"No blackberry jam this week?" Jules asked with obvious disappointment in her tone as she surveyed the rows of little glass jars laid out on the vendors table. She frequently volunteered to do the shopping for the household when she wasn't terribly busy with either work or her project, and Cook never minded handing over the list. For obvious reasons, she did most of it in London, but she did try to go to the Hogsmeade Market when she could. The blackberry jam was the main reason, because the stuff she bought from this booth was so much sweeter and richer than what Cook picked up in London. The other reason was that there was a little bakery booth that had the cutest little bundles of biscuits for sale — but those weren't groceries, and they never made it all the way back home before Jules ate them all, so it wasn't a defensible reason to make the trip all the way to Hogsmeade.

"Well... we'll get the raspberry, then, I suppose. And a jar of the apple-butter," she added, turning her attention to the basket she'd brought along to fish out her money and pay. Having traded a few coins for the two small jars, she turned and walked down towards where the bakery booth usually was — only to find that it had been replaced by what appeared to be a butcher. The table was laid out with thick, angry-looking chunks of red meat on big slabs of ice, and a vendor was wrapping one such specimen in brown paper for a customer.

Big chunks of raw meat was not what she'd been looking for (though it was probably much closer to some of the items on her list than the little biscuit bundles), and Jules was so dismayed she stopped in her tracks in the middle of the busy street, nearly dropping her basket. "Oh, no," she said, as though this was the worst discovery she had ever made. "Not you too."

Kingsley Wells