Godric's Hollow and Neville---Some Unexamined Assumptions

[Eric Oppen]

No: HPFGUIDX 31880

Somebody above mentioned that a straight line from Bristol to Surrey (which
is just south of London, making Harry a resident of the outermost ring of
London 'burbs, if I remember my UK geography correctly---of course, when I
was there, I resisted leaving London with resolve worthy of a better cause)
goes to Wales, and then to Ireland.  Hence, we here have assumed that
Godric's Hollow must be in Wales.

_Why can't/shouldn't it be in Ireland?_  Lots of British people live there,
and we don't know but that James and/or Lily aren't of Irish or Northern
Irish origins themselves---they could have wanted to live there for lots of
reasons.  Maybe James' work that brought him in so much money was writing a
series of childrens' books that had the side-effect of turning reasonable,
normal adults into obsessive fans who speculated endlessly about who, in the
series, should/would go out with whom, and why---and the Republic of
Ireland's tax structure is far more author-friendly than the UK's is.
Artists, authors and inventors get substantial tax breaks there.

As far as Neville being too young for the Lestranges to put him under a
memory charm, there are two unexamined assumptions here.

One is that the Lestranges and Barty Crouch Junior would _not_ have, forex,
tortured little Neville in an attempt to make his parents talk.  This
postulates a level of benevolence on their part that, frankly, I do not see.
If there's _anything at all_ beyond the range of a Death Eater desperate to
find Lord Voldemort, I don't know or _want_ to know what it is.

The second is that Neville had to have been very young when the DEs arrived.
What if he was, say, five or six or so?  He could have given testimony---at
least he might well have been able to in the US; ISTR that children that
young can and have testified, albeit with special modifications of court
procedure to allow for their age.  All we know AFAIR is that the attack on
the Longbottoms came when Voldemort had been gone for a while and people
were beginning to breathe easier again---hence the rage against the
Lestranges and BCJr.

*putting fireproof armor on*