The Romance

[Carol]

SSS wrote:
> Snip>
What I reacted to -- and called your opinion -- is that I read your previous comments as saying, AS ABSOLUTE FACT, that there is no way those hours were missing, as in there was no reason in the world to consider that they might contain something mysterious or significant.  And I was trying to point out why, for many people, it was quite reasonable to think that there was!  They were left unexplained, and it seemed like a goodly chunk of time to a lot of us [that's where the opinion comes in, to me], so it wasn't weird or crazy to have thought there might be some clues there in a series which, at many levels, was a mystery.

Carol responds:

Exactly. "The missing twenty-four hours" is essentially HPfGu code or a catchphrase for what may have happened during that time, just as DDM!Snape was code for the various theories relating to Snape as Dumbledore's man (through and through). And we still don't know why it took so long or how the news got out so fast or even how DD found out about it given that Peter Pettigrew, hadn't told him. (Did he wake up suddenly realizing that he knew where they were and that the Secret keeper must have betrayed them? And when did he tell Snape, or did Snape feel his Dark Mark burning as Voldemort was vaporized and run to DD's office? Many of us used to think that they had hatched the plan of protecting the Dursleys' house with Love Magic together. 

Just as JKR dropped the "awful boy" clue about Snape and Lily in OoP and followed up on it in DH, she dropped the clue about "young Sirius Black" and the flying motorcycle that he lent/gave to Sirius (depending which edition of SS/PS you're reading), to be followed up in PoA. As SSS says, many of us expected additional follow-ups, but JKR never seemed to think that it was odd for Hagrid to keep Harry for the rest of the night and a day and not fly him to the Dursleys till the next night. (How long, I wonder, would it take to fly a motorcyle from Godric's Hollow (which we theorized is in Wales) to Little Whinging, Surrey, by way of Bristol? Anyone ever calculate that?)

> Siriusly Snapey Susan,
> who doesn't mind having her position challenged or questioned, especially when we're trying to figure out if we're talking about things in the same or different way, but who'd appreciate not having her words called "nonsense"
>
Carol responds:

Hear, hear.

Carol, noting that *all* of us are expressing our opinions and none of us is in possession of the full truth or "the facts"