And so I padded to the other room, opened a wooden door, and all was well until I caught sight of a row of bathroom towels, all white and fluffy like rice, and then it hit me, the remembrance of things past, the things I did and didn’t do, the people I have lost.

In the first line – five. As in, syllables. No more and no less. This paragraph tries.

For the second line, two more. Which all adds up to seven. Like I’m cheaply doing here. If you can add Nature, great. Sticks of bamboo, butterflies.

Then we’re back to five. Observe the set style. Lyrical, cryptic. Philosophical. (Lightly, not too much.) Minimalist, zen. Now we're on the way.

Plane

“Wah,” said the woman next to me. “You travel everywhere. So brave.”

(No, I wanted to say. Not brave but cowardly. Never staying anywhere for long, always whizzing through, unable to sit and listen to all the stories of hope in despair, of the children running through endless pot-holed streets, sold for coins, and the women, always the women, the women who sit by firesides all over the world with their silent, terrible tales, tales no human should ever have to tell.)

“Oh,” I said, buckling up. “You get used to it.”

The elephant in the room was getting increasingly frustrated. Why was everyone pointedly ignoring him? Was he not large enough, should he be stretching out his ears a bit more? Was the sofa hiding him from view?

Somebody spilled cigarette ash onto his bulky frame. Another person neatly side-stepped his trunk. The elephant started jumping, dancing, then hopping on one foot. But still nobody noticed him, so he finally sunk, dejected, onto the Persian rug.

One thing was for sure. He would never forget.

What would be magic for you, if you were in Narnia? Would you, as a young faun playing tag in the woods, be agape as the trees parted to reveal a room in a big old house?

What would be beautiful for you, if you were of Narnia? Would you be entranced at a world with more colours than white, where the snows are quickly melting?

What would be a happy ending for you, if you were of Narnia? Would you realize that in a finale without Aslan, things are a lot more complicated and nobody really knows what to do?