Snow White and the Seven Samurai

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Once upon a time there was a little house in a big wood.

Not all little houses in big woods are quaint or charming, or even safe. Some of them are piled to the rafters with stolen car radios, others house illegal stills used for making moonshine (so called, they say, because one carelessly dropped match could lead to a fireball that’d be visible from the Moon). Some of them are the lairs of big bad wolves dressed as Victorian grandmothers, not that that’s anybody’s business but their own.

But this particular house is quaint. Roses scramble up the door-frame like young executives up a corporate hierarchy. Flowers bloom radiantly in its small but neat garden, and for once they aren’t opium poppies or coca plants or commercially exploitable varieties of the mescal cactus. Just in case there’s any doubt left in the onlooker’s mind, it has shiny red front door with a big round brass knocker, which in these parts is a sort of coded message. It means that if you go inside this house, the chances are that you won’t be strangled, stabbed, smothered with a pillow or eaten, although you may easily die of terminal cuteness poisoning. If you’re particularly observant, you can probably deduce more about the people who live there from the seven brightly coloured coats and hats hanging just inside the porch, and the fact that the lintel of the door-frame is only four feet off the ground.

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