help!

[quigonginger]

OK, maybe the exclamation point was extreme, but I have a post for 
which I didn't know what code to use.  I finally (after scrolling 
several times the length of the list) settled on 3.4.7.  Does anyone 
have a better suggestion?  I'll copy it here to save you time. 
It's #45448 (that's for my benefit).

Thanks, Ginger the Bewildered

I always thought that the wizarding community is much smaller and 
more tightly
knit than our own world. If you think about it, since there is only 
one
wizarding middle/high school in all of Britain, that means that every 
witch and
wizard in Britain knows every other witch and wizard in Britain as 
well as you
and I knew people we went to school with. Better, in fact - there 
would be no
moving around and changing schools, so they would go to the same 
school for all
7 years (barring expulsion), *and* it's a boarding school, so 
everybody sees
each other at every meal, on weekends, etc. They would know people 7 
years
older and 7 years younger, plus names of kids whose tenure overlapped 
their
siblings, and even their parents and children. They would all hear 
the same
school legends of former students. It's not like the silly remark 
people often
make (at least here in the US): "Oh, you're from England? Do you know 
Bob?" 
People in the British wizarding community *would* be likely to know 
each other.

It appears from Malfoy's statements that it is possible for a 
wizarding family
to send a child to a foreign school. This would have the effect of 
having that
child enter the British wizarding community as an adult. He would be 
less
well-known among the Hogwarts graduates who form the majority of that 
society,
although that could be an advantage, since his peers would never have 
seen the
stupid things he did in school. Take Fudge, for example. He doesn't 
seem like
a distant politician; he seems more like a guy you knew in school - 
because
most people in the WW *did* go to school with him.

I believe that Lily and James are well known so early in adulthood 
simply
because everybody goes to the same school. We know that James played
Quidditch, which only 28 students in any given year have the 
opportunity to do,
and the sport is wildly popular, so this would automatically have put 
him in
the spotlight. As his girlfriend, Lily would also be well-known even 
if she
never did anything else to get noticed (and I suspect she did). Frank
Longbottom may have had a spotlight position at Hogwarts as well. (Do 
we know
of anything yet? Prefect? Class clown? Know-it-all? I regretfully 
don't
have my books with me, and I don't recall any tidbits about his 
school days.) 
If so, he would have had a social advantage as soon as he and his 
classmates -
who all knew him - graduated and started contributing to society.