Rainbow Sunshine Blogs: Harry Potter Book Night at Waterstones, Bradford

On Thursday, I made the last-minute decision (well, it was about 5 hours before I had to set off for the event, but it was still too late to get my Hogwarts and Hufflepuff pins from home and too late for me to have put my camera in my bag) to go with a set of friends from BUSOM and one from RamAir to a Harry Potter Book Night event at the Waterstones store at the old Wool Exchange in Bradford. Two of my friends came in full-on Slytherin attire (one in a Slytherin uniform with tie, scarf, wand and a dark mark temporary tattoo, and the other in a Bellatrix-inspired costume complete with Bellatrix's bird skull necklace and a dark mark ring, as well as a wand and a dark mark temporary tattoo), while a couple of the other girls just wore house-relevant T-shirts/scarves/hoodies. Meanwhile, I was just in my BUSOM hoodie and my Moby Dick show T-shirt.

To start proceedings, each attendee was sorted into Hogwarts houses for the competition aspect of the event, as we would be scoring points during each activity. We each had the Sorting Hat placed on our heads and we picked a folded slip of paper containing our house at random from a hat. This meant that many of us were sorted into houses that were not our official houses. For example, my two aforementioned Slytherin friends were both sorted into Hufflepuff, and a Gryffindor friend and I (a loyal Hufflepuff) were both sorted into and scoring points for Ravenclaw for the evening.

I was sorted into Ravenclaw for the night ...

But I'm a Hufflepuff!

The first activity was a treasure hunt where we each had a piece of paper with the names of ingredients involved in making polyjuice potion (powdered bicorn horn, leeches, lacewing flies, knotgrass, fluxweed, and shredded Boomslang skin), and we had to raid the children's section of Waterstones to find these ingredients and write the letter that identified each ingredient onto the sheet. As there were only approximately three Ravenclaws, we only scored 3 points for each of the first two activities.

The second activity was a wordsearch, where we had to find a large set of words associated with Harry Potter, including Riddikulus, Morsmordre and Expelliarmus, either horizontally, vertically or diagonally as well as forwards or backwards.

After a short break for buying ourselves presents (see below), white hot chocolate and either jelly beans or chocolate frogs (Freddo bars), the third and final activity, the quiz, commenced. We teamed into our houses (due to there being a lot of Hufflepuffs, Hufflepuff had the largest number of groups, while Ravenclaw only had 2 teams for their 3 members) and answered questions on charms and spells, jinxes and hexes, transfiguration, potions and ingredients, curses and the dark arts, and a "wildcard" round. Having not read the books (not because I don't want to, but because it would take a lot of concentration and time I currently don't feel like I have), I could only answer a few of the questions myself, but my aforementioned true Gryffindor friend was very enthusiastic and keen to share her knowledge of Harry Potter and we managed to achieve 100% in every round, reaching a total score of 2190 points!

In the end, Hufflepuff (probably due to their having several teams for the quiz) won both the quiz and the competition overall, followed by Gryffindor and Slytherin, while Ravenclaw came 4th with 3000 and something points (we suspect someone else had a small Hufflepuff team). One of my friends in a Hufflepuff team won a bookmark for being the most enthusiastic team member, and we were all given certificates of attendance.