RIP Sir Terry Pratchett

This is not a Harry Potter related post but I hope you'll forgive me for that. I'm incredibly saddened to hear of the news of Sir Terry Pratchett's passing after years of battling early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Members of my family have suffered with Alzheimer's and dementia and it is a truly awful illness and is one of the worst things I can imagine having to experience.

I remember rather skeptically picking up a copy of The Last Hero in the small library in my hometown when I was in my early teens, thinking it was all a bit too fantasy for the likes of me (which is strange when I think about it, as pretty much everything I liked as a teenager was in the fantasy genre). I liked the pictures though and gave it a go. I had no idea who the characters were or what on earth was going on but I loved it.

After The Last Hero, I experienced the next few Discworld novels through audio books read by Nigel Planer (if you've not given them a listen, please do, they are excellent). To this day, Guards! Guards! still conjures up memories of sick days when I was home from school and my head hurt too much to read so I just lay on my bed and listened.

I've read what is probably the majority of the Discworld novels now and I even wrote an essay on Pratchett's use of metaphor in Going Postal as part of my English degree.

Everyone's favourite character from Discworld- including my own- seems to be Death so I'll leave you with a poignant quote from him:

'THERE IS NO JUSTICE... THERE'S JUST ME'.