Back to School & Other Shenanigans
I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this before, but it’s something I’ve often thought about. You know how we talk about going back to being a kid again with a sort of nostalgic yearning like it was some sort of golden era of perfection? When I look back on my childhood, I find a lot of joys, but also petty quarrels and feeling excluded, of never quite fitting in, of trying and failing to be cool enough. This morning, someone I follow on Twitter (Adrian Tchaikovsky, the author of Children of Time which is a great piece of science fiction that I cannot recommend enough) posted a photograph of the ‘Back to School’ section of a retail store, & there, amongst other school uniforms was a set of the standard Hogwarts black robes, complete with a Gryffindor scarf and a magic wand. As a good fangirl ought to, I shared the tweet, along with the comment- “Can I go back to school, please?” But as I typed those words, I asked myself if I really meant them, and I knew the ans...