The Elephant Cafe

Sunday, 17 June 2012

“Jo preferred the round table in the back looking out at the Castle” reveals the waiter drawing us in further, more than resolving our query definitively. “That one, right in the middle there,” he points it out.

We take an adjacent table with an equally compelling view of Edinburgh Castle ablaze in late afternoon sunlight. The collage of photos taken in the Café as she wrote, the adjacent press clippings, the women’s bathroom covered in graffiti addressed to the author and the many characters she created, the girls are absolutely buzzing.

Hannah and Joelle sniffed this place out on our walk up George IV drive as we walked to dinner last night. “There it is” they shouted as we walked past again on our way to tour Edinburgh Castle this morning.

“We’ll come back and have Tea after we see the Castle,” Laura promised without really calming them; and, so we did return to the Elephant Café – the birthplace of Harry Potter.

Ask nearly anyone to fill in the blank after speaking two of the most famous initials of the past 15 years – “J.K.” – and anyone not living under a rock will immediately respond “Rowling.”

Joanne, or Jo as she was better known then, wears an unruly mane of red hair in the photo collage hanging on the café’s shrine wall. The café’s most famous patron sports a well coiffured blonde mane in the adjacent press clippings, one tiny glimpse of the massive before and after HP changes in the life of a person who has handled celebrity brilliantly in a country resident to the most brutal paparazzi in the world. 

JK Rowling envisioned Scotland as she described many of the scenes that appear in the book.  With Edinburgh Castle staring in as the formative words came together on a napkin, I can certainly understand. Haggrid’s Hut that sits in the Warner Brother’s Studio outside London was flown by helicopter to the top of ridge lines in Scotland to shoot several movie scenes. Wednesday we plan to ride the train West from Fort William and across the train bridge that appears several times in the movie on the route to Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling said Hogwarts at a day’s train ride north of London which puts that bridge in about the right spot.

We didn’t expect our Harry Potter experience to go outside of London, but the trail is quickly becoming a remarkable thread in our trip. Getting to know the author by where she worked and the scenes that were in her mind has been amazing. Even better is watching it expand the definition of what seems possible, realistically possible. The idea of Harry and a wizarding school was said to have come to J.K. Rowling on a train ride. The idea was so moving and gripping she had to flush it out.

How much more confident are you in the conviction of your ideas, that it only takes one spark to get something rolling, after you have sat where J.K. Rowling gave birth to Harry Potter?

Before we go, Hannah writes a thank you to J.K. Rowling on the bathroom wall "for writing the books." On the hand dryer Joelle scrawls "Dobbie is a Free Elf."