"Any moment, someone's going to find out I'm a total Muggle": Hermione Granger admits feeling 'inadequate' as a working witch

From The Daily Prophet:

She's tried to establish a career away from Harry Potter with a job in the Auror Office at the Ministry of Magic and as a visting professor at Durmstrang's Academy. However with her Hogwarts days firmly behind her, Hermione Granger admits she's convinced her 'game' is up as a full-time witch.

She has tried to carve a name for herself as an adult, serious bureaucrat in the Auror Office but was forced out after trying to impose very formalised operational and report-writing procedures and admits feeling 'inadequate' about her teaching skills after Durmstrang students said she gabbled her lectures "and expected us to know everything before the lecture had even started."

In an interview with Quibbler magazine, the 23-year-old said: 'It's called the impostor syndrome. It's almost like the harder I try, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I'm just going 'Any moment, someone's going to find out I'm a total fraud, and that I don't deserve credit for what Harry achieved.' I can't possibly live up to what everyone thinks I am and what everyone's expectations of me are."

After she finally helped defeated Lord Voldemort (as re-filmed in the drama-documentary "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part II" in 2010), she had lost confidence in herself as a magician. It was only when she was appointed as assistant director of the Auror's office under director Stephen Chbosky the following year, that she began to rebuild her self-esteem, which was shattered again after many staff refused openly to take instructions from "that know-it-all bitch, er, witch".

Her confidence took a further body blow when Durmstrang's Quidditch professor Viktor Durmstrang completely blanked her at staff meetings. Hermione's on-off boyfriend, Ron Weasley, is happily working under his father in Muggle Artefacts, where he regales colleagues with ever more colourful anecdotes about how he and Harry defeated You-Know-Who.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

We went to see this film tonight.

If you've read all the books and seen the other films (and read the reviews of the film itself) you'll know pretty much what to expect. it doesn't disappoint, it doesn't delight, and the ending is a classic - it just stops half way through a scene and that is that.

Highlight: the fact that the actress playing Hermione Grainger is about six inches taller than the actor playing Harry Potter in real life, but he is taller in the books (or at least we expect him to be). So there is a load of Humphrey/Lauren clever camera angle stuff going on so that you hardly notice; unless you look out for it, in which case you have to admit, it's very cleverly done.

Except for the graveyard scene* where Hermione is supposed to lay her head supportively on Harry's shoulder but she forgets to bend her knees first, so it takes her about a minute to get her head into a seemingly natural position.

* Why on earth Harry's parents are buried in a Church graveyard, despite the fact that the wizards and witches in the stories are quite patently not Christians, is not explained.

Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince

We finally got round to seeing this film today. I normally take a great delight in going to see films that have had mediocre reviews just for the fun of being able to say that they were pretty good actually, but in this instance, the critics were right.

My main gripe being - bearing in mind I've read all the books a couple of times and seen all the films a few times and found that they were usually very faithfully and imaginatively translated to the big screen - that this time, they took a fairly long and complicated book, chose a dozen scenes at random (missing out some of the most important ones and including a few irrelevant ones, including two scenes that weren't even in the book*), filmed each scene in loving (but slightly inaccurate**) detail and sort of tacked them together into a half-way bland overall hodge-podge.

The best bit is fairly early on, when Luna Lovegood admits to Harry, "I sleepwalk. That's why I wear shoes to bed". I'm not sure that was in the book either, but at least it made me laugh.

* Neither the first scene, in which dementors (?) attack the Millennium Bridge, nor the scene halfway through in which Bellatrix Lestrange and Fenrir Greyback attack the Weasley residence in the middle of winter and then run off through a corn-field** where the corn is still standing eight foot high (or maybe it was a wheatfield, either way, that stuff would have been harvested months before then), were in the book nor do they advance the plot.

** In the book, Tonks rescues Harry from the Hogwarts Express; in the film Luna Lovegood rescues him. In the book, the baddies have to fight their way down from the astronomy tower; in the film they just sneak off. The Weasley residence appears in one or two of the earlier films and is in a copse or near a wood; in this film it's in the middle of a cornfield with nary a tree in sight. Why?

Emma Watson aka Hermione Grainger