As much as Christmas is about baby Jesus and playing your new Nintendo Wii until you can't bend your arm any more, it's also about something more – watching billionaires cry about wizards and stuff.
At some point between Christmas and the new year, there's going to be an ITV documentary broadcast entitled JK Rowling … A Year in the Life, all about Harry Potter creator JK Rowling and her adventures completing Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. But the documentary also shows what JK Rowling gets up to in her spare time which – in between posing for giant statues of herself made from one giant diamond and offering the poor £50 to spend a week as JK's Dancing Monkey Slave – mainly involves going to places where she used to live and crying a lot.
Even though she's quite old, 2007 will stand out as one of JK Rowling's most emotional years. She's experienced just about every human emotion on a grand scale over the last 12 months, from heartache at deciding to kill Harry Potter to relief at changing her mind at the last minute, from pride at seeing Harry Potter's naked penis performing solo in sold-out shows to such brazen celebration of her own flesh that she whapped her bra out for some kids.
But none of this could come close to the emotional sledgehammer of returning to the place where she wrote the first ever Harry Potter book Harry Potter And The Weeping Genital Sores and its more successful follow-up Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone – an incident that was fortunately being recorded for a Christmassy ITV documentary all about JK Rowling's year.
On December 30, ITV will broadcast JK Rowling … A Year in the Life. It's the first time JK Rowling has ever allowed cameras to document her life and, as such, the first chance she's ever had to show the world that she's not a completely humourless, emotion-free robot who takes herself so seriously that it's uncomfortable to watch.
And the easiest way for her to do that was to go back to the flat where Harry Potter was born and sob a bit. According to The Press Association, part of the documentary sees JK Rowling return to the Leith flat where she finished writing the first Harry Potter book, only to find that the new residents have Harry Potter books in their bedroom. Rowling said:
"This is really the room where I finished Philosopher's Stone, here. This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life really changed in this flat. I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I'd made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, 'Well, I want to write,' and I wrote the book and, 'What is the worst that can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal. It's really back to the wall time here'. For years now I've felt that if it all disappeared, and some days I do feel like 'is it real?', then this is where I'd come back to, this would be my base line, I'd be back in Leith."
Admittedly she'd return to Leith to bulldoze it and use it for the site of a peculiarly skaghead-heavy offshoot of The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter theme park, but it's nice that she's thought about it.
And even nicer that JK Rowling has finally shown some emotion for once. She'll win a lot of fans with her teary outburst. Not enough to make anyone buy the next book she writes that isn't about Harry Potter, admittedly, but still quite a lot.
If only we could shake the feeling that JK Rowling was only crying because she realised that she used to live in a flat that's smaller than the room where she currently keeps all her fancy hats in her new house…
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