Why didn't Harry go to Grimmauld Place?

[meriaugust]

No: HPFGUIDX 89150

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, abbet69 at y... wrote:
> Why didn't Harry just go to Grimmauld Place instead of just 
sticking 
> his head in the fire.  He could have checked the house for Sirius 
and 
> if he wasn't in the house, at least he was in London by himself 
> without putting his friends in danger.  I don't think there's any 
> reason not to believe Harry could use the Floo Network from 
Umbridge 
> office.
> 
> Abbet

The simple answer to your question is that JKR says so: she needed 
to get Harry to the Ministry of Magic, duel with the DE's, loose his 
godfather and learn about the prophecy, and she did so in v. 
dramatic fashion. If Harry had just leapt into the kitchen at Number 
12, waltzed upstairs and found Sirius tending to Buckbeak's wounds, 
then we would have been denied a great battle sequence, the tragic 
death of a great character and the most important chapter in HP 
cannon: The Lost Prophecy. But the answer you are looking for is 
slightly more difficult. The simple fact of the matter is that Harry 
is, for all intents and purposes, a fifteen year old boy, and the 
more complex fact of the matter is that there is no easy way to 
understand how the brain of a fifteen year old boy works (trust me, 
I live with one who hasn't the sense to come out of the rain). There 
are lots of things that Harry *should* do but doesn't. There are 
dozens of incidents in the books in which our boy hero finds himself 
in a situation where a simple solution (one that the readers are 
probably screaming out at him) would have saved him a lot of bother 
and trouble and drastically changed the course of the novels. For 
exampe, in GoF, after he has figured out the egg clue and is stuck 
in the stairs under the invisibility cloak with his Marauder's Map 
just out of reach, I know I was screaming "Accio Harry! Accio you 
idiot!" Had he done that, he could have retrieved both the map and 
the egg, and kept Fake!Moody from using the map in the plot to kill 
his father. My point, and I do apoloize for being so long winded, is 
that sometimes the obvious solution doesn't occur to Harry, or to 
anyone that age. Plus it also sacrifices plot points. 
Meri (who after seeing Return of the King is sure Frodo and Sam took 
the long way around, and could have gotten to Mordor faster though 
without all that good plot and character development)