When I grow up I want to be a witch...

I did. And I still kinda do. Wouldn't it be great to be a (stereotypical) witch? One who can control the weather and fly around on a broomstick and turn one's enemies into toads? Although I'd probably want to forego the whole wart thing, and I definitely wouldn't want to get caught and burnt at the stake (and let's be honest, real witches would totes never allow themselves to die that way). 

Now, I'm not going into the whole argument about how Wicca is a religion, or how some people are practising witches. That is completely not what I'm talking about, and if you fall into that category, good on you!! I grew up in a time when Harry Potter was a new and evolving story that was more real to me than the fictional real world of school, homework and ballet practise. For me, the idea of being a witch was quite a romantic one, where every single one of your magical endeavours were closely tied to your role of combatting evil on a daily basis (in many instances the evil was the possibility of rain - I had a rain dance that totally stopped that from happening, and the fact that I lived on an island with 300 sunny days a year had nothing to do with it). I felt closely linked to every one of the characters in these books, and every time they learnt a new spell or about a new part of the magical world, I felt like I was learning this with them.

We all grow out of these things, I suppose. However, I don't regret a single moment that I spent as a teenager pretending to be a witch. And that involved a lot of time - I'm lucky I was naturally good at school/homework otherwise the amount of time I spent 'witching' would have caused me to fail many of my 'proper' exams. It made no difference to me though. I had one particular friend who thought of herself as much a witch as I did, and we secretly underwent all our magical training, not allowing the so-called muggles to catch a glimpse of our secret magical world. We had our magical names for each other, and a secret language called Artisanish, which we could not only speak and understand, but we could write too!!

Gotta love my HP hat!!

My friend and I spent so many weekends playing at witchcraft. We had our own version of Hogwarts, which we inflicted on our little sisters and their friends over the summer holidays. We would teach them things about the History of Magic, spell casting and Trigonolometry, which was a subject I invented so that I could talk about the Lord of the Rings as well. We taught them how to duel with their self-decorated wands, following the rules of duelling as well as any Hogwarts student should, and we would have magical sing-a-longs, with songs such as 'The elves go marching one by one' and so on. It was so much fun, although our sisters hated it when we set them homework!!

So that's my story about how I thought I was a witch when I was younger. Unfortunately we had to close our Hogwarts school down once I moved to the UK, but I'll always remember it as some of the best days of my early teenage years. I don't really have the time to do the same thing now, but I still dream of the days when my biggest priority was learning the correct block for a standard disarming spell. As we all do....