Guilty Secrets...

OK, I admit it! I'm a hypocrite. And you wanna know why? Because I just went out and bought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

At the RM 109.90 price!!

Despite in previous posts pouring scorn on those profiteering bookshops who sold the book well over the odds, I succumbed to temptation and bought a copy now that it's payday and I'm rich again.

Don't worry, I don't think I have entirely sold my soul. The place I bought it, you see, was the kedai koperasi (co-operative shop) at my university. Not one of the big profiteering book chains, but a small store set up by the university to help the students and staff. So that's alright, then. My sociopolitical conscience is safe.... Sort of..

Besides, I was genuinely impatient to find out who gets killed off in this the last book in the Potter series.

I have already read the first five chapters and the body count is mounting. It is genuinely gripping stuff, and Rowling's style has gradually evolved and matured along with many of her readers. Gone are the mildly amusing English eccentricities and silliness present in the earlier books - this is a serious thriller set in a world which has become utterly familiar, yet ominously terrifying. I can't wait to get back to the book after posting this...

Maybe if you are all good readers and click on my advertisements, I will write a proper review of the book when I've finished.

To be honest with you, Harry Potter is just the latest in a long list of great things that I have got into long after everyone else has done them and moved on. Take pop music for instance. When I was young, everyone was blowing up their hair and throwing themselves all over the place to the sounds of the Smiths, the Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode, to name a few great icons of the Eighties and early Nineties.

Yet at the time, I couldn't stand them. I much preferred Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. I thought the lead singer of the Smiths sounded like a manic depressive on mogadon who produced music to slit your wrists to. Depeche Mode were just weirdos with silly hair and make-up, to me then. And the Pet Shop Boys well, what were they on about, eh?

Now I'm an old codger of 42-ish, look at me. What are the most frequently-played CDs in my car? The Smiths Greatest Volumes 1 and 2. An absolutely superb double CD remix compilation of - you've guessed it - Depeche Mode. And a similarly brilliant collection of the Pet Shop Boys' Greatest Hits. And I keep on playing them, over and over, because I love them for reminding me of the fun I never had.

In fact, if you really want to know, the past is for me by far the richest source of musical enjoyment. I'm not saying that I don't rate the current music scene - oh no. I think, for instance, that Robbie Williams is a wonderfully inventive cheeky working-class genius who makes me proud to be British whenever I hear his stuff. I am also turned on massively by the innovative and exciting vibes of hip-hop and jazz, and the way rappers like Eminem twist the language round and round and speed it up in ways never imagined before excites my linguistic sensibility. And I think George Michael, for all his mercurial temper, has one of the best soul voices in existence.

But, as some old fogies might say, they don't make songs like they used to. Like, for instance, the Beatles. Like Elvis. Like Bowie. Like the Stones. Like Pink Floyd. Like Led Zeppelin. Like the Doors. Like Stevie Wonder in his Songs in the Key of Life period. Like Michael Jackson when he was still black.

I could go on of course.

I came to all of these artists much later than their maximum sell-by date, and because of this I appreciate them more. And the reason is that time, as well as healing all wounds, helps us to see the value in things that we just couldn't appreciate at the time because, well, we were too busy experiencing them to notice.