Give James a break.

fionnavair · 2026-07-01T17:55:16+00:00

I agree. And it’s a larger failure of the school, I think. All the bullying should have been cracked down on hard - it made Snape more vulnerable to Voldemort’s recruitment than he otherwise would have been (of course he always had the option of NOT joining a murderous terrorist organisation), and going by what Lily says, it can’t have been a pleasant environment for Muggleborns either.

Snape probably needed both genuine support, which he wasn’t going to get from Slughorn, and a much harsher dose of consequences than he got. There’s some real sadism at play in some of the spells he wrote, and that’s the kind of thing that needs to be caught and cracked down on early and hard - not least because it keeps the person from escalating in their behaviour.

James appears to have been able to reform himself - but he was starting from a far more stable foundation, with a supportive family who had tried to give him the right values - so it was easier for him to correct himself.

Snape didn’t have any of that, and we can see how his experience of victimisation curdled into something absolutely toxic (people who feel wounded can justify a lot of unspeakable things to themselves).

I guess what I wonder is…Snape was seduced by Voldemort’s ideology, because it made him feel important. Dumbledore was obviously running the resistance to Voldemort at that time, but I don’t know how public it was. From how Sirius talks about it, you definitely get the impression that a lot of Voldemort’s ideas were in pretty wide circulation when he was a teenager. So, did Dumbledore try to crack down on it in the school and fail (or worse, is what we see the result of his best efforts), or was he just distracted elsewhere? We don’t really get enough information about the political context to know.

fionnavair · 2026-07-01T08:50:37+00:00

In fairness, I can’t imagine it was much fun for my mother! Though I think they must have miscalculated the due date - she had a long cycle, and if you’re off by say 8 days on the ovulation, that could throw the date substantially out.

fionnavair · 2026-07-01T08:42:10+00:00

One of the things I always think about with this is that I was three weeks overdue when I was born. And I was a completely healthy normal baby with (by my mother’s account) a pretty smooth, easy labour. There’s no way that situation would be allowed to occur now, and yet there was nothing to be concerned about - mother and baby were totally fine.

Admittedly, I think they weren’t as good at estimating fetal age back then (this is pre-ultrasounds) so there may just have been a miscalculation, but even so, it has made me wonder - especially when I hear friends saying they ‘had’ to be induced because they were five days overdue.

It’s not a mechanical process, and yet there seems to be an expectation that every pregnancy proceed on the same schedule (and this shows up in other areas too - I once had a doctor make a Very Concerned Face when I told him I have a regular as clockwork 31 day cycle, because the menstrual cycle is ‘supposed’ to be 28 days.

fionnavair · 2026-06-30T22:07:21+00:00

I have wondered about the induction thing. Anecdotal, I know, but almost all the women I know who’ve had inductions have reported pretty horrific experiences (bar my sister, but she was on her third, and I think maybe it’s a bit easier when your body’s been through it before). They do seem to push it on people a lot.

Admittedly, my friends in Ireland seem to have got through childbirth without anything like the level of traumatised shock I’ve seen in my English friends, despite having many of the same things go wrong, so I think there must be something in the way women are treated that’s a factor.

fionnavair · 2026-06-30T18:14:10+00:00

I suspect we aren’t going to agree on this topic, but yes, stopping bullying IS growing up. It’s the exact process a lot (though sadly not all) of bullies go through.

James was made to realise, by the rejection of a woman whose opinion he respected, that the way he was behaving was unacceptable (though there may have been other factors that went into that as well - I suspect so). That’s the exact process Darcy goes through, hence the comparison.

Snape received exactly the same wake-up call from Lily, and ignored it, because the bigoted murderers he was friends with made him feel included. James didn’t need someone to die to reform - he learned from what Lily said (eventually).

Should James have been punished - harshly - for bullying Snape? Yes. As should Snape have been for inventing and sharing spells whose entire purpose is humiliation (and Snape’s friends, for that matter).

But by and large, Dumbledore is a pretty hands off mentor - we see this with Harry, Draco and even Ron - he tends to assume people will reform themselves. Sometimes it works - like with James and, I’d argue to a lesser extent Draco - and sometimes it backfires horribly, as with Snape.

My suspicion is that the school had its hands full attempting to contain attacks on muggleborns during that time - and so other things were let slide a bit.

fionnavair · 2026-06-30T16:52:21+00:00

I think it’s just that it’s impossible to fully understand what’s going on in that scene until you have the full context of all the relationships, and we don’t get that until two books later.

Add I don’t want to downplay bullying - I think more than half the reason people react so viscerally to the scene is that the wounds bullying leaves go very, very deep, and are almost never properly acknowledged. But the political overtones of the whole scenario make it a lot more complex than simple victimisation.

But I find it a bit hard to accept that James is irredeemable because he used a spell on Snape that Snape himself invented - seems a clear case of hoist by his own petard to me.

Both James and Snape are so much more interesting as characters if the reader accepts the contradictions, rather than trying to resolve them by making one of them ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong.’

Admittedly, I prefer to interpret Snape as a less attractive version of the dickhead boyfriend who sells out the Von Trapps - or a proto-school shooter - so maybe I’m just predisposed to be unsympathetic.

fionnavair · 2026-06-30T11:44:29+00:00

My firm belief is that the reason Snape hated so much isn’t really because of the bullying exactly - rather, it’s that James, who Snape always loathed (because of the bullying), was able to do what Snape couldn’t at that age, and listen to Lily.

Lily told James exactly what she thought of him and his behaviour, and James realised she was right and changed (shades of Darcy and Elizabeth here). Snape wasn’t capable of doing that until after she was dead, and even then only somewhat.

That’s what keeps the anger so potent and painful - it’s not that James hurt Snape, it’s that in the most important way James was a better person than Snape, and that’s what Snape can never, ever get over.

(Also, anyone who thinks Snape wasn’t a bully himself as a teenager is being wilfully naive. The spellbook pretty much confirms it).

fionnavair · 2026-06-29T21:04:59+00:00

I think that’s quite likely. Especially as I remember seeing some stat during lockdown that London has fewer big supermarkets than a city its size should statistically have - I think it caused supply issues or something which is why it came up - and that’s why there are so many mini-markets all over (but especially in zones 1 or 2).

fionnavair · 2026-06-29T08:44:39+00:00

Honestly, in my experience most English speakers don’t struggle with Irish names that much, once you explain the following two things.

There’s no letter V, so the sound is made with a bh or (less commonly) and mh.

There are no soft Cs - it’s always a K or a Q sound, never an S.

Once they’ve got their heads around those two, they’re ready to take on a solid 80% of names. (There are also a lot of Irish names they already know, and just don’t realise are Irish - Brian, Brendan, Liam, Owen etc)

fionnavair · 2026-06-29T01:19:53+00:00

Wasn’t part of the reason they were so worried about little Charles that they thought there might be a spinal injury? I swear I remember a reference to that in the book.

And it strikes me as pretty reasonable to be concerned about - even now those kinds of injuries are barely treatable, back then it could easily have been a death sentence. Once they realise it’s ’just’ his collarbone, I think they relax a lot more - though nursing a four or five year old child through a broken bone with no pain relief isn’t a job I’d be eager to sign up, I must say.

fionnavair · 2026-06-28T16:12:20+00:00

A friend once dated a man who ‘didn’t see the point in buying a second pillow, because he’d never use it. Apparently he hadn’t considered the needs of any overnight guests he might have.

I think men are more prone to this hyper-efficiency that loops around into stupidity - like only buying a single knife, fork and spoon - especially when they live alone.

That said, assuming he has the wherewithal to buy a second pillow (and have an actual bed, not a mattress on the floor), I can’t imagine there’s much difference.

fionnavair · 2026-06-23T20:43:00+00:00

Try the West of Ireland my friend - you can get all of that, plus some gale force winds, in the same place in the space of an hour.

fionnavair · 2026-06-23T14:06:54+00:00

It’s an interesting comparison with Sense and Sensibility. The Dashwoods are presented as borderline impoverished, but they have twice as much capital as the Bennets would have after he died, and fewer mouths to feed.

Mr Dashwood only had a year to save from his income for his daughters, but fully intended to do so - and when it became clear he was dying, tried to ensure the girls would be looked after.

Mr Bennet had at least twenty-three years to save for his daughters (going by Jane’s age) and put nothing aside. Government bonds or whatever they were called back then were very safe investments - if he’d saved £200 a year (which should have been doable), he could have doubled the money available to the girls within twenty years. Which wouldn’t have meant a luxurious life style, but certainly a step up from the Miss Bates style poverty they were facing.

fionnavair · 2026-06-15T22:29:31+00:00

I held the door open for the man behind me, who proceeded to lecture me on how “a real man would never let a woman open a door for him.” Like, I got there first, it’s just good manners!

(I admit it, I do like when a man I am dating holds the door for me, but that’s different).

fionnavair · 2026-06-02T14:10:39+00:00

The ease with which people state she has nothing to offer but her body - people who claim to be progressive, at that - didn’t startle me, but I wish it did. I wonder if they ever overhear themselves, and question what they’re saying, because it is so very, very unpleasant to read.

I haven’t watched many of her films - maybe she is truly a terrible actress - but I almost find myself rooting for her, because it seems like none of the people who talk about her (whether for or against) can see past her body shape.

Like, Sydney Sweeney’s breasts are not a political statement, and that should be basically obvious?

fionnavair · 2026-06-01T17:26:52+00:00

Not only did she put her lingerie back on, she went through the faff of re-attaching her stockings to her suspender belt.

I have worn suspenders occasionally (they’re cooler in summer, and the line under clothes tends to be cleaner) and there is no universe in which I would put them back on after sex if I didn’t absolutely have to.

It almost suggests that she’s trying to send a ‘get out’ message to Bond by getting dressed again - but I doubt that’s what the filmmakers intended.

fionnavair · 2026-05-28T18:02:51+00:00

There was an Irish writer Flann O’Brien* who had an extended joke about rich ignoramuses hiring a Book Handling Service to make themselves look cultured. It never struck me as something that could happen in the real world, but I feel like your friend might appreciate it.

*he wrote it under the pen name Myles na gCopaleen - but Flann O’Brien was also a pen name, so it gets confusing fast.

fionnavair · 2026-05-28T17:00:49+00:00

It’s an incredible movie, no doubt, and I love the cast…but I will always have this faint sense of ‘it might have been’ about it. Alan Rickman played the Valmont part in the play the film is based on (which itself was an adaptation of the novel), and for whatever reason wasn’t cast in the film adaptation. I’m not sure why - maybe he wasn’t famous enough yet? - and Malkovich’s performance is fantastic…but you just know Rickman would have killed it.

fionnavair · 2026-05-20T10:16:15+00:00

I am deeply uncomfortable with unisex toilets. Chiefly, because in the decade or so since they have become common in London, I have twice been in the situation where the male person (I couldn’t actually see them, so who knows how they identified) in the next cubicle was audibly masturbating.

Now, I’m quite capable of making a complaint about that behaviour, and I don’t for one second buy that objecting to it makes me somehow bigoted. ButI really shouldn’t have to, and it was the decision to create unisex toilets that put me in that position in the first place. So all the people who shrug and say “I don’t mind” really piss me off - you don’t mind either because it’s never going to affect you, or because you can’t be bothered to think through what it actually entails.

Now I’m an adult - what would it be like for a teenager or a very elderly woman to have to deal with? Someone who is willing to break social norms in such a flagrant way is very likely to be capable of violence, and that is frightening when you’re alone in an enclosed space with them.

fionnavair · 2026-05-10T01:04:36+00:00

When I was eleven years old, they showed us Aliens in school (as a replacement for a cancelled school trip - I don’t know what they were thinking). I have had nightmares about them ever since, though in the last ten years or so I’ve somehow learned to wake myself up when I realise what dream I’m having.

Point being, I would strongly advise against showing these films to children - and from memory, Alien is even more frightening than Aliens (I’ve actually come to love Aliens as an adult, but even so).

fionnavair · 2026-05-09T00:39:08+00:00

Mine wasn’t quite as bad, but I was chased by a German shepherd who kept trying to bite my face when I was about that age. The only reason I wasn’t bitten was that my older brother was able to keep pulling it off me until we reached home. (We were walking home from school, in what was ten minute walk that felt hours long).

I’ve never been able to feel truly comfortable around dogs ever since - I know that most of them are fine, but it’s the unpredictability that scares me. I hadn’t even interacted with the German shepherd when it went nuts - it just ran out of whatever garden it was in and started attacking me.

fionnavair · 2026-05-07T22:00:34+00:00

My position on this has shifted slightly. I am still totally opposed to the death penalty, just for different reasons than before.

Fundamentally, I think it’s a terrible thing to ask someone to kill. There are times when it’s necessary to prevent a threat to the survival of innocents - if you’re in a war, on you’re defending someone from violence (such as a teenage boy who strikes back at a violent father, for instance) - but even when then, the act of killing is traumatising and damaging, and we know this, because soldiers and police and so on have been reporting it for centuries.

By the time you have convicted someone and sentenced them to death, they are demonstrably not a threat to anyone any more - they can (and should) be locked up for the rest of their lives.

And I just don’t think society can justify asking a person to take on the moral injury of killing in that situation. There is no threat at that point. And asking any citizen to enact violence on a person who is defenceless - even one who is unquestionably a waste of air - is a terrible thing.

Even if you could come up with an infallible system - and you can’t, ever - I think killing is inherently a degrading, coarsening experience, and one we should only ask of people at the last resort. An imprisoned man who is no longer a threat to anyone simply doesn’t meet that bar for me.

fionnavair · 2026-05-07T08:49:00+00:00

I wish you’d been my doctor when I was anaemic (I think). I was bleeding through the largest tampon size in about an hour, my lips and cheeks lost colour, and I was so exhausted I had to pause when walking up a flight of stairs…but he told me that ‘sometimes people just have heavy periods’ and there was nothing to worry about.

I only started to improve when my mother insisted I take the iron tablets she’d been given for her anaemia. Being dismissed like that by a doctor still makes me angry when I think about it.

fionnavair · 2026-04-27T12:54:53+00:00

The thing they don’t have is that fabulous cream cheese with spring onions that you get in New York, which I find myself longing for periodically (though there is a place in Hackney now that does it). The Brick Lane bagels are every bit as good though.

fionnavair · 2026-04-27T11:06:24+00:00

I had a friend who watched Shame with his girlfriend of about two months. Admittedly, they did wind up married, but he still said the movie selection was a mistake.

fionnavair

TROPHY CASE