We finally went to see the Harry Potter film, and very good it was too. It must have been good because I managed to stay awake.

This was a first for me as I am famous in the family for going to the cinema to watch 20 minutes of trailers, then having a two-hour snooze.

This started when daughter was small and I used to do a night shift and then have to stay awake to look after her.

Going to the cinema in the afternoon kept her occupied while I caught up on a much-needed kip.

As a consequence of spending all of her pre-school years, and much of the holidays since, curled up in seat 23 in row G, I now associate cinemas with sleep. Therefore my judgement on Harry Potter is it is definitely worth seeing.

I remember the book coming out just before we went to Spain a few years ago.

Daughter spent two weeks with her copy two inches from her nose. She read it on the plane, at the breakfast table, walking along the road, on the beach, in restaurants and in bed each night.

As soon as she reached the final page - on day three - she read it all over again.

The locals must have known her as that strange little English girl.

She is strange because initially when we weren't able to book tickets for the Harry Potter film, she and her friend pestered to be allowed to watch the Blair Witch Project on Sky TV.

Talk about going from one extreme to the other. After checking with her friend's mum, we let them. I thought it terrifying, and I'd seen it before, but they were unimpressed.

"Well you don't really see anything do you?" said daughter, "just piles of pebbles and twigs tied together."

Next day we went to a local school's Christmas fair. I have never seen so much art and craft and aromatherapy stuff in one place, most of it made by the children and their parents.

Going past one stall, which had bunches of twigs tied together for some sort of holistic healing purpose, I joked: "Look, Blair Witch twigs."

Daughter laughed but the stall's owner glared. I decided she might be a white witch and decided to restrict my jokes to Harry Potter in the future.