Sr. and Mrs. Dursley, of 4 Alfeneiron Street, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, well done, thank you. They were the only people in the world who would be expected to get involved in something strange or mysterious, because they simply wouldn't go along with that kind of nonsense.

Mr Dursley was director of a firm called Grunnings, which did drilling. He was a tall, burly man, with almost no neck, although he had enormous mustaches. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had a neck almost twice as long as normal, which was very useful because she spent much of her time stretching it over the garden fence to spy on her neighbors. The Dursleys had a little son called Dudley, and in their opinion there was no better boy anywhere in the world.

The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their biggest fear was that someone would discover it. They thought they wouldn't be able to stand it if someone discovered the existence of the Potters. Mrs. Potter was Mrs. Dursley's sister, but they hadn't seen each other for many years, in reality Mrs. Dursley pretended she didn't have a sister, because she and her worthless husband were the least similar thing possible to the Dursleys. They shuddered to think what the neighbors would say if the Potters appeared on the street. The Dursleys knew the Potters had a little son, too, but they had never seen him. The boy was all the more reason to keep the Potters at a distance; they didn't want Dudley mixing with a kid like that.

When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday on which our story begins, there was nothing in the cloudy sky outside to suggest the strange and mysterious things that would soon be happening across the country. Mr. Dursley hummed as he chose the world's dullest tie for work and Mrs. Dursley gossiped happily as she struggled to fit a screaming Dudley into his high chair.