Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Juvenile Court
With huge apologies to J. K. Rowling. Just not SINCERE apologies!
One of the great culture shocks for Americans traveling in Europe are the incredibly low drinking ages.
In France and Spain it is actually 16!!
That is not a typo!
And in Britain, while one has to be 18 years old to buy booze, one can order beer or cider with food starting on one's 16th birthday!
By contrast, the drinking age is 19 in most provinces of Canada. It used to be as low as 19 in some American states but Congress passed a bill a couple of decades ago requiring the states to raise their drinking age to 21 to qualify for federal highway funds. States will scream "state sovereignty" whenever one of their citizens challenges their statutes and actions as unconstitutional but they readily SELL that sovereignty for federal funds!
The real reason we Americans hold the drinking age at 21 is that it cuts down on bar fights. Does not eliminate them, of course, but cuts down on them!
You see, 19 and 20 years olds can be full of piss and vinegar and are even worse when beer is added to the mixture!
Sometimes the older guys are in no mood to put up with that shit.
But any young British lad can waltz on into a pub and order a pint of stout as long as he also orders some food!
It really causes problems over there as you can imagine!
You thought we Americans have problems with drunken teenagers! They have a Wales of a time with them in Cardiff and Swansea! They keep the bobbies busy in London! Drunk teens are bad enough in Kent, Washington but it is LEGAL for them to drink in the shire of Kent, England! Even if they cannot order Scotch on the rocks we have 16 year old Scots on the rocks! If they see a naked blonde girl riding a horse in Coventry, they just assume that she's another inebriated teenager. Lord have mercy on Mercia! It's enough to make the ghosts of Derby glad they're dead! The Sheriff of Nottingham would rather deal with Robin Hood and his Merry Men!
And so in Juvenile Court, in the case of Crown v. Harry Potter:
"Mr. Potter! You were seen along with some of your friends from the Hogwarts School in the pub. You drank at least four pints of Guinness Stout in two hours. You sang the JACOBITE version of Rule Britannia! and you provoked a bunch of rowdies from MANCHESTER by shouting ARSENAL cheers! To defend yourself against these outraged UNITED fans, you shrank one to six inches in height and turned another into a woman. A particularly ugly woman at that. The rest put up their hands and said, 'Okay! Okay! Ever'ting's all right!' Fortunately these spells wore off by morning.
Then you were found, unconscious and with injuries, along with your damaged broom, at the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square! What have you to say for yourself?"
Those Hogwarts kids love to fly as close as they can to such landmarks on their brooms without actually hitting them. But sometimes, especially if they've been drinking or smoking pot, they hit them!
One should NOT drink and then fly on one's broom!
I understand David Chick (as Spiderman) spoke with Harry Potter while Harry hovered near the gantry over the Tower Bridge on his broom. Potter also cast a spell on that little bag of purple flour so it would home in on Tony Blair's spine right between the shoulder blades!
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