[HPforGrownups] Re: Dumbledore and other leaders WAS: Moody's death

[Lee Kaiwen]

No: HPFGUIDX 181903

Lee responded:
> Or just keep him at Hogwarts and not send him back in the first place?

Carol responds:
> DD has made sure that the protection at Privet Drive ... is still 
 > in place until his seventeenth birthday by having Harry
 > return there during the summer holiday.

Yes, this was the explanation as DD gave it. Moody gave a different 
explanation:

"Your mother's charm will only break under two conditions: when you come 
of age, or you no longer call this place home.... You and your aunt and 
uncle are going your separate ways tonight ... so this time when you 
leave, there'll be no going back...."

Moody's and DD's explanations are almost, but not quite, the same. DD's 
explanation seems to imply there's some sort of residency requirement -- 
that Harry has to physically reside at Privet Drive for at least a small 
part of each year (could Harry have stayed over one summer at Hogwart's 
and still returned the next?) He is, in essence, homesteading; it's his 
physical presence which determines whether the place is still home.

Moody's explanation, OTOH, implies that Harry's intent, rather than 
physical presence, is the key, and DD/Moody's plan sets out to create a 
situation in which Harry is intentionally abandoning Privet Drive for 
the purpose of breaking the charm. Seems unnecessary. Why not just take 
Harry away without the intentional abandonment stuff, and allow the 
charm to expire naturally later? Intentionally breaking the charm seems 
to do nothing more than deliberately and unnecessarily tip off the MoM.

> Nor can they Polyjuice Harry to look like Dudley since Dudley also has
> to leave Privet Drive.

But Dudley can leave any time once Harry's gone -- say, three or four 
days later. By the time the DEs figure out what's happened, Harry's long 
gone. Nor does it seem like they'd waste a lot of time on Dudley once 
they discovered he wasn't Harry.

Carol:
> The Disillusionment Charms must have been performed before they
> arrived. But then they had to be lifted at 4 Privet Drive, so the
> Order must have been counting on the protective Charm once their
> presence had been detected.

But the issue is not protection -- it's secrecy. The moment the MoM 
figures out there's something up inside Privet Drive -- whether they can 
get in or not -- every DE in England is parked outside the place waiting 
for the charm to lift (or to be deliberately broken).

Lee:
> Hagrid riding a flying motorcycle. That's not magical activity?
> Mooody's packing a six-er of polyjuice. That's not magical activity?

Carol:
> I don't think those two count. Neither do the brooms or the Thestrals.

Well, obviously JKR, at least, wasn't thinking of them as "magical 
activity". It then becomes a question of what constitutes the "magical 
activity" that triggers the Trace. Is it only at the moment the spell is 
cast? And does it only involve certain types of spells? Then it would 
sound like, Trace or no, there's an awful lot an underage wizard could 
get away with.

Lee:
> ...complaint about the attribution line...

Carol:
> Let's just say that it does sound slightly sarcastic

Thanks for the candid feedback. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I 
feel like the odd-fellow-out at a MagicEye viewing; I'm staring at my 
attribution line until I'm bug-eyed and I still can't see the sarcasm, 
but everyone else says it's there, so I've no choice but to believe them.

> BTW, if you post from the list, you won't have to worry about your
> e-mail reader acting on its own a la Harry's wand.

I download all my e-mail and reply offline, so it'd be a bit of a hassle 
having to go online especially to reply to HPfG posts). Besides,
the text editor I use for off-line replying has a number of useful 
features that posting from the list doesn't: line counts, word counts, 
spell-checking, and the nifty ability to automatically reformats ">" 
paragraphs, which saves me a bunch of time having to do it manually. 
Besides, trying to compose long messages in that tiny little textbox is 
just too confining.

OK, one and all. I've changed my attribution line (took long enough to 
find the setting) to:

<Name> had this to say on <date>

Any objections :-) ?

CJ