Movie in Oxford, Scotland, shopping, wands, population

[Simon J. Branford]

No: HPFGUIDX 4189

Well I start with movie news (or more correctly rumours).
There is going to be some big film shot in Oxford in the next few days. The
crew that was setting up some lighting stuff would not confirm what film but
confirmed that they were setting up in more than one location in Oxford and
it was all for the same film.
Today they have been setting up in the quad of the Bodleian (library). They
have been putting up what seems like floodlights from a football pitch. The
library is closed on Saturday afternoon and Sunday - so I guess they will be
filming then.
During the week they have been setting up in and around Christ Church
College. I have heard today that they have closed off the dining hall there.
I would guess that they could not close this for too long a period - irate
students are not easy to deal with - so they must be filming there soon.
This led me to believe the rumours that they will be filming in Oxford over
the weekend and maybe for a longer period after that.
Possibilities are that they are filming scenes, which occur in the dining
hall, maybe Oxford is being used as Diagon Alley. I have other more wild
theories but will leave it here!


Hogwarts is in Scotland.
In CoS, when Snape is having a go at Ron and Harry over the flying car
incident, he mentions Peebles. Peebles is a small town, south of Edinburgh,
but very definitely in Scotland. For Harry and Ron to have flown over this
place they must have been in Scotland and to get back to England they would
have to have flown south.
Also JKR has said Hogwarts is the only wizard school for the UK and Ireland.
I am unsure though whether she meant Northern Ireland or the whole of the
country when she made this comment.


Neil asked: "I was wondering where the children get their regular clothes
from and what they are like?"

In shops. Maybe Diagon Alley has ordinary clothes shops as well. They then
import there stock from normal muggle suppliers. I wonder how Hermione would
react if she found out about the cheap labour in the clothing industry.
Ron and the rest of the Weasley's seem to have a supply of normal clothes
(they wear them when they go to play Quidditch up in their field).


Neil wrote: "Since you mention that furore, we haven't heard from young
Nicholas for ages (are you lurking here Nicholas?).  He was a fervent, if
not the only, supporter of the 'Hagrid's wand was not snapped' theory and
tried to enlist me to support his argument. I sort of agreed with him, after
a fashion, I think."

And I have had the fun of reading all of those messages for the FAQ's. I
still say it was not broken but that does not clear up the mystery of what
happened to Nicholas.

Christian wrote: "I assume that the demographic distribution agewise is
similar, but adjusted with a factor of two (i.e.,
the segment of the muggle-population aged 7-8 years in proportion of the
muggle-total old is equal to the segment of the wizarding population aged
14-16years in proportion to the wizarding total)"

I am not sure I agree with this step (I do not think it will make much
difference to the figures though). It seems to me, that during childhood,
wizard children develop at a similar rate to muggle children (age of first
crush, puberty, etc.).

Christian wrote: "I assume that the number of muggleborn wizards is negated
by the number of squibs born by wizards."

Definitely an assumption. Very unlikely to be true. Squibs seem to be very
rare but muggle borns seem fairly common.
But being a mathematician I know all about making assumptions, and again
this is unlikely to have affected the figures by any significant amount.
Unfortunately I have done little population modelling, or mathematics of
this kind (I hate statistics), so cannot really help.

Simon (who now has an interesting evening of work to look forward too)