Snub spoilsports, urges VICTORIA GALLAGHER-O'HOULIHAN

I'M SO excited. I know there used to be a Christmas before Harry Potter. But that doesn't count. I also know that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I, like Sex and the City, will be just too popular and festive for certain people's tastes. These certain people will be familiar to anyone who ever committed the terrible crime of being popular. These people are spoilsports.

You can pick a spoilsport out in a crowd. They usually look miserable, typically score a 7 or less for presentation, and they almost always pretend to be stupid.

Spoilsports would have us believe that they don't watch TV, can't tell one X Factorcontestant from another, and don't understand that "sick" means good. They make preposterous statements like " Fade Streetis nothing like real life", "Twitter is irrelevant" and "Victoria Beckham is too thin" in order to draw attention to themselves.

For the spoilsport, any music that’s popular enough to be on iTunes, anything that you can hum or dance to, is inherently suspect. Instead, they like movies from Serbia, magazines that don’t have any words on the cover, and that math rock duo that sound like a dishwasher.

Spoilsports are often so obsessed with bringing down the mood they actually come to like these things on purpose.

Just to be even more awkward, there are certain awesome things that spoilsports, presumably after some mumbling conference they have annually, are allowed to like. They’re great ones for talking up Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, for example, but they always do so in a spoilsporty way: “Look at me,” they seem to say, “I like it and you know me – I’m a spoilsport.”

It can’t be much fun being a spoilsport. In my weaker moments I almost pity them. But then I remember all the things I’ve heard and read about my beloved Harry Potter. Every year it’s the same old thing. “This film is too much like the book” and “You’d have to have read the book to understand the movie”. Hello? It’s supposed to be like the book. It’s a film of the book, dummy!

It is bad enough that they allow people who don’t know the difference between Gellert Grindelwald and Kingsley Shacklebolt to review Harry Potter films. It’s even worse when they insist that the movies make no sense without JK Rowling’s fine novels.

And? So? It is a well-known scientific fact that more people have read Harry Potter than are actually alive on the planet right now. Also, when you stack all the Harry Potter books sold on top of each other, they reach far beyond the known galaxy. Experts and professional aura surgeons concur that if JK regenerates the franchise as promised, the stack might actually reach where angels live.

Spoilsports can feign ignorance all they like, but statistically it’s pretty likely that they know far more about horcruxes than they care to let on.

Unless, of course, they’ve all left our galaxy because it was becoming, you know, too popular.