The not-so-magic steam train

On July 8th 2000, when I was 11 and ¾ I met JK Rowling. I wound down the windows of my mum’s car and let the tingling wind of the hazy July day tickle my chubby fingers. We raced the steam train which was chugging atop the tracks cemented on the once grassy knoll. Majestic in its metallic beauty, it seemed to choke on the very smoke that propelled it along. To my right, the giant cooling towers of Didcot power station, sheer mountains of bleak industrialism. Billowing steam, it seems now as if they were there to cloud the clarity of my memories.

We arrived and walked along the gravelled path to the railway station. I kicked myself for not bringing my homemade broomstick. She was supposedly aboard the Hogwarts Express. I climbed the stairs, and with a flick of dyed blonde hair, the magic maker was in front of me. We were alone, nothing but chintz separated us. I stalled — what was I expecting? For her to reassure me, with those shadowed eyes, that good will always triumph over evil?

From the moment I saw it race the tracks, I knew that the train wasn’t the real deal. Yet there was one truth I took from our brief acquaintance: that, if I used my imagination anything, even the famous writer that I told her I dreamt of becoming, could come true.

Alongside the pen she used to sign my book, which remains on a shelf with the relics of my childhood, I have held onto this wisdom. But the difference between myself and my childhood hero is that I didn't want to write fantastical plots with scarred wizards, enchanted portraits and those who must not be named. Although I relished burying myself deep in that printed world, I remained much too enamoured, and still do, with the world surrounding me.

I want to describe the buzzing excitement of the railway station that day. The screaming toddlers, forced to queue for too long for something they couldn’t yet understand; the undercurrent of excited children and adults gabbling about a world they managed to make almost real; the silence of those revelling in the heavy hardback, thick with 635 pages of further explanations; the clawing heat of a warm day, where ice creams melted making sticky fingers, whilst a thunder cloud hovered sure to wash the saccharine away.

I have travelled to over 30 countries, and I could review the top sites or the finest foods. But, I will never forget the moment I met her and realised that magic isn’t just imaginary; we can find it in a single recollection, even of a railway station.