Dementor's Kiss / Molly's Age

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Catlady is suffering severe mental confusion from what Yahoo!mort has
done to webview of group messages.

Catlady applauds all of Nora's post
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/1460 but wonders
why Nora is cataloging saints.

Eustace_Scrubb wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/1442 :

<< And what exactly did happen to Barty Jr. after the Kiss? If we can
believe Lupin, the victim, although worse than dead, isn't in fact,
clinically dead. Without the soul, the victim has "no sense of self
anymore, no memory," but the brain and heart may still be working. So
is Barty in a special ward of St. Mungo's with other Kiss victims,
just existing, being fed via tubes? To what extent are their brains
still working? >>

IIRC Sirius's reminiscence of Azkaban was that most prisoners 'go mad'
from depression and despair, waste away, and die. (I don't think he
specified 'stop eating' as the reason for wasting away, but it fits.)

Maybe they didn't actually waste away because of going mad, maybe they
wasted away because of having been Kissed but left in their cells with
no feeding tube, etc.

Neri wrote in 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/1455 :

<< Actually, Molly remembers Ogg, who was "the gamekeeper before
Hagrid" (GoF, Ch. 31, p. 617 US) although she was at Hogwarts 10
– 20 years after Hagrid was expelled. >>

Talisman replied in 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/1458 :

<< Where do you get your assertions about Molly's age? Why do you
think she wasn't the same generation as Hagrid--or older? At least
Hagrid has all his hair (sorry Arthur). >>

I think it's the same chapter in GoF (where families visit the
Champions before the Third Task) in which Molly not only tells stories
about Ogg, the gamekeeper before Hagrid, but also reminisces of Arthur
having been caught by Apollyon Pringle, the custodian before Filch.
>From this, and the geneally middle-aged appearance of the parental
Weasleys, I long assumed that Arthur and Molly were at Hogwarts with
Minerva and Tom (and maybe Hooch, as she is grey-haired). That left
the problem of explaining why they left school in the 1940s and waited
until the 1960s to have two kids, and then waited another
approximately 8 years to have another herd of kids.

But JKR on her website has recently insisted there was no big gap
between Weasley children -- Charlie's last year at Hogwarts was
immediately before Harry's first, and Bill is two years older than
Charlie -- so all those people were right who insisted that Bill's
line in the same GoF chapter ("I haven't seen this place for five
years") referred to when he left school, not to some Old Boy visit,
such as checking some Hogwarts Library books for a curse-breaking
assignment...

So if there is no gap between Weasley children to explain away (and
the stuff about not having won the Quidditch Cup for seven years,
since the legendary Charlie Weasley was Seeker, and winning it in PoA
in Oliver Wood's seventh year was the only time Wood won it, has to be
somehow ignored as Harry misunderstood or JKR can't do Maths), then it
might well be that there is no long wait to start having children,
either. If they had Bill in 1971 instead of 1966, maybe they left
school in 1970.

It's like, early in OoP, Herself informed us that Lucius Malfoy was
41. Making him born in 1954 like my DH (which really irritated me,
because I had him born in 1949) which makes him leave school in 1971
... which makes Arthur and Lucius having been in school together,
where no doubt they were the same incarnation of Gryffindor/Slytherin
rivalry as Harry/Draco and James/Severus ... as many naive readers had
assumed from their silly fight in the bookstore in CoS...

Filch seems pretty old. Even if Squibs age like Muggles AND he doesn't
take care of himself, he must be in his late 50s at least. (Being 47
myself, I yearned to say 'late 60s at least', but I must admit that a
lot can be accomplished by not taking care of oneself.) If he was 50
in PS/SS in 1991-2, then he was 30 in 1971-72, the earliest year he
could have got the job under the current hypothesis of Molly's age. I
suppose it's possible he had been kicking around his parents' house
(or sleeping in an alley eating out of garbage cans) and becoming ever
more bitter until that age...