturday. Just stay in bed watching Columbo films on Channel Five. Because if you do go out, chances are that Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows will assault you from every angle. Don't believe us? Cast your mind back two years to when Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince was published – you literally couldn't move for posters advertising the book, queues of people waiting to buy the book and – worst of all – children walking into your legs because they were too busy reading the book to see where they were going. Imagine that but with Heelies – that's what Saturday is going to be like.

The hype for Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows has been so overwhelming that there isn't much we don't already know about it. For instance, we've been made aware that Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows has been printed 12 million times in America and has got gigantic preorders in the UK. We know that JK Rowling cried when she finished writing Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows and we know that the climax of the book is pretty karate-heavy. Oh, and we also know that JK Rowling will write more Harry Potter books when all of her new ventures fail, too. But what about the actual content of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows?

Well, despite JK Rowling pleading with people not to spoil the story of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, rumours have slowly been leaking out. Some people say that Harry Potter will die, while other people are sure that Hermione dies. But now none of that speculation matters because the National Post is claiming that a copy of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows has been leaked online, with someone called Byron Ng claiming to have downloaded it:

Ng said he went online and found what appeared to be the novel's first few paragraphs mentioned in an article that appeared Sunday in The Guardian, based in the U.K. He used that information to Google and find the rest of the novel. He found that someone had posted what appeared to be first 495 pages of the 794-page book on a peer-to-peer sharing website where directions to pirated movies and other material are located. So he downloaded it too. "It is not an e-book or Word file, which is what people would normally do," he said. "What some guy did was take pictures of it, 500 little files, each with a picture of a page. Someone took the trouble to do that."

Apparently the leaked online copy of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows had been downloaded 507 times by last night, which leaves us in a bit of a quandary. Although it's funny to see someone burst the bubble of self-important high-security secrecy surrounding Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – which, let's remember, is just a children's book about a titting wizard – those people that have downloaded the leaked Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows copy deserve a thumping too. After all, if you can't wait four poxy days to find out whether an imaginary schoolboy wizard can beat a noseless Ralph Fiennes with a magical stick or not, you're far, far beyond help. You people make us sick.

Now, if you'll excuse us, we need to finish chapter two of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

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Harry Potter Finale Allegedly Leaked Online – National Post