It’s been a good week for ... Harry Potter fans
News travelled faster than a game of Quidditch. Excited Harry Potter enthusiasts from across the globe signed up for the festival dedicated to their hero and his Hogwarts cohorts. Its Facebook page took 250,000 hits, with 10,000 confirming they planned to attend the event taking place from June 23-25.
But then there was a twist in the plot ...
It’s been a bad week for ... Harry Potter fans
The festival, to take place at Bearsden Cross, East Dunbartonshire, has had to be cancelled due to too much interest.
Organised by a handful of volunteers from New Kilpatrick Parish Church and aimed at developing "better relationships" between church and community, it was to be a small Potter-themed event with stalls and games.
But the church minister, Rev Roddy Hamilton, said the plans had been "blown out of the water" by the massive interest on Facebook and the festival was called off amid concerns it had got out of hand.
People had been planning to travel from all over Europe and some had compared it to T in the Park, which attracts 80,000 a day.
But Hamilton said this small, local event, which has been held for the past five years, has been been "blown out of the water this week by our Facebook post going viral", and added: "We were going to do one or two events, a barbecue, a Quidditch match. It was very small scale but it didn't end up being like that."
And while Facebook had been useful in generating local interest in previous festivals, the Potter theme had sent the post global.
"We just saw the numbers increasing and increasing," Hamilton said.
"It took us three years to get 155 likes on our church Facebook page and three days to get to 10,000 on the Harry Potter page."
The minister said they were not set up for the level of interest it generated and there were concerns about "safety, parking capacity and licensing implications".
So T in the Park Potter-style won’t be coming to sleepy suburbia after all.
Even the most powerful spell can’t turn Bearsden into Balado.
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