Anisa Ghuloom

Anisa Ghuloom, from Riffa, is 18 and has just finished her A-levels at St Christopher's School. She will shortly be going to Bristol University in the UK to study history

I have spent many hot, Bahraini afternoons with Harry. He placates my restless mind and always manages to uplift the unhappy one. Not only that, but my friends like him too and it is only a bonus that parents adore him.
But Harry is not an ordinary boy nor is he a person at all; he is the one and only Harry Potter, boy wizard and product of J K Rowling’s strike of ingenuity on a long boring train journey one day in the early 1990s.
She has famously said that Harry, simply walked into her mind fully formed and she spent the next five hours of that particular train journey mapping the whole series.
I met Harry when I was eight-years-old by reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Despite the fact that the Harry Potter, Hogwarts, Dumbledore, and Blast-ended Skrewts are clearly only viable in the imagination, it was hard at the time not to believe that somewhere Hogwarts school was real and thriving.
I probably would not be the only person to admit that a few tears were shed on an 11th birthday when no owl swooped through my window inviting me to Hogwarts.
The fictional nature of the books was inconsequential though because Harry and his friends had enamoured me from the first page. His adventures fighting the evil Lord Voldemort – though frightening to my eight-year-old self – were thrilling and I loved him for his courage and loyalty no matter how difficult the circumstances were.
As subsequent books were published they began to grow in length and the time between the publication of one and its successor each time seemed agonisingly long.
But by the end of the 200-odd pages of the first book, I was so hooked that any wait would have been too long.
And so the pattern was set: for the past 10 years every time I finished a Harry Potter book there was the high of its conclusion but inevitably too there was the low of realising that a long wait was necessary before I could find out what else Harry would be doing.
 However, it is for this reason that our generation is quite special. We, the Muggle Generation, will always be the most blessed because he will be forever be tied to our own growing up.
We should feel just a bit sorry for future children who will never feel the excitement when the new Harry Potter instalment is released after the typically painful wait.
Instead they will be able to read the whole series in a week if they can or want to. I almost certainly would have tried to if I had been born after all the books had been published.
They may experience all that Harry does but they will never age alongside him. They will never inherently feel as close to Harry as the Muggle Generation have.
Admittedly they may cry, as many of us have done, when certain characters meet an untimely death or sympathise with his nervousness on approaching his first crush but they will never have their own similar experiences, in the meantime, to make it feel as if they and Harry had grown up, together.
Reader’s empathy with Harry is probably partly due to this fact that he was never a stagnant character in a book; he was constantly growing older like a real person.
It seems quite fitting that at a time when I have finally finished school and can now be considered as an adult, that Harry too has become an adult and the series comes to an end.
Finally, on July 21, 2007, Harry will be fighting his last great battle. It will have been 10 years since I read the first Harry Potter book. Ten years of anticipation and excitement whenever a publication date was announced. Ten years of every release being followed by sleepless nights when I would be left one-handed, a book taking up permanent residence in the other. Ten years of living life in the Muggle world and having all the non-magical but still worthy experiences that it entails.
Unfortunately the films do not have quite the same magic as the books so consequently, July 21 also spells the closing stages of the Harry Potter era. For as good as Daniel Radcliffe may get as an actor he will never be my Harry.
 So you see, you cannot blame us if, on the day of publication and for the period consequent, you see hoards of the Muggle Generation red-eyed and gloomy when the era finally and irrevocably ends.
For it is not only the end of Harry’s era that we will be mourning when we turn the last page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows since we will be ending a chapter in our own lives too.