I didn't go anywhere
they came to me.

I was working in Waterstone's in Islington as a summer job in 2003. Among others I served Nick Hornby and Alan Davies, but the highlight of that summer was another occasion.

It's a busy Saturday and I am running around like a blue-assed fly trying to sort everything and serve customers at the same time, and it's getting me a little irritated.

Mind you, even when I am irritated, I'm still irritatingly polite.

Anyway, I am rummaging behind the front till looking for an order form or something. My colleague to my left is serving a man and his wife, and in the queue behind them is a rather pretty girl.

I stop looking for the order form and make myself available for service while looking inquiringly in her direction, you know, the way you do when you want to attract someone's attention without actually saying anything.

She doesn't come over, so I call out "Hi, can I help you?". She really is rather pretty, in a very short skirt with milky-white, slender legs, curly brown hair and a quintessentially English face.

She looks up with amazement, then realisation, and says in the exact voice I have heard a thousand times, "Oh no, don't worry, I'm just waiting".

I get that shiver. You know, the one where you realise something just a minute too late.

It's fucking Hermione. It's only sodding Hermione Grainger. The under-age, completely illegal Emma Watson. And those two buying books to my left are her parents.

My brain struggles desperately to marry the concepts of Famous Person + Very Pretty Girl + Way Way Underage & Therefore Totally, Utterly Completely Wrong.

It fails and I instead self-flagellate later to get rid of the unclean thoughts that are still coursing through my head.

She was 13. Oh god.
(cypherspace is not a toaster, Sat 18 Apr 2009, 14:08, Reply)