I went to Catholic school where I wore a uniform, had to pray and sing hymns - but religious schools are pretty much the only option round these parts and in my experience it wasn't particularly 'strict'. Did that have an effect on me becoming an atheist? Totally, but only because its how I learnt all about the church and its teachings. But I wouldn't necessarily say I had any bad experiences related to my time at school, if anything it was mostly positive - I just saw the whole religious part of it to be a bit of a waste of time.

Eddie, you say Buddhism isn't a religion whereas I have always just assumed it was. My knowledge of Buddhism pretty much is 'That one that seems chilled out and doesn't cause any trouble', so I wouldn't mind learning a bit more about it.

I forgot there was a US version of that. If you liked that, you may wanna check out the British Shameless. It ran for eleven series, but I stopped watching around the third or fourth when it started to focus on different characters.

I think it's one of those things where I just bought in to the hype too much. Maybe there's some cultural context I'm missing, or it's one of those that works much better when you grow up with it - but it just didn't really hit me as a seminal Christmas movie. I mean, for something called A Christmas Story - it doesn't really get very Christmassy until half of the way through!

For what it's worth though, I was still grinning like a madman by the end of it.

Ravenclaw in the house!

This web team business sounds intriguing, I'm in.

I'll try my best, aha. Chronology can be tricky with time travel, but here's my understanding.

Hope that helped!

My interpretation.

That's quite interesting to hear as I thought I was the odd one out in that respect. Possibly because when I brought it up during the time of 'Pottermania', people didn't really wanna hear anything negative said. I'm not so sure if it was 'emo Harry' that was the problem for me, it more just felt like nothing interesting was really happening.

I guess you could say I have a weird relationship with Harry Potter. I loved it at the start, hated it around the middle and found myself falling back in love with it near the end. But because I 'abandoned Harry' partway through, I don't really think I have the same level attachment that a lot of other people in my generation do.

I started reading the books around the time Goblet of Fire was published. I loved the first three (and still do), but the fourth not so much. When Order of the Phoenix came out, I was really excited to pick it up, but after reading it I pretty much gave up on the Harry Potter series.

Some years later when Deathly Hallows was released, I went along to a midnight launch with some of my friends who were big fans. I was not really too fussed when I got there but by the end I bought in to the hype. I ended up reading and loving the shit out of the book, so I went back and read the sixth for the first time and bloody well loved that too.

I'm not sure exactly why the middle of the series didn't do it for me, I've never went back for a second go. Maybe I should?