Learner Dad: Everyone in my family is a Harry Potter stan, except me

My son was slower to convert. He just loves the word ‘no’. (He might have got this from his father.) Picture: iStock

I’m the only one in my house not reading Harry Potter books at the moment. And that includes my wife.

Our ten-year-old was the first in. She likes a good yarn and flew her way through the Diary of A Wimpy Kid series of books, which are very funny, and a training manual for kids on how to be sarcastic.

After that, she started into Harry Potter.

I knew she was hooked because we wouldn’t hear from her for hours, and this is a girl who likes to be heard. You’d find her curled up on the couch or resting on her elbows in bed, feet up in the air behind her, in a world of her own.

It’s great to see your child glued to a book because it means they’re not going to ask you for a treat. I was just a bit disappointed that it was Harry Potter.

This has nothing to do with the author JK Rowling, who has faced accusations of being transphobic. My problem with Harry Potter is that I don’t like the jolly hockey sticks, English boarding school feel of the whole thing.

Like a good critic, I’ve never read a single page of the books that I don’t like. But I’ve half seen a few of the movies in the background on Christmas Day and they’re a poor man’s Lord of the Rings. I’ve also seen Daniel Radcliffe (he plays Harry in the movies) on with Graham Norton a few times, and he seems a bit smug.

This is enough to make me allergic to all things Harry Potter. But there is no denying that Harry Potter is a benign cult for children.

It’s more than just seven books and a bunch of movies. It’s a way for kids to connect. When my daughter curls up on the couch reading Harry, she is joining a silent club of kids all over the world. It is one of the things that helped her settle in her new school last year when we moved to East Cork. Find a kid who wears a cape and a wand on International Book Day, and there’s your next friend.

When we went to karaoke night on holiday last week, she wore a Harry Potter t-shirt and told me she loves being a Harry Potter nerd. She’s all in.

My son was slower to convert. He just loves the word ‘no’. (He might have got this from his father.) For all that his sister tried to get him to become a Harry Potter nerd, he wouldn’t go near the first page of the first book. Until he did, without telling anyone, and now he’s nearly finished it.

He’s got the Harry Potter bug so bad that he was reading it in the queue for passport control coming home from holidays. I felt a bit embarrassed because it looked like we were showing off our bookish kid, but it was all his own doing.

He was allowed to play Minecraft on the plane, so that was the end of Harry Potter for a couple of hours. You’d be hard pushed to find an eight-year-old boy who’ll choose reading over video games. But then the weirdest thing happened. My wife picked up the book he’d been reading and got stuck into Harry Potter all the way into Cork Airport. Worse still, she loved it and she and the kids were babbling about it on the way home.

It felt like a betrayal. There is talk of Harry Potter movie nights and I don’t think I’m invited. I wouldn’t blame them in fairness — the last thing you need is Grumpy Dad harrumphing his way through the show, muttering about a poor man’s Lord of the Rings.

I have a choice. I can stay in the kitchen listening to The Rest is History podcast, glad of the time alone. Or I can face the fact that millions of kids and adults can’t be wrong — it might be time for me to head for page one of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. If you see me wandering around Cork with a cape and a wand, you’ll know what happened.