We have no use for a purple hat. Not even one with golden strips around it and white net trailing from the back, but it lay so wizardly on the dim night pavement that we turned into enchanted children and picked it up. Now the people in dark coats in front of the pub smoke their cigarettes between shouts to friends across the street, and they look at the hat as we walk through the knotted crowd. It is a bit like possessing a secret thrill, like the evening we found the tower fenced off in a construction compound. It had been thick with gravity, a tower rising from a small castle bewilderingly by a road, crossed by cars with windows rolled up and people heading to the Starbucks some strides away. We had gaped, crossed the road and followed the fence all the way around to a place where we could poke our faces through a gap between two upright concrete slabs and watch the tower closely. A small plastic board said it was a high school's library.

The purple hat is also only a purple hat thrown away, now its conical inside littered with clumps of dirt. But we can't bring ourselves to fling it into a bin with crushed coffee cups and tissues people have blown their noses in. It could have been a magical creature, this one, and for the instant that we grinned stupidly and bent to pick it up from the road, it was. We leave it perched on a mailbox, grand and humble at once on the throne.