Yesterday, in one of J. K. Rowling’s regular forays in to the sex and gender debate revealed that she was born with a genetic blood disorder:
I was born with a bleeding disorder. That doesn’t make me a new variety of human. I don’t feel ‘less than’ people without it, but nor does my bleeding disorder mean an inability to clot should be considered an innate attribute of the human species. I inherited an unusual physical anomaly. Nature made a mistake.
It is tempting to remember Roy Phipps from Troubled Blood also has a genetic blood condition – von Willebrand Disease.
‘What’s von Willebrand Disease?’ asked Robin.
‘A bleeding disorder. I looked it up. You don’t clot properly. Gupta remembered that wrong; he thought Roy was a haemophiliac.
‘There are three kinds of von Willebrand Disease,’ said Strike. ‘Type One just means you’d take a bit longer than normal to clot, but it shouldn’t leave you bedbound, or unable to drive. I’m assuming Roy Phipps is Type Three, which can be as serious as haemophilia, and could lay him up for a while. But we’ll need to check that.
Troubled Blood, Chapter 14
If Rowling does have von Willebrand Disease, it isn’t that uncommon. It is the most common hereditary blood clotting disorder in humans, affecting 1% of the population. In terms of lake inspiration, perhaps it is time to take a second look at both the title of Troubled Blood and the blood malediction featuring in both Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts.
J. K. Rowling has changed her Twitter (X) header and updated her profile picture with dramatic turquoise pendant earrings. The image is of Tower Alley situated at the the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour on the south coast of England, the UK’s largest naval base. The tower in the background is 
Although most fans are still digesting the wonderfully complex plot of The Hallmarked Man, J. K. Rowling has recently reiterated that her headers are usually clues to future books, it is probably a good time to remind ourselves of the headers most likely to refer to Strike 9. With The Hallmarked Man carrying themes of pregnancy, childbirth and babies, the images of a tree-house and scattered dolls, might mean a childhood theme for the next in the series.
A thirteen chapter preview is available for the lastest Robert Galbraith novel, The Hallmarked Man. This is a copy of the North American edition from Mulholland and the preview is available on the French website Decitre.fr, and is likely to be an error, so for the curious, check it out soon:
Having just finished the month-long Lake and Shed celebration of J. K. Rowling’s opera omnia, my dominant feeling is one of pride. Recording somewhat over 31 hours of video, mastering (or at least becoming competent) in video editing for the intro and getting to grips with the technicalities of rendering and uploading the content to Substack and You Tube, all within a month, was a challenge that I wasn’t sure I could pull off. Twenty-five episodes were dedicated to individual works of Rowling, and in each episode only a single example of lake inspiration or shed artistry was explored. The mine is so rich that we could easily produce another hundred and twenty-five episodes and still not exhaust what J. K. Rowling has achieved.
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