Not a bad place Oxfordshire, by most accounts. Broke down there once and had to wait three hours for a tow truck. Other than that, it’s all right. Oh, no, hang on; the highest percent of Harry Potter fans in the UK live there. Yep, actually it’s shit.

We are not known for our love of Harry Potter here, but that’s more to do with adults buying a children’s book and not simply because they are poorly written in A-level prose and so drawn out you could happily conceive and give birth in the time it takes to read one. Moreover, the whole ‘special’ cover for adults business is like selling Dairylea in matte black boxes, slapping some lower-case letters on the front and calling it ‘po-mo’.

People in Wallingford, Oxfordshire don’t care less what we think though. They have been pre-ordering their copies of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows with an urgency befitting Paris Hilton at the Mexican border. Advance sales on Amazon.co.uk alone have reached a staggering quarter of a million (one million worldwide).

Christopher North, head honcho of Amazon books (UK) and a very happy man, commented:

“Those people are all mad! Don’t they realise that thanks to the British postal service their copy will probably take longer to arrive than if they’d just got off their lardy arses and wandered into the high street and bought one?!”

No, he didn’t say that at all. Naughty us, slap wrist. This is what he really said:

“The postman in Wallingford is certainly going to be busy on the morning of Saturday 21 July. Nobody wants to miss out on this book and that is illustrated by the high rate of pre-order sales. Whereas previously people would have circled a date in their calendar, now they simply pre-order and look forward to delivery to their door on the day of the release.”

We would like to think he said this in a voice that sounded all enthusiastic and excited like Big Bird, but we'd be hypothesising.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if those 250,000 copies of Deathly Hallows should end up in their rightful place; in front of nice, contented children avoiding fresh air, trees and the trauma of social interaction. Yeah, right. Excuse us while we replace all those socks we’ve just laughed off.

This is the final book in the Harry Potter series, where somebody important to constantly replicating plot gets killed off. This may be walking beard Hagrid, odd-bod Luna or even possibly Lord Harry Potter himself. Again we are merely hypothesising (sorry, no spoilers!), but if we had a tenner to hand it would go on the fat bloke…

Though just like everyone else in the stratosphere we will have to wait until 21st July to find out. There we’ll be, sitting on the tube, feet up on the chair in front, gleefully reading over the shoulder of some businesswoman with a struggling marriage:

Hagrid closed his eyes for the last time. “Please, Harry” he said. “Fulfil your destiny and find the Magical Pepper pot of Diphtheria”. “I will, Hagrid,” cried Harry. “And I will definitely avenge Luna’s death while I’m about it”.

Opps, we’ve done it again. Hate us.

Read More:

Town Tops Potter Poll – Metro