They're all just wild about Harry

By JULIE STARR

There's lively chatter as 4000 schoolchildren file into London's glorious Royal Albert Hall and look about in wonder.

The lights are low, there's a great blue planet suspended above and a distinctly Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry look to the stage.

Soon a rowdy band of Hogwarts students storm the aisles and stir up raucous chants of Gryffindor, the name of a certain adolescent wizard's school house. Thousands of young feet stamp in unison.

From the stage darts a bundle of energy - Matt Emulsion, an assistant caretaker at Hogwarts, he tells us. Mr Emulsion further fires out jokes - What do you call a snake on a car? A window viper - produces a wand and sorts us into houses. The boys from St Richards Catholic College in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, want to be in slightly sinister Slytherin, but are put into Ravenclaw.

There's a bang, a puff of smoke and actor Stephen Fry emerges from a large fireplace dusting floo powder from his shoulders.

"We're here to meet the most famous and most popular author in the whole wide world," he says. "Are you ready?" You bet we are. Were jumping out of our seats.

And there, stepping out of the spine of a giant copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is author J.K. Rowling.

"That's Rowling as in rolling pin," she tells Fry, narrator of the Potter books-on-tape and her interviewer for today's global question-and-answer webcast. "You can call me Jo."

Rowling appears awed by 4000 schoolchildren screaming their appreciation, even a little shy, but answers deftly the questions of children from Australia, Israel, France and South America.

She breezes through queries about her average writing day, what she read as a child - absolutely everything - and is careful not to divulge too much about Professor Snape, for example, to ensure she doesn't ruin future surprises.

"She was more secretive than I expected," 11-year-old Joshua Getty, of St Richards, says. "I was hoping for more information about the next book."

Rowling doesn't patronise her audience. She plays it straight. "No," she says, "I don't believe in magic in the way that it appears in the books."

But, she says: "I could be slightly corny and say I believe in other kinds of magic, in imagination, for example, and in love."

Later she reads from the new book, starting at page 583. We watch and listen reverently.

Another puff of smoke and she's gone.

Outside I meet Joshua Stretton, 6, of Hamilton, and his mother, Debbie, two of the winners in the Herald/Cathay Pacific competition, with publishers Allen and Unwin, for a trip to London to see the webcast. Erina McMath, aged 16, and Anne Crozier also flew over for the event.

"Yes," says Joshua, all smiles, he enjoyed it. The best bit? "I liked the reading bit."

But if Joshua was pushed to choose J.K. Rowling or the dinosaur skeletons down the road at the Natural History Museum, the dinosaurs would win.

"Still," he says, "I liked the magic." So did we all.