When I was very young I was given a snow globe for Christmas. Inside the plastic dome was a woodland scene in front of which skipped a small likeness of little red riding hood, complete with basket and, pacing in front of her, the wolf. It would be hard to say the monster was menacing, though the modeller had clearly tried to convey this meaning through showing its teeth, lolling tongue and hunched gait. But despite this, the overall appearance gave a wonderful impression of the loneliness of a pine forest in winter, and this strange initial encounter between girl and beast. The tableau entranced me, but I wanted to wander further among the conifers. What was behind the trees? Turning the globe round I was immediately annoyed to find that the back was made out of blue opaque plastic (which, I knew, worked from the front as a clear blue sky) but I found that if you held your eye close to the dome and squinted you could just see behind the trees. Of course what I saw was that all the characters and trees were flat, but this didn’t matter, I knew I was now looking beyond the illusion to its mechanics. Oddly enough this did not spoil the fantasy, but instead made me feel like I’d been let in on a secret, one of the same order as finding out where the tooth fairy lived. A few stray snow-flakes completed this scene beyond, giving it a feeling of abandonment, like a deserted shop, but also a kind of pregnancy, as if something was about to happen, or maybe that whoever had been there had only just left.

For events to be magical, there has to be magical characters making them so, and even the brushes and pots of glue they leave behind them retain some of that enchantment.