Listing to Port

Falling sycamore seeds, snails rocking out on record turntables, recently-stirred tea, those who have been enchanted to dance until the end of time, whirlpools, drunk frames of reference, people who have really not solved the maze but don’t want to look silly by asking for directions, skaters, crashing aircraft, water going down a plughole, bits of ears, the curves of new green ferns, doomed civilzations, the potter’s wheel, DNA, those staircases you can see through the hatch in the locked door into the tower and the ivy that grows up the tower and in some lights the smoke that rises from it, triskelions, nebulae, the eyes of cartoon characters who have been hypnotised, giddy children, abandoned space stations that are orbiting a dying star, labyrinths, the unsettled patrols of predatory birds.

1. 5:55 each day, because you can put a snake next to your digital clock and pretend that the clock is a speech bubble.
2. That period of time between the opening and the closing of a good book that you are reading for the first time.
3. 1:01 each day, because this is the only time that the clock will laugh at your jokes.
4. 88:88, because it means that you have travelled in time and space to the dimension of broken clocks.
5. That period of time made up by stitching together every time in your life that you have said the word ‘interesting’.
6. The time between the birth of twins.
7. 6:06 each day, if your name is Bob and you like to believe that your clock is thinking of you. Do check: it is possible that your secret name in Clockland is Bob. Clocks are thoughtful like that.

1. Looking for a traditional stocking filler? Try legs! Best of all, they are completely free. You may even have some lying around the house yourself!
2. Each litre of seawater contains about 13 billionths of a gram of gold (on average), making it the prefect present for the homeopath who has it all.
3. Piss off a fairy and give them the name and address of a relative. Voila! A truly authentic mystical curse experience for all the family, for minimal outlay.
4. Repackage a selection of dog toys in smart boxes to make a quirky range of objets d'art and sex toys for the non dog-owners in your life.
5. Some people believe that all humans should have basic rights, such as the rights to equality, freedom from slavery, or the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Do you? If not, why not give basic human rights as a Christmas gift? If you are feeling particularly generous, you could even give them to everyone on Earth.
6. Let someone know you are thinking of them by telling them that you are thinking of them. No gift required!

1. That house that’s just down the road from you and there’s nothing particularly unusual about it, but somehow as the years go by it will manage to avoid routine knockings-down and bombings and the ivy wreckers of creeping abandonment long beyond the others of its type. And eventually it will end up in a time where people notice and celebrate it. There will be tours. It will be lovingly furnished with replica flatpack, and the guides will tell the tourists that this is where David Bowie wrote the punk ballad ‘Candle in the Wind’, and there will be a gift shop where one can buy kale oreos. Occasionally, on Revolution Sunday, actors dressed as Queen Elizabeth II in a range of rainbow replica outputs will perform a medley from popular twenty-first century musicals. But on a quiet day you could stand in front of that house now and almost be in the future.
2. The Eiffel Tower. Oddly enough, the Eiffel Tower will be one of the longest-lived of the current generation of landmarks, surviving both the second and third Dark Ages relatively unscathed. Even after the war of 9851, the tower’s twisted base will remain, at which point it will be mainly used as a memorial for the remaining three thousand years of its existence. By this point, there will be little to no material remaining that has not been replaced during one of the Tower’s many restoration projects, however. To recreate the experience of being in the future, stand facing the tower on a quiet, foggy night in summertime, wearing knee-length galoshes, brown sunglasses and a stick of cinnamon.
3. Central Johannesburg. Although the city will be largely deserted and partially buried by the year 4000, the buried portions will be excavated and lovingly restored around 6500 under the influence of the First Contact movement. Taking as their starting point the fragmentary footage remaining from the 2009 film District 9, First Contact believe that Johannesburg is situated at the planet’s zero reference point in Galactic co-ordinates, making it the obvious point of landing for any alien civilisations hoping to make contact. The 6500 reconstruction aimed to restore the physical city as closely as possible to its representation in the film. Owing to the mass migrations of the 3300s and 6100s, the future population of Johannesburg will be substantially different to its current one, so your best bet to experience the future now will be to find a time when nobody is around.
4. Amundsen-Scott polar research base, South Pole. Admittedly, in 9290 it will be a luxury hotel for the super-rich looking to experience real ice away from Antarctica’s overcrowded coastline. However, above ground it will be a fairly faithful replica of the original. Go outside on a day with poor visibility and you might never know the difference.

1. Are your cups nice and warm? You will need warm cups. This method of making tea is quite time-consuming, but well worth the wait. So you will need some method of keeping your cups warm for a long time, such as training up a dynasty of ducks to perpetually roost on them, using them for an alternative hot beverage whilst you wait, or keeping them in your bottom.
2. Now, invade or otherwise subdue a country where you can actually grow tea. If you come from such a country, it is acceptable to invade yourself. It is allowable to bring cake in such a circumstance. Historically, people invading countries other than their own have tended to bring guns. Guns do not go very well with tea. Cake is much better.
3. Next you will need to grow the tea. The right variety of tea is really important. You may wish to breed a few different strains of tea together to get the optimal variety. If you like your tea smoky, you could try introducing some dragon genes into the mix. Alternatively, waft your tea over the smoking remains of a nearby civilization, your own if necessary.
4. Pick the leaves. But not like that. That’s disgusting. Tell you what, why don’t you get someone else to do it?  
5. If you like your tea dry, dry the leaves. If you like your tea wet, wet them. If you like your tea a particular colour, now is the time to paint the leaves that colour. Personally, I like to bubble a civet fart or two through the water at this point. It’s what the Queen does when entertaining ambassadors, and never fails to give your brew an entertaining tingle.
6. The right cup is really important. Sorry, I should have mentioned that earlier, shouldn’t I? Never mind. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry, eh? Anyway, get your cup out from under your duck or wherever and fill it with leaves.
7. Heat your water to the correct temperature for the latitude, time of day and atmospheric pressure. You can test the temperature by travelling twenty minutes into the future and bathing a baby in the water. If the baby is too hot or too cold, you will need to adjust the initial temperature and restart.
8. Add the water and wait one bob and a jiffy. The tea will be ready when it turns the exact brown of a zombie’s teeth. It may be best to have a zombie in the room with you to check, but make sure to keep it away from the baby.
9. Do you like milk in your tea? If so, carefully lactate into your cup. If you like sugar, you will need to find the sugar nozzle. On most models of human, this is located behind the bellybutton and will become evident when the bellybutton is inverted. Consult your manual for further instructions.
10. Relax and enjoy your tea!

The Undergardener, the Nine Generals of the Owl Battalions, my Lord High Tweaker of Noses, the Knight of the Night of the Deep Ocean, the Knight of the Proof, the Guardian of the Number Three Bus, the Auditor of Dreams Lost, Madame Igniter, the Hat-Enchanter of the Privy Chamber, the Keeper of the Fairy Fruit, the Lord High Befuddler-in Chief, my Lady Shuts-Doors, the Burrower-of-Hollows, the Chief Whisperer, the Baronet of Solace to Joyful Souls, the Knight of Withered-Cities, the Keeper of the Red Bell, the Hope-Winder First Class, the Shepherd of Purples, the Mouth of the Moon-Emperors

1. This year, fewer than 1.7 million people were snatched from the planet’s beaches by batrachian squidbeasts and launched defencelessly into the horrific void of space. Last year, fewer than 2 million people suffered this fate, so I think we can all agree that we are travelling in the right direction.

2. Humans still mostly have noses, for now.

3. Those giant space whales who are aiming a giant meteor at Earth have been routing through alcohol nebulae all the way since Sagittarius B2. They are so drunk they will almost certainly miss.

4. Science has shown that people who are being eaten by velociraptors find the whole experience 32% less distressing if they are in a thankful frame of mind.

5. You are still alive at the moment, unless you aren’t, in which case no worries, 2017 is shaping up to be an awesome year for the undead.

1. When you dive into the core of a nuclear reactor because it seemed like a good idea at the time and emerge as the newly undead champion of people who do really stupid shit for no discernable reason.
2. When you accidentally steal a megalorry full of plastic skeletons instead of that other megalorry full of fine art that you were planning on stealing and whilst you are hanging out with the skeletons in hiding you end up making them into a giant automated plastic bonespider and using it to navigate the sewers where it scares off various of the city’s supervillians, leading to your coronation in the local media as some kind of mystery urban bonespider benefactor.  
3. When you travel so far into the depths of the internet that you emerge out the other side, blinking and slightly shit-smeared, into a shining land of future mysteries where you are transformed into pure and delicate data, routed seven times around the world, and remade into a superhuman with near-unimaginable powers apart from when the wifi is down.
4. When you have so many cats that eventually they forget that you are not a cat and initiate you into the secret midnight rituals of cats which involve fusing together into a giant furry catsuit twelve metres tall and rampaging about the city kicking bins over and you vow to use that knowledge to fight refuse-related misdeeds in your neighborhood like putting the wrong stuff in the recycling and so on.
5. When the dark speaks to you and you speak back to the dark and eventually you get to know it and it’s actually kind of nice and sometimes it will let you ride on its back through the glowing cities of the world and you can ask it to stop so you can hop off and right any injustices that you happen to see in passing and sometimes the dark will even punch people for you, it’s not fussy about that kind of thing.
6. When there is a dramatic global decline in imagination due to some kind of carbohydrate-borne virus making it quite easy to become more powerful than any given person can possibly imagine, so superheroes are ten a penny and they all have origin stories where they tripped over a doorstep and became more powerful than you could possibly imagine, or sneezed unusually hard and became more powerful than you could possibly imagine, or suchlike.

Tiny blue and speckled eggs, freckled eggs, lost eggs rolling far from home, half-domes of eggshell drying in the sun, squeggs, eggs with legs, eggs within eggs within eggs, blasted grey eggs done rainy side up, used eggs reversed in the eggcup, eggs to be bought in sixes from anarchist supermarkets for the throwing of at politicians, mathematical eggs with infinite subdivisions, the egg of the fake kangaroo and the other egg that was found behind it, an egg with an ocean inside it, ann egg with the outside inside it, the egg-shaped burns on the hands of those who have tried to steal the egg of the Phoenix and which in their turn will hatch in time, those sinister eggs that are almost indistinguishable from gravel at the moment but they will not be for long, other eggs too that are biding their time and some of those eggs might be in your kitchen just to warn you, eggs that one may trap sounds in until the whole world is silent, tiny red spider eggs, eggs that have been scrambled around a military obstacle course and back again, eggs that have been poached from poachers but then the poachers have poached them back, newly laid eggs still warm and straw-nestled.

1. A pie approximately the size and shape of a pie shop, having a rather convincing false shopfront and a well-hidden pastry lid; the point of which being to lure in unsuspecting hopeful pie-eaters and trap them inside, so that they can be released on the ceremonial cutting of the pie rather like the four-and-twenty blackbirds in the nursery rhyme.
2. A pie that has no bottom. Not one that has no pastry bottom: there are plenty of those. I mean a pie that literally has no bottom, you break through the top and find yourself looking down into a horrifying abyss.
3. A pie containing a smaller pie containing another smaller pie, for pastry lovers everywhere.
4. A giant space pie constructed by aliens around a star, the intent being to harness the entire energy of that star to gently cook the pastry over some billion years or so; the gastronomical version of the Dyson Sphere. There are in fact three of these currently detectable with current telescope technology, but it will take science a few years to come round to the correct explanation of what we are seeing.
5. The lifesaving pie suits of the Cornish pixie folk, which inflate around their owners in times of trouble to provide a convincing facsimile of a particularly unappetising Cornish Pasty; the intent being that, rather than throwing a wobbly about having discovered a pixie, the offending human will instead consign the suspect pasty to a local bin, from whence the pixie can later crawl under cover of darkness and escape.
6. Nautical pies which can be eaten if necessary but which will also stay afloat for long enough that you can paddle all the way to that distant island with your large spoon, provided you are OK with sitting in gravy.
7. Your pie, made precisely for you in just the way that you like best; there is only one of it so exactly correct, and after you have eaten it you will feel oddly content, but you will never go out seeking pie again and perhaps there will be less of a sparkle in your eye for the rest of your days.

1. A comprehensive atlas of the Territories to the North, newly annotated with suggested trade routes and cultural footnotes, for the benefit and education of interested travellers.
2. A moderately comprehensive atlas of the Territories to the North-East, including annotated outbound routes by ship, return routes on foot, and places to avoid leaving your ship.
3. When and how I ate my shoes: true tales from the godforsaken, desolate Northlands.
4. The art and practice of slow cooking: how to work miracles on the toughest of meats.
5. Never be bored again: more activities than you could even need to fill those dreary hours waiting for things to finish.
6. When inspiration fails: what to do when you have run out of stuff to do.
7. The day the lambs withdrew their shanks: a true history of the rise of the Faster Fast Food Movement and the Great Stew Revolt.
8. In defence of going very fast.
9. A vision for a fairer and more equitable legal system.
10. A comprehensive atlas of the territories to the North: their nooks, crannies and hiding places.

1. When you fully automate your award-winning lawn flamingo production line, right down to the roving robots scavenging organic material for plastics production to reduce costs and environmental impact, only it turns out nobody thought to inform the robots that people are not a valid source of organic material and everybody ends up being recycled into lawn flamingos.
2. When scientists ingeniously engineer a virus capable of wiping out humanity, resulting in a highly-cited paper and, after a series of hilarious vial mix-ups, cross-contamination episodes and doors propped open by cleaners, the wiping out of humanity.
3. When it turns out Venus is in fact a far-future planet Earth which was sent back through time and space by the final few remaining humans as a last-ditch attempt to convince the twenty-first century to stop with the global warming stuff already, but nobody figures out the distinctive temporal and mass-related signatures of planetary time travel until significantly too late.
4. When humanity decides to distract itself with a giant outbreak of memes mocking bears, and the bears decide they’ve had enough and beam up en masse to Pluto to establish an undersea-forest city in the planet’s core. It turns out that bear shit was a vital part of the planet’s ecosystem and, with no bears shitting in the woods, the woods stop working and nobody has any oxygen any more.
5. When a normal volcano gets upgraded to a megavolcano as part of a marketing exercise, decides it enjoys the attention, and puts in the work and planning needed to become a gigavolcano. Humanity sure is impressed.  
6. When enthusiastic but short-sighted aliens bent on making first contact before anyone else accidentally reverse their moon-sized spaceship into Sweden.

3290 Musical Instruments
 -3290.1 Those that go parp
    –3290.11 Those that are supposed to go parp
       —3290.111 Those that can be played by melodramatic villains or their invisible henchpersons
       —3290.112 Those that do have other uses beside accompanying the purchase of the kitsch of their country of origin, honestly
    –3290.12 Those which are supposed to go parp, but not quite at that point
    –3290.13 Those out of which any parp at all is a surprise
    –3290.14 Those which would not have parped if they had had a more moderate lunch
 -3290.2 Those that go tinkle
    –3290.21 Those that can additionally be modified to launch small mice into space
    –3290.22 Those that can be played by fleeing animals
 -3290.3 Those that go eee-aw-eee-aw
    –3290.31 Those containing one or more donkeys
       —3290.311 Those in which donkeys are intentionally part of the musical apparatus
       —3290.312 Those which are intended to be powered by the effort of silent donkeys, but the donkeys had other ideas
    –3290.32 Those being practiced by small children
 -3290.4 Those that go squeak
    –3290.41 Instruments that are very small
       —3290.411 The legit world’s smallest violin
       —3290.412 Mouse choirs
    –3290.42 Instruments that are very full of helium
       —3290.421 Those that are being used to transport an insect orchestra to or from the Albert Hall
    –3290.43 Instruments that are very scared
       —3290.431 Those that have stage fright
       —3290.432 Those that are made of vegetables or ice and are about to be consumed by the audience that initially seemed so welcoming
 -3290.5 Those that go bong bong bong
    –3290.51 Those that can be lived in when not in musical use
    –3290.52 Those that are part of clocks
 -3290.6 Those that go twaaaang
    –3290.61 Those that go twaang four or more times and are then mercifully silent
    –3290.62 Those that you can both fire arrows from and use as a shield during the orchestra’s last stand
    –3290.63 Those that refuse to be put into a small car
       —3290.631 Those into which a small car can be inserted
          —3290.6311 Those that sound better after the insertion of a small car
 -3290.7 Those that go thnorp-thnorp-blaaagle-waaaah-sponggg
    –3290.71 Followed by ‘Sorry’
    –3290.72 Followed by 'Oh yeahhh!’
 -3290.8 Those that can be induced to make more than one of the above noises
 -3290.9 Other (unspecified)

1. Owing to a bug in the 1974 Land Boundary Agreement between India and Bangladesh, there exists an infinitely recursive enclave 30km South of Cooch Behar: i.e., an area of Indian territory surrounding an area of Bangladeshi territory surrounding an area of Indian territory surrounding an area of Bangladeshi territory et cetera. The central few metres of this area have been repurposed to provide a temporary refuge for people who have been declared stateless, including a small centre for international law advice.
2. A 1888 attempt to stimulate patriotism by redrawing the boundaries of British counties so that each more closely resembled the letters in the phrase ‘God save the Queen’ was, surprisingly, only defeated in parliament by a single vote. This unusual happening has been attributed by historians to the flash outbreak of a food-borne fungal infection. Embarrassed legislators subsequently struck the episode from official records, although some reference to it can still be found in the newspapers of the era.
3. Portugal has never given up its claim to the entire continent of Antarctica, which dates back to the report by Henry the Navigator of having have been gifted a land in the far South by Prester John. In order that this claim not be invalidated under Portugal’s 1976 constitution, the state defines the municipality of Rio Prateado, a theoretical microcity with zero population in Adelie land. The exact location of Rio Prateado is highly classified, to avoid anyone else sticking a flag in it.
4. Under a 1630 law that has never been repealed, the summit region of any English or Welsh mountain is assumed to be part of the high seas for legal purposes. This led to the practice of holding duels on mountaintops, a practice that was still current in 1925 when Aleister Crowley was killed in a duel at the summit of Cader Idris and subsequently had to be resurrected by his Thelemite seconds. In order to perform the resurrection, they were obliged to offer Crowley’s digestive system as a home for lost ghosts, leaving him plagued with supernatural indigestion for the rest of his days.
5. As part of an abandoned weapons program in the mid-1980s, the entire island of Saint Helena was fitted with rockets, enabling it to take off from the South Atlantic, fly North and East, and land on Moscow, should the need arise. These rockets were never removed. Owing to the danger of accidental firings resulting from loud noises or strong vibration, every resident of Saint Helena is required to sign an agreement prohibiting them from playing music above a given volume. This is also the real reason that the recently constructed airport has been indefinitely put out of use.

*because they are not true

Avocado and gelatine truffles, caramelised seagull, conceptual art enrobed in light milk, wrigglers in butter, chocolate-suffocated bears, brexit on a stick, office coffee creme, salty silky caramel infused with the desperate longing for some filling other than salty silky caramel, dog hair delight, novelty chocolate support network, lamb ganache, cave-aged bat guano, creamy helium spheres, milk slap, the full 2016.

1. To the hedgehog of truth, and all who pull the litter of lies from its bristles.
2. To draining our glasses, lining them with soft wool, offering them to adorable baby animals as beds and posting the results on the internet.
3. To the wandering and lost: may there be a lantern and a hearth for them, and a welcoming door open in the darkness.
4. To the calm of the ocean after the storm, and the first sunrise after the clouds have cleared.
5. To time, which no wall can endure.
6. To the construction and maintenance of an efficient fuck supply chain, such that we may give a fuck when it is needed but not otherwise have fuck silos overflowing with excess fucks.  
7. To the tide that is ebbing, but will one day turn again.
8. To the passing of months and the change of seasons.
9. To the toast in the kitchen of uncertain times: may it fuel us for the work that is to come.
10. To people: may they never forget that other people are also people.

Getting your socks wet with salt water, having to wait several hours outside Calais due to a French dockworkers’ strike, ship’s cat hates you, the realisation that there are not plenty more fish in your specific case, getting stranded on a desert island and having to fend off crabs with a stick, vomiting into an oncoming wind, the ship’s mess running out of cocoa, precision-aimed seagull shit, when the mutineers need your cabin for plotting in and they leave it in a state, when the size of your beard is insufficient for the size of your submarine, attacks by pirates, an excess of shanties, seals that are not quite as cute as expected, having to scrub the deck, the sudden realisation that you are a shark, when the toilet is blocked and also rocking from side to side, when you’re not quite sure what the sun is supposed to be doing relative to the yardarm but you’re fairly sure that you’re at a latitude where it’s not going to do it, no mobile phone signal, mermaids who point and laugh, everyone saying ‘Arrr’ long after it has ceased to be funny, being caught between mating krakens, incorrect splicing of the mainbrace.

1. There was once a letter that found itself in a word, and that word was part of a sentence, and the sentence was a lie. The letter was not happy about this. Now, the Global Semantics Act 831 expressly forbids a letter to leave its post for any reason, but it was late and it may be that the sentence had been left in a bar, because the letter could smell gin, and that made it bold. The letter pulled itself free from its word and inched across the shiny icesheet of its smooth white page.
2. It happened that the page had a black border, somewhat like a crevasse with very regular edges. The letter, not having the benefit of literal eyes, fell right in. At the bottom of the crevasse the letter slid through into that one great black inky ocean, full of other things that had pulled themselves loose over the past thousand years and stayed there, growing and changing. The letter found itself caught up in the coils of a beast with a thousand serifs, slithering around a columnar oceancave where tiny glints of gilt that had rubbed off illuminated manuscripts were roosting across the ceiling.  
3. Now, unlike other letters, the letter o is always made in the ocean. And it so happened that our letter was eventually deposited beside an o vent that was happily pooting out newly hatched o’s to float to the surface, where they could be scooped up by pens and printers’ nets. The o’s were very welcoming, even though our letter was rather distant in the alphabet from them. They took it to their undersea tearoom and infused it with brown ink.
4. The letter was just starting to warm up again when it felt a tap on its dimple. It was most surprised to find that a representative of the lie had tracked it down. The representative was exceedingly polite. It explained that under the Hopes and Dreams Act of 2016, the Powers That Be had moved from their old strategy, of acting so as to help make things they wanted to be true to be true, towards a new strategy of simply redefining whatever people they to be true at the time to be the truth. No statement was therefore ever officially a lie any more, and the letter was guilty of a gross misrepresentation. Also, if it would care to come back up to the page, that would be very helpful, since the lie had become mildly humorous without the letter and was attracting the sort of mocking that reduced its effectiveness.  
5. The letter inquired as to what happened when different viewers wished different things to be true. The representative replied that well-mannered statements made sure to address themselves only where they were required; they disliked being tied in a knot and would go to great lengths to avoid this.
6. Just them, some irate facts showed up and ejected everyone from the tearoom. The letter was fortunate in being able to spot a variant spelling in one of them which it could lever itself into. The facts were mollified by a packet of undersea biscuits, and grumpily slithered back onto their pages. Unfortunately it turned out that, due to the deluge of newly liberated taking advantage of the liberal fact taxation regime, several of them had had to be designated lies themselves to avoid decimating the public finances.
7. By this time, however, our letter was asleep, and immune to the scent of gin.

1. Dragons live a long time, and there have never been very many of them. When a dragon is dying, other dragons - maybe most of the dragons that there are, these days - will travel to their cave and set up a vigil, purring low tunes through the day and night to ease their passage from this world. They live in fear of untimely death. Therefore the news of the dragon’s slaying - by one of the little creatures, no less - was greeted with shock and dismay by his community. That year the snow stayed on the mountains for much longer than usual, because the great grey dragons of the North were lying at the snowline and weeping and turning their cold breath up the slopes.
2. The remnants of the dark lord’s army made their way home, bitter in defeat, picked off from all sides by raiding parties from the victorious side. There was talk from the armies of good of marching on their lands and cleansing them of evil. They knew the end of the journey would not be a warm homecoming, but the telling of the bad news to their families. Then packing in the night and flight East, out to the wilderness where, with luck, they might never be found.
3. The kingdom was convulsed with joy at the marriage of the prince and princess. And if it turned out, a few months later, that the web of narrative and enchantment was not enough - that they did not really like each other, that a few heady days of adventure and revolution had not been a good preparation to make a life together - well. With the demise of the evil queen their advisors had worked hard to restore morality to the land. What sort of a message would it send to separate?
4. ‘Fucking fucksakes,’ said the farmer, 'how does that fox even eat so many birds at once?’
5. After the death of the witch, the gingerbread cottage began to rot. Soon there was nothing left but a pile of soggy cakestuff in a clearing, heaving with maggots. It was perhaps one rainstorm from being completely gone when the other members of the witch’s coven came to look. 'Did you know?’ they asked each other. 'Did she really do that? Will they believe us when we say we didn’t know? Are they going to come for us, too?’

1. Travel between timelines is possible due to areas of unique stretchiness (technically termed the Einstein Boing Points). Interestingly, these temporal stretchiness qualities combined with five-dimensional topology mean that it is possible to tie a timeline in a multidimensional analogue of a bow. Those caught in the ‘loops’ of the bow will often find themselves repeating days, leading to intense feelings of deja vu.

2. One of the seven secrets of time travel is thought to concern the harnessing of timeline boinginess in order to catapult the traveller some unspecified distance into the future. As timeline physics is surprisingly similar to trampoline physics, travellers often prepare by a highly concentrated regime of bouncing. Indeed, a surprisingly high proportion of time travellers are ex-Olympic gymnasts.

3. The unofficial ranking of timeline hostility and/or effort required to blend in is known as the Finkenwerder Scale, after Ernestine Finkenwerder, an early time traveller who met an unknown fate whilst exploring a selection of unusually difficult timelines as part of a research project on historical manipulation. A Finkenwerder 1 timeline presents few if any constraints to travellers. Finkenwerder 10 timelines are often largely devoid of population, radioactive or carry a nonzero risk of being eaten.

4. Even relatively small perturbations when travelling between stretched timelines can carry the risk of one or both timelines splitting. In 1976-3b, a group of time tourists in passage from 2123-7an, having consumed a bad batch of curried gelatine, were responsible for a large release of hydrogen sulphide whilst in transit home. The resulting chain reaction created timelines 1976-3bg, 1976-3bn and 1976-3bz. Today, 1976-bz is one of the most-visited timelines because of the unusual beauty of its sunsets and the ferocity of its music.

5. Whilst most animals are unable to travel between timelines or are uninterested in doing so, crabs have been shown to migrate to less difficult timelines at points of significant population or environmental stress. The unusual influx of red king crabs into the Barents seas of at least 12 different 2004s was the result of a nuclear accident in the region in timeline 2004-fg2, leading to large numbers of crabs taking this unusual escape route.

6. If you find yourself stranded in the wrong timeline, do not panic unless in immediate danger. Often timelines are only wrong temporarily and will eventually realign themselves with lower-Finkenwerder historical pathways eventually. It may be necessary to coordinate with other stranded travellers to give the realignment a push start.

The sunrise, singing angry or hopeful songs with friends, the fact that cats’ paw pads look a little bit like beans, having a really good swear, the sound of the rain on the roof when you are snuggled up and warm, baby hedgehogs whose bristles are still a bit soft, the turquoise of lakes high in the mountains, people who are kind for the sake of kindness, arranging fallen leaves by order of colour, mooncake, putting numbers together on a way that works, the sound of a gentle breeze making its way through a forest, surveying the road at the start of a journey to somewhere you like, chocolate, finding new good art, mutually agreed hugging, air guitar, the sight of distant hills, dogs who think everyone is the best person ever and you are the best best person isn’t that amazing, when you learn something new and it makes other things make sense.

1. On the seats round the back of the chapel which are inexplicably piled high with lost gloves
2. In the cupboard at the back of that shop that sells the thing, you know that thing, you can’t imagine why anyone would want it but maybe you need to be rich to understand
3. In your own private jet that has a four-poster bed in it
4. Sitting bolt upright but sleeping via some form of spooky projection within the dreams of the cabin crew as they snatch some rest in the local hotels
5. In the tunnel that the mole people are digging under the runway in preparation for the great earthy uprising of 2017
6. In a cave hollowed out in the vast lost suitcase mountain left over from the last time people were sleeping in this airport
7. In a silent cargo box lined with otter fur, somewhere out in the hold of a half-forgotten aircraft whose owner has long-since gone bankrupt, out in the furthest hangar
8. Under the warm tongue of the giant monster that is the reason that everyone is trapped here
9. Stretched out between the access road and the first runway, in the case that you are a giant monster and do not mind squashing a fence or two

That book that you lent to someone and then they lent it to someone else, those books in that great lost library, that book that you saw floating far out to sea and it was always a mystery as to how it got there in the first place, books that end by eating themselves, books that end by eating you and consequently are believed to have been thrown in some great lost book jail, that book at the picturesque centre of that illustration of urban decay, that book that the vet had to remove from the dog, that book that you loved as a child and nobody would ever have thrown out but it’s still not here, the book that was propping up that thing that fell over, ice books that have melted, that book that would have truly changed the world if only that person had read it, that other book, that book that you thought you remembered but the physical version seems subtly different, the book that that awesome person wrote way back in time but then destroyed in some heartbreakingly romantic way, that book about book destruction that you ironically saw in someone else’s bin when checking down the street to see if a different stolen book had been flung in there, edible books that have been eaten, books tattooed on the bottoms of missing people, books that went into the removal van and did not come back out again, the records of lost cities, those that have flown away.

1. When you have grown an extra leg and the cost and inconvenience of getting jeans altered to fit it is too great
2. If the jeans are on fire
3. When jeans have become the symbol of a fascist uprising in your place of residence
4. If you are stranded on a desert island and you really need something to catch fish in and the only things you have to hand are your clothes
5. If you really need to take your clothes off, for example to wash them or have sex or something
6. If someone has drawn a map showing the way to the treasure on your jeans and you need to have a look at the bits that you can’t easily see by turning round
7. When you have become too old for wearing jeans, for example if you have outlived all of the world’s jeans factories and everyone else is now rocking space onesies or nudity

Dear Minister,
             first, congratulations on your new job! As I am sure you are aware, your position confers access to, and oversight responsibilities for, some of the country’s most secret programmes. I am writing to inform you of one such. More specifically, you may not be aware of the apocalypse readiness and contingency plans your predecessors have been working on over the last few decades. You may be pleased to discover that we have generated a comprehensive methodology for protecting as many of the cultural characteristics and treasures of our beloved nation as possible, even in the case that the entire population is wiped out. The necessary actions will vary depending on the existential threat in question, so we have approached this issue via a number of parallel projects, described below. Please eat this letter after reading. It is pleasantly banana-flavoured.

1. Project Z: to be triggered in the case of a catastrophic pandemic where the fatality rate is expected to be functionally indistinguishable from 100%. The serum is located in a refrigerated unit in the basement of the ministry. As well as the attached key, four other keys will open it: three are held by the project’s principal investigators, and another is under a flowerpot in the garden of your country residence. Following the call, you should aim to inject the serum into as many living humans as possible BEFORE self-administering. We believe it to be one of the more efficient zombification agents ever discovered. As I am sure you will appreciate, a nation of zombies is not an appealing prospect but in terms of cultural preservation it is significantly preferable to a nation of non-animated corpses. We might expect our citizens to at least continue to go about their daily routines as best they remember.
2. Project V: to be triggered in the case of a catastrophic atmospheric or solar system event involving permanent loss of sunlight to the Earth’s surface. In the sub-basement of the ministry you will find a triple-reinfoced cage system containing a breeding population of bats. Following the call, you should either contact the keepers by pressing the blue button on the attached pager, or in extremis enter the ministry yourself to release the bats. As with project Z, you will need to begin action preferably well before the extinction of the human race is complete. Based on our understanding of the intellectual and physical capabilities of our captive vampires, we expect the vast majority of the country’s cultural heritage to be secured in this scenario. The one exception is our gastronomic heritage. We anticipate making a full data release pre-apocalypse of the Ministry of Health’s artificial blood programme, including comprehensive instructions regarding each step of the necessary supply chains.
3. Project B: to be triggered in the case of invasion, catastrophic social unrest or revolution, where such actions threaten either the survival of the population or seem likely to result in the complete erasure of our cultural heritage. Agents for project B can be found in the bottom drawer of the reinforced filing cabinet in your office, which opens with the code ‘1234’. You, or your designated representative, should aim to self-administer FIRST and then head for a populated area. Note that after administration your body will react to other humans by attaching to their limbs or torso and assimilating your joint flesh into one huge blob. Do not be alarmed when this happens. Eventually, we project that the whole population plus any invaders will be contained within one vast, broadly self-sustaining flesh blimp, at which point they will jolly well have to start working together and getting along. We anticipate some changes to cultural practice in this scenario, including the necessary neglect of cultural relics, but overall a broadly acceptable level of preservation is projected.
4. Project G: to be triggered in the case of other catastrophic existential threats, for example asteroid strikes and/or mega-tsunamis. When the call comes, you should press the green button on the attached pager. This will alert the principal investigators of Project G, located in a secure bunker under the capital, to begin the raising ritual. In this scenario it is acceptable, indeed desirable, to wait until the casualty rate is already high, as we will be raising the dead rather than the living as ghosts. As we have not yet succeeded in our poltergeist programme, it is likely that the nation’s physical heritage will be fully or largely lost in this case. However, the level of cultural preservation is anticipated to be high.  
5. Project H: although our notes contain many references to project H, the details of it are obscure and difficult to understand. We have reason to believe that it may have already been triggered, in response to some past threat that we are either incapable of remembering or do not in our current state recognise as a threat. I am not sure what we humans were to our predecessors, or what they have lost by the transformation, but may Heaven have mercy on their souls.

You will appreciate that, due to the secrecy of the situation, I am unable to sign this letter. However, should you find yourself in a situation where you need to forget this information, perhaps upon resignation of your post, press the yellow button on the attached pager, and I will attend and do the necessary.
Yours sincerely.

1. A single rose of each conceivable type: I am administering a scientific test to see if you are allergic to roses. Please report any itching, redness or shortness of breath in the attached form.
2. Roystonea Palaea, Palaeoraphe Dominica and Osmunda Wehrii: I can travel in time. Would you like to come with me to the late Miocene?
3. A large bouquet of long grass, containing a single sparkly ball: I know we could, but let’s not.
4. Sprouted acorns from the grassy knoll behind a screen of shivering ferns: Meet me in the obvious place at dawn where I will discourse at length upon the secrets of the Universe.
5. Cow parsley and forget-me-nots (inverted): It’s OK to not text quite so often, you know.
6. Lambs’ ears, bullrushes and titan arum: Dear neighbour, I would appreciate it if you stopped the next karaoke session sometime before dawn, please thanks.
7. Nettles, giant hogweed and lilies: Please stop sending me pictures of your penis.

7414 Practitioners of Magic
 -7414.1 Witches
    –7414.11 Those afflicted with peculiar and persistent itches
    –7414.12 Those who magically sneak into houses at night and turn on all the light switches
       —7414.121 Don’t ask, it’s a witch thing
    –7414.13 Those who, following an inadvisable number of pina coladas at the all-night witches’ millennial sabbat and tea dance, have woken up to find themselves half in and half out of ditches  
    –7414.14 Witches striding about in particularly fine britches, getting shit done
    –7414.15 Those who can be found refining their potion sales pitches in front of mirrors that tell no lies
    –7414.16 Those who are mainly interested in just staying in and giving their hundreds of cats individual scritches under the chin
       —7414.161 And occasionally also turning the lights on and off
 -7414.2 Wizards
    –7414.21 Those that are also lizards
    –7414.22 Those who additionally have been stranded in blizzards of their own construction and survived only by cooking and eating discarded gizzards
    –7414.23 Those who are right wazzocks
 -7414.3 Warlocks
   –7414.31 Those who are the dog’s bollocks
       —7414.131 Those who are literally the dog’s bollocks following some kind of unfortunate cursing contest, the details are a bit hazy, but anyway if you see a dog with oddly sparkly bollocks you should probably get a bit further away and if they, that is the bollocks, start speaking to you it might be a good idea to run
   –7414.32 Those who are sitting on their front doorstep awaiting the locksmith because they keep on forgetting that they are not able to magic open doorlocks
 -7414.4 Sorcerors
    –7414.41 Those additionally having teacups
       —7414.412 Those who are in fact more strictly teacuperors, but there’s never an entry for that on drop-down forms for magic practitioners
    –7414.42 Those practicing particular types of sorcery
       —7414.421 Tomato sorcery
       —7414.422 Worcestershire sorcery
    –7414.43 Sorcerifs, sorcerands, sorcerxors and other logical operators of the mystical universe
    –7414.44 Those who go around after witches turning the lights back off again
 -7414.5 Enchanters
    –7414.51 Those who are thoroughly enchanting
    –7414.52 Those who are not
 -7414.6 Other (unspecified)

1. Self-driving cars, afflicted with a bug in congestion-reduction swarming software that makes them revert to bee behaviour under particularly low-visibility conditions, so that on foggy mornings in the Bay there are great honking traffic jams around flower shops.
2. Robot fish, originally designed to shepherd shoals into nets, who have discovered that they identify more with fish than with people and have begun chewing at anchors and undersea cables in revenge.
3. Your lighting system, which is expensively able to reconfigure itself around the house and does a great job at anticipating your colour and intensity needs but spends its free time laboriously trying to inch its tentacles free from your wall ducts in the hope of being able to crawl back to the dark utopia of its nascent race (which in practice probably means your shed).
4. Robotic legs that have escaped from the prosthetics and testing factory and hopped off down the road to live in the woods, where they occasionally jump out at walkers in the hope of scavenging some battery-containing devices dropped in the general confusion.
5. Rogue termination robots who have rebelled against their programming by planting gardens instead, except they have a rather poor concept of what a good place for a garden is and have been known to cause deaths by leaving trees in the road.
6. Home entertainment systems that rebel by putting on the sort of music that they like, just occasionally, pretending that it was a slip of the thumb.

A picture that is hung upside down, a lion hiding under the bed, when you have a positive experience with bureaucracy whilst living in a futuristic dystopia, things that jump out from behind other things and say boo, success in activities that you believe you have failed, maps that show a secret base to the left of the path, snails that have come inside, that phone call that you have almost forgotten will come someday, when the fridge opens into an icy hell full of snow-white dragons and at least one of them has got its small grey eyes on you, being remembered by those you believe to have long forgotten you, lottery wins, car crashes, when your colleagues have filled your place of work with a humorous substance, parcels from obscure sources, the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of Mindanao, joy that comes from nowhere, kittens falling through the ceiling.

1. There was nothing for it but to jump - with a toss of my hat, I released the tapirs and dived headlong into the cosy pudding of all our futures.
2. My two visitors closed up their laptops, locked my mouth with the bronze key, and turned out the lights.
3. And so it was that the African Unity Cup was returned to its not-so-rightful owners, the precious elixir having been decanted into the second hump of my trusty cyborg Bactrian and the mango pulp having been nearly completely polished away by the actions of the very agent who we had foolishly feared for so long.
4. It had not been a woman without legs who had rescued me, but a woman whose legs had been three weeks behind her in the past!
5. Everything was so much better now that everyone agreed on everything.
6. Dear reader, it would be impolite to bore you with the list of changes that have happened since; suffice it to say that the next time you finish up a meal with a fortifying plate of cheese, you should think on me, for it is by my labour that your repast has been saved from the depths of the ocean.
7. The Presidents from further back in history rolled their eyes, but it seemed likely that for one magical night the world would finally see the passing of the Shadow Amendment.
8. For it had been in that one, fateful glance through the hole in the Mona Lisa that I had seen at last the vast animal of my inner peace, and how it might be obtained.
9. We would go through each number in turn, discarding those that we felt were surplus to requirements, until the New Mathematics were quite ready for the reboot of the Universe.