Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Poster. Image from Pottermore

Okay, so this is going to be a bit of a short post this week, but I wanted to write about something that happened to my dad recently because I found it amusing, and because Father’s Day is coming up this Sunday (in Australia anyway).

My dad has three pairs of glasses, and he regularly loses (and finds) them. A short while ago, he was once again missing a pair of glasses. This time he deduced that he must have left them in his local bookstore because that’s where he last remembered taking them off.

My dad is also an early riser, and he wanted his glasses back as soon as possible, so he went to the bookstore first thing the next morning before it opened. He was surprised to see a large group of other people were waiting there too… not ridiculously large, but pretty big for this small local bookstore. It was a mixed crowd – young people, old people, men, women. He figured it must just be a really popular book store.

When the clerk finally opened the doors, the crowd rushed in. My dad once again watched in puzzlement as all the people made a beeline for the back of the store.

Instead of following the crowd, he went up to the harassed-looking clerk to ask if they had his glasses. Thankfully, they did, and he soon had them in hand. Curious, he asked what all the other people were here for.

“Oh, they’re here for the new Potter book,” the man said.

I don’t think my dad even knew there was a new Potter book (or really, play) until this point. He’s not exactly a Harry Potter fan, and definitely not someone who’d decide they need to get a book on the first day it’s available. Nonetheless, he’d obviously picked the release day of ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ to go and collect his glasses, so to everyone else he must have just looked like another eager Potter Fan waiting to get his copy.

I, by contrast, actually am a big Potter fan, and bought most of the previous books within the first week of their release (for more on that, see Growing Up With Harry). And yet in spite of my love of Harry Potter, I never bothered to get up early or join the insane queues out the front of the store to be “one of the first”. I like sleeping in, and was content with waiting till some of the insanity died down.

So I love that, through sheer coincidence, my Dad is now the only one of us who has managed to join a Potter queue… even if he didn’t actually intend to.