Minerva McGonagall (ex_mcg485) wrote in bearandbarnacle, @ 2009-02-21 09:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | minervapost, secrets, topic |
Minerva McGonagall: Topic: Secrets
Minerva hasn't got many secrets anymore. She's more or less given them up now that she doesn't have a career riding on them and her reputation seems able to take care of itself.
This isn't to say that she's advertising about her life, but her greatest secret was Tom (and Myron, who would have been sixty by now, how old she's somehow gotten ... and how young she was then), and that she's discussed with at least two of her new acquaintances. Of course, she hasn't seen Susan or the Doctor in months, so apparently that secret is safe, but she feels no imperative to hide the experience now. This does not, however, mean that she's going to chat about it.
When she thinks about it, she's never had many secrets as such, apart from the affair with Tom and its result. There was Dumbledore and the reason why she was his standing date to Ministry functions, but that wasn't a secret so much as something everyone knew who had a reason to know. There's a distinction.
All Hogwarts professors who know what's good for them keep their private life private, since teachers who see most of wizarding Britain in their classrooms are perforce something of public figures and their personal enmities, love affairs and youthful indiscretions would be interesting gossip to literally every adult in their culture. She doesn't see this as secrecy so much as good self-management.
But to her deathbed, Minerva will never tell anyone how many pairs of shoes she owns.
The other day she was in her closet and took the time to count. She came out with the following figures:
Total number of pairs - 89
Worn on a regular basis - 17%
Having a raised heel - 97%
Having a heel over two inches - 60%
Having a heel over four inches - 20%
Not worn since she was in her forties - 12%
Clearly, this must never be revealed to anyone lest her reputation should fail to survive. She has a feeling that when she does eventually die, some charity-shop drag queen is going to be made very, very happy by some of the pairs she never wears and which are rather well suited to a certain era's better class of stripper, but that doesn't make it better. This, she feels, is a real secret.