I have no time for Harry Potter. None. This makes me an anomaly in a house full of Potter fanatics. Everyone here has read every book a zillion times and seen all of the films. My daughter has been listening to one of the audio books at X 0.6 speed so that the experience can go on for longer, ideally forever. She even sat me down the other day to find out which of Hogworth´s four houses my personality profile would match me to. I needed to answer a series of questions until a virtual sorting hat algorithm decided that I was Gryffindor, just like HP himself.
Yabbadabbadoo!
Objectively, I would be the first to concede that everyone else is right about Harry Potter and I am wrong. This is pretty much a default position in our house. I have earned the reputation of being wrong about an extraordinarily wide range of subjects. There is no question that Harry Potter is extremely well written. The whole series has encouraged a generation of kids to read. That has to be a good thing! Youngsters have grown up with Daniel Radcliffe and the rest of the young cast. He was barely an infant when they made the first film and look at him now – in his nineties! Nearly all those who were first introduced to these books as adults seem to love them.
The whole world is mad about Potter. There is a platform (platform nine and three quarters) at Kings Cross train station where you can take the Hogwart´s express (or at least pretend to). You can visit the studios where they made the films. My lot have all done this. You can buy gifts and games and wands and all sorts of merchandise. There is a Harry Potter theme park for Christ´s sake!
Still, I can´t stand him! I have fallen asleep in every Harry Potter film and incurred the wrath of the family by making only one critical observation about them: English kids can´t act to save their lives!
There is only one idea that has come my way from Potter Industries that caught my imagination a wee bit; the invisibility cloak. I am told that this crops up in the first book. Ask anyone in our house if you need to know more. There is not much to the idea: there is this cloak that makes whatever it covers invisible. If you allow this cloak to completely cover you it is like you are not even there. How cool is that?!
My house is in Andalucía and my rivers are the Ríos Guadalhorce and the Grande which join together and travel south to empty into the sea a stone’s throw from the city of Málaga. Our “local” fish is a beautiful endemic barbeI called the Gypsy barbel and its home range is restricted largely to the rivers of Andalucía.
I stalked the Guadalhorce for an hour or so the other day. There was good light. Normally I would have spotted several fish in the shallow river but there was not one to be seen. It´s true that the river was carrying a little colour but probably no more than usual and I was expecting that recent rains might have raised the water levels a little and offered a few new nooks and crannies for the barbel to explore. It seemed that the Guadalhorce had gotten hold of that invisibility cloak.
And then I reached that river’s confluence with the skinnier Río Grande. If, at a stretch, I might have used the slight turbidity of the Guadalhorce as an excuse for failing to spot a fish to cast to, on the Grande I would have to think again. It was looking pretty clear and the water level was good. I stalked the Grande for a half an hour, often in the ideal conditions in which the river was in full sun while I stood on the elevated margins, in shade. But it was all to no avail. That damn cloak had settled here too! Where were the fish? Don´t ask me! It seemed futile to continue. If I might be permitted to use the wonderful expression of my late father, I had come to realise that I was “pissing into the wind.”
I had a ten foot four weight fly rod with me as I edged cautiously along the margins of those rivers. I had a little nymph on the point and, a couple of feet above it, a modest foam bodied dry fly that could act as an indicator. I had all these things with me but didn´t need or use any of them. It is sight fishing on these rivers and the flies were never even cast.
Of course, what I really needed was a wand.
Published in Fly Fishing and Fly Tying Monthly, March 2023
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