We live in a world of boxsets.

We separate our weeks into what we are watching. And having spent-slash-wasted a decent number of days on ‘Orphan Black’, ‘Murder Most Horrid’ and ‘Deadwood’, we missed a good chunk of the summer sunshine, and now we lie in wait for the postman to bring the newest season of ‘Game of Thrones’.

In the weeks running up to this, we will, naturally enough, rewatch the previous seasons. Aimée will remember every detail. I will be amazed to have forgotten a good number of deaths. And I really will have forgotten most of them. I recall there were some.

That’s the joy of my memory. I might recall the general arc of the story, but the details, marriages, births and deaths will have slipped my mind.

There’s always a reason to watch a film again, there may be something I missed the first time, or – in knowing the ending now, I might understand whatever hints and foreshadowing devices that I almost certainly missed the first time.

In any case, there will be actors and performances I enjoy without fail.
And so we come to Harry Potter. Of course, I will be watching with an eye to Fiona Shaw, she is a reason to watch anything.

Aimée and I will exclaim in prickled recognition when we see Zoë Wanamaker, Miriam Margolyes, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Eric Sykes, Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Michael Gambon (who I absolutely want to be when I grow up), Robbie Coltrane, Richard Griffiths, Helena Bonham-Carter, and the ever changing faces of the young actors coming into their own.

So many remarkable actors were attached to this series of films, and in a similar style to American Horror Story, it’s an ensemble piece, a massive collective of ostentatiously gifted actors, working their socks off and being wildly impressive.

I read the books to my mother. She loved to read but when her eyesight failed, she couldn’t manage books and so it fell to me.

I read ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ to her first. My mother had never read it, and could never fully forgive herself for missing it for so long. And so I read her the Harry Potter books.

She had wanted to hear ‘The Hobbit’ but having already tried it when she was younger, she reaffirmed her feeling that the description of the hairy feet was “unnecessary and off putting”.

Now, you might ask, would she have liked my book? So far there are no hairy feet, so that would bode well. There is a decent amount of workaday tragedy, of which she would undoubtedly approve.

Of course, I haven’t got to the murders yet.