Running back to Harry Potter

With a few days until pay day, we're skint, so for the sake of a cheap evening, we stayed in and watched another Harry Potter.

There's a drastic jump in quality between the first two (special effects about as good as Captain Pugwash) and the third, where all of a sudden Hogwarts is surrounded by a detailed landscape, rather than lots of night and fog. Had they got the landscape gardeners in or something? It's mysterious.

Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkhaban is also the first properly gloomy Potter; apart from an inflated aunt at the start, everything is dank and dark and there's rather too much running around in the woods at the end. Harry Potter himself doesn't look quite so creepily young any more, and there are lots of pumpkins, for no clearly explained reasons. Oh, and Timothy Spall and David Thewlis, and I'm pretty damn sure I saw Ian Brown from The Stone Roses having a pint at the start.

That could have been some sort of hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation though; I got up at 6 this morning and went for a run, then this evening went for another run, this second one a bit too quick and a bit too long. Still, that's another 11 km banked today, so the training chugs on towards the half marathon at the end of next month without anything looking disastrous.

Yet.