Listing to Port

1. Castle in the clouds, location variable. Seemed like a good idea at the time but actually you can’t land a plane on it and it’s a bit high up for a helicopter so getting to the shops is a nightmare. Great for things that can fly and who also like damp fog in their rooms in the morning. Non-steerable. Viewings by appointment, we reserve the right to cancel if the property is drifting near an airport or through a thunderstorm at the scheduled time.
2. Castle cursed with a hundred years of sleep by an evil enchantress. Enchantress was not sure where to apply the spell and ended up casting it at the front door and running away, so if you use another door to go in you are fine. Comes with large pile of sleeping delivery professionals in the front hall. By agreement with the Society for Mystical Post, purchasers will need to turn sleepers regularly to prevent pressure sores.
3. Castle on little legs up in the foothills of the Lost Mountains, uninhabited since shortly after its original enchantment when it became sentient. Castle is now ticklish but most problem areas have been identified and fenced off. Purchaser will need to be resistant to digestive juices to use the main hallway. Purchaser will also need to be able to catch the castle, and to trim its toenails.
4. Floating castle on the South Pole of Jupiter. Amazing views. Usually has oxygen. Would suit responsible, radiation-resistant professional who likes amazing views.
5. Castle on the Western borders of Faerie, on the shores of the nether sea. Built by elves. Elves, who may have been a bit more into dancing and singing and draping themselves over furniture than building, got bored half-way through and hired a dodgy wizard to magic the rest up. Hence most of the towers are illusory and in hot weather they flicker and someone will have to undrape themselves and go and bang on the ceiling to get them to come back.
6. Castle accidentally built on tail of hibernating dragon. One initially careless, now exceedingly careful owner. Must sell before Spring.
7. Charming, bijou basement castle-ette. Basically like a full castle but without the above-ground parts. Would suit open-minded torture professionals, minor abominations and aspiring villains. Newly installed bathroom suite. Dogs welcome.  

1145 Tools
 -1145.1 Those for making holes in things
    –1145.11 Pointy sticks
    –1145.12 Drills
       —1145.121 Those capable of drilling through rock and metal and stuff
       —1145.122 Those capable of drilling through wood
       —1145.123 Those capable of drilling through butter and cheese
    –1145.13 Scissors
       —1145.131 The safety scissors that you used to cut a perfect monkey out of some paper and also your shirt, age 9
       —1145.132 Scissors for running with
       —1145.133 The multi-bladed herb-cutting scissors of your nightmares, marching on their ten points to the relentless beat of dreams
    –1145.14 Fingers
 -1145.2 Those for joining things together
    –1145.21 Glue
    –1145.22 Tape
       —1145.221 Duct tape
       —1145.222 Lesser forms of tape
    –1145.23 Accidental use of paint
    –1145.24 Little connecty widget things
    –1145.25 Love and hugs
 -1145.3 Those for breaking stuff
    –1145.31 Big fucking hammers
    –1145.32 Saws and stuff
 -1145.4 Those for stopping things squeaking
    –1145.41 WD-40
    –1145.42 Gags
    –1145.43 Helium-removal tools
 -1145.5 Those for turning things around
    –1145.51 Wrenches
    –1145.52 Screwdrivers
 -1145.6 Those for doing something else but you are not quite sure what
    –1145.61 Those plastic things that are in that box in the garage whose proper and essential use will only come to light after you have thrown them away
       –1145.611 Those that in addition appear to be irreplaceable

1. May you open your nappy bag at a time of great need to find only one nappy, used, several days old, and an empty packet of wipes.
2. May your baby open a portal to the vomit dimension and channel a milky spew larger than their own head through it.
3. May the next sleep regression begin tonight.
4. May there be no one food that everyone will eat.
5. May your toddler sequentially vomit on every clean duvet cover in the house.
6. May all your attempts to concentrate be interrupted by ‘I need a wee!’
7. May the toddler toddle your phone and keys off to a mysterious, inaudible and probably damp destination shortly before you are due to go out for an important appointment.
8. May the important toy go missing in the airport.
9. May they eat library books, draw on the walls, post letters into the bath; may their curiosity be channelled into finding out whether technology bounces.
10. May your child catch some picturesque illness that no childminder will come within ten miles of just as you approach a work deadline.
11. May their shoes be wrong in some subtle way that they lack the language to explain.
12. May the baby learn to climb up slides.
13. May you be so tired that you can no longer count.

1. Flying ant day. Normally falling towards the end of July or start of August, flying ant day is the day when winged ants leave their colonies to start new ones elsewhere. This is by far the best-known insect fiesta and has become significantly commercialised in recent years, with cards, comestibles and souvenir nick-nacks hitting the shops several months in advance. If you want to celebrate flying ant day along with your little insect friends, why not have a picnic with foods ants like? Jam, sugar and sticky sweets are all firm favourites. Interestingly, non-flying ants have been getting in on the airborne action this year by inflating hollowed-out bumblebees with digestive gases and using them as makeshift dirigibles. Keep a look out for bees with a suspicious buzz!

2. Walking fly day. Part of the emerging slow food movement amongst flies, walking fly day is a day when flies take to the ground. Participants pledge to take the  scenic walking route to food items, only flying if in active danger. Consequently, the day before walking fly day is usually a time of frenetic activity amongst flies, as participants attempt to secure and memorise known food locations. Check whether walking fly day is celebrated in your location - presently it is only widely practiced in ares with a significant hipster fly population.

3. Diving wasp day. Usually occurring shortly after flying ant day, diving wasp day is the day wasps compete in diving into sweet, fizzy liquids around the globe. You can help by providing cola, beer or orange juice. Want to know if it’s diving wasp day or not? Check whether there are other wasps hanging around, ready to rate the diving of their audacious comrades!

4. Fucking laser-shooting tarantula day. Interestingly, tarantulas can develop biological lasers in their legs in response to stressful stimuli, or sometimes just when they feel like it. Fortunately, tarantulas are terrible organisers and are habitually late, so no-one has ever managed to successfully co-ordinate fucking laser-shooting tarantula day. 

5. Rising up and destroying all vertebrates cockroach day. Don’t worry, they’ll wait until we’ve been largely incapacitated by some other event, such as an asteroid strike or nuclear war, first.

Those who navigate by the stars, who shit glitter, who look beyond the horizon and practice absurdity in the dead of night; those who come in from a thunderstorm with amazing hair; people who have reflections but the reflection always seems to be doing something a little bit differently; people who make up songs, those who are in love with ideas, those who stalk ideas, those who sleep with ideas and regret it the next morning; people who dance in the rain; those who do small kindnesses to trapped animals, having an airship powered by glamour and starlight, those who were born on Mars and are having a hard time keeping it secret; those who search for hidden rivers and lost basements, those who are able to ride unicorns because of the other reason people can ride unicorns that you don’t know about; those who are powered by the sea, word architects, lovers of elephants, with inky fingers; people who are calm in a crisis; those who have map tattoos across their bodies, who have inhaled the ghosts of ancient Hollywood, who smell of sticky strawberries, who deal with sorrow by singing; those who spin numbers together, who dress that way for ral and do not care; who sleep in a cradle of books; those who have no idea that they are fabulous; and all the others.

1. To take in hand the Fabled Sword of Truth and gird your loins with the Ancient Armour of Smriti the Dragonslayer; thus armed, to boldly step aboard the number 3 bus and take them to the local antique dealers; to get them evaluated for a quick sale in the hope of being able to pay this month’s rent.
2. To place the Ring of Power in the electricity meter, thus reaping a near-infinite but possibly evil supply of household energy.
3. To boldly venture into the cleft down the middle of a split infinitive, find a dilemma and cut off its horns.
4. To climb the rocky ridges of the Northern Mountains, find the golden dragon and slay it; take its hoard of nine thousand fabulous rubies; explain to the golden dragon’s children that it was a necessary act, as they weep acid tears and rend their scales; and represent your fraternity of adventurers in the international dragon court on charges of murder and theft.
5. To retrieve the fabled blade Sandwich-Cleaver from the ruins of the Great Picnic in That Field With The Bull In It.
6. To find somewhere to pee unobtrusively in the Kingdom of the Fairies.
7. To travel forwards through time at the rate of one second per second for the rest of your life.
8. To set sail on your reinforced steamship on a mission to the shopping malls of the seven seas, in search of the fabled Dress With Pockets That Can Be Machine-Washed.
9. To struggle across the Marshes of Despair, fight off eagles in the Red Mountains and stumble half-blindly over the Desert of Bones to get to the oasis wherein lies the Reliquary of the Elbow of Saint Constantine, only to find that there is a road to it from the other direction.

I used to have an elephant,
Her toes were cherry red.
I went out picking cherries but
I picked her out instead.
I said her hiding place was bad
And now she had been busted;
She said it was a better place than
Fridges, cars and custard.

She brought a mighty eletrunk
In which she stuffed her stuff.
My children asked me ‘Are you sure
Our sofa’s big enough?
And tell us, why is she so grey,
So wrinkly beside?
Should she be washed and ironed?’
'Forget it’, I replied.

Then next I thought Her Elephance
Could prove a lesson for
A group of seven blind men
who were waiting at the door.
'I’ve something here for you to feel,
Pray tell me what each finds!’
'That’s nice,’ they said, 'Now, if you please,
Where should we put these blinds?’

One day she went a-wandering
In search of some lost shore.
Two whales in a mini picked
Her up on the M4.
They called me on the Elephone
From somewhere North of Gower.
What was she doing there?’ I asked.
'About 5 miles an hour.’

At last I found the perfect home
For elephants at large;
Some friends of mine became her hosts
(She promised not to charge).
They kept her in their living-room
Behind the sofa-bed.
'Why, thank you!’ said my thoughtful friends.
'Don’t mention it’, I said.

1. The shopping trolley. The shopping trolley was one of the first inventions to spring from the fertile mind of Mr. Benjamin Trolley, a little-known farmhand in rural Australia. Interestingly, the first designs for the shopping trolley were not intended to hold groceries at all; rather, they began as a device for trapping and transporting wombats. This is why modern-day trolleys often still feature what is known as a ‘wombat flap’ - a hinged opening at the back through which animals can enter. A visiting American entrepreneur, Mr. Gregory Cart, recognised the potential in Trolley’s designs and stole a set of early blueprints, bringing what he termed the 'Shopping Cart’ to the market in the United States in 1905. Although Mr. Trolley won a subsequent lawsuit to be recognised as the original inventor, the damage was done. To this day, his invention is referred to by the name of his rival across much of the world.
2. The badge. The history of the badge is tied up with that of the 1835 Cruelty to Animals Act in the UK. During the run-up to this Act, there was some debate both in parliament and amongst the general public as to whether badger-baiting should be included in the list of prohibited acts. A popular movement in support of the badger arose, based around the London area of Holborn. Participants frequently greeted each other with the 'Holborn Snort’, a sound intended to mimic the call of an angry badger, and wore makeshift brooches depicting the black and white insignia of their alliance. Over time, these became known as 'badges’. Following the passing of the Act (successfully including a ban on badger-baiting), the badge was co-opted by other popular movements, eventually achieving its present ubiquity.
3. The sock. Interestingly, the sock was commonly known as the foot-glove until at least 1885. Thus one finds, for example, Shakespeare’s famous quote from Romeo and Juliet, 'O, that I were a glove upon that foot.’ (perhaps one of the earliest occurrences of foot fetishism in English Literature?) The sock owes its change of name to a quartet in the original version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida, in which a group of frightened maidens prepare for battle by competing to remove each other’s socks, eventually culminating in an energetic punch-up, or 'sock-em-up’ in the terminology of the time. The brief, wild popularity of this scene led to the adoption of the word 'sock’ for the foot-glove among London thespians, and subsequently the wider population. The scene itself was presented to Queen Victoria in 1895, who let it be known that she disapproved. It was subsequently cut from later versions of the operetta.
4. The doormat. Doormats were seldom seen in common use until 1770; before this time, people just tracked mud everywhere (a detail often omitted in historical dramas). The original idea for the doormat is believed to have come from one John Frederickson, an English inventor in the service of the King of France at Versailles in 1763. At this time, the fashion for highly-polished mirrored or gold-plated doors was beginning to wane in favour of a more subtle look. Frederickson invented what he termed his 'door-mattifying device’, a scratchy mat which could be rubbed over a polished surface to reduce its shine. The door-mattifying devices, once left beside their respective doors, soon acquired the secondary use we know today. Interestingly, the proper term for a doormat in French is still le chose pour porte-frottement.
5. The mug. Most people believe that the origins of the mug must lie far back in history. Interestingly, this is not the case. The mug as we know it was invented in 1835 by American philanthropist Theodora Mug, as part of her drive to improve global hydration levels. Its rapid adoption the world over is testament to the classic simplicity of the design. Before this date, drinking vessels were commonly known as flagons and were typically of larger size and more complicated construction. Indeed, in the 17th century it was common for women to drink only from their cupped hands, due to the extreme weight of the flagons of the day, which were used as status symbols.

2022 Overlords
-2022.1 Evil ones
–2022.11 Those ruling a kingdom, empire, planet or intergalactic civilization
—2022.111 Those who do little but stalk, glower, dispense arbitrary violence and die
—-2022.1111 Those who additionally do a bit of decadence
—-2022.1112 Those who additionally do soliloquizing and/or plot exposition
—2022.112 Those possessed of mysterious powers
—2022.113 Those who mainly ended up at the helm of a massive, bloodthirsty empire by dumb luck, and are not really sure what to do about it
–2022.12 Those ruling a small archipelago, city or cave system
–2022.13 Those having only a base and an unspecified number of henchbeings
—2022.131 Having a base on an island
—-2022.1311 Island is also a volcano
—-2022.1312 Island is shaped like a skull
—–2022.13121 Island is a world heritage site due to its amazing natural skull-shaped rock formations, gets a lot of adventure tourists
—2022.132 Having a base underwater
—-2022.1321 Widely known in shark conservation circles for extensive private collection, donations to shark welfare and advocacy organisations
—2022.133 Having a base in space
—-2022.1331 Those who make use of an universal docking system and are unusually careless with passwords, allowing any old space traveller to get on board
—-2022.1332 Those who do not
–2022.14 Those possessed merely of an evil overlord sort of mentality
-2022.2 Misunderstood ones
–2022.21 Those who have immeasurably improved the lives of millions of orcs, lifting orc-kind out of lives of brutality and extreme poverty and giving them a sense of self-belief and purpose again, not like you care
–2022.22 Those who have subtle and nuanced reasons for wanting to take over the world
–2022.23 Those who were never really evil overlords at all, but whose story was written by their enemies
-2022.3 Good ones
–2022.31 Those that are materially no different from the evil ones, other than that they have been able to write the history books
–2022.32 Those who overlord only to keep the declining secret base construction industry in business, safeguarding thousands of jobs
-2022.4 Those whose status is uncertain
–2022.41 Those of a capricious or insane nature
–2022.42 Those who may in fact exist only as children’s stories
–2022.43 Those who were possibly eaten five years ago by their own piranhas, but had arranged the direct debits of their empire such that nobody has actually noticed

1. You come home to find a single drop of gravy leaking through your letterbox and your key will not fit
2. Cats come up to you with sorrow in their big green eyes
3. You have had more than one wrong-number phone call from the Vatican basement, from those payphones near the statues, and there is some kind of grinding noise in the background but it is hard to hear over the Spanish-accented clarifications of the woman on the other end
4. You begin to receive vague but apologetic letters with postmarks from the near future
5. The pipes knock at night in something that is almost Morse Code, save for the addition of a mid-length, rattly noise like the coughing of a rat
6. You notice a door that you have never seen before and that is curiously hard to forget
7. A senior librarian comes to your door to absolve you, without asking, of a number of library fines relating to highly unusual books that you have never, to your knowledge, checked out
8. Whenever you turn round there is a blackbird flying away
9. There is a ringing phone in the gutter down the road, and a large man in sunglasses who is trying to pretend that it is not there
10. You cannot remember if you have ever been in a hailstorm, and neither can anyone you ask
11. There was a will from a relative you never really knew about, in a part of the world you’d never heard of, and it bequeathed you a box that cannot be opened and, once opened, cannot be closed

1. Introductory Subaquatic Methodologies. Diving suits and systems; types of octopus, their strengths and weaknesses and propulsive power; how to enter and leave a submarine; the thousand most common passwords; underwater navigation; secret base architecture, underwater version; practical cave diving; elementary shark fighting; psychology of evil; identification and valuation of gold, silver and major jewel families; the bends, identification and treatment; strategies for survival on the open sea; common signs and signals used by maritime rescue agencies.    
2. Introduction to Maritime Studies. Identification and architecture of typical pirate vessels; practical rowboat operation; grappling hooks, theory and practice; history, ethics and practice of stowing away; criminal psychology; introductory knife fighting; free diving; endurance swimming; lighthouse systems, operation and disablement; physics and geology of sea caves; celestial navigation; money laundering for beginners.
3. Practical Espionage 101. High-speed driving techniques (car); high-speed driving techniques (motorbike); acrobatics (elementary); introductory marksmanship; helicopters, operation and escape; abseiling; security patrol methodologies, evasion and disablement; introductory seduction; resistance to torture; knots; acrobatics (advanced); psychology of evil; rocket operation, major types; bomb disposal; acrobatics (bedroom); introductory wordplay.
4. Introduction to Conspiracy Theory. Introductory codebreaking; history of the Knights Templar; theory and critical evaluation of ancient mysteries; pyramid architecture; introductory archaeology; modern cultists, identification and hazard evaluation; ancient Greek; alternative cosmologies; history of art; corridor sprinting.
5. Unorthodox Arts for Beginners. Introduction to alternative hairdressing; the fourth wall: when to break, when not; introductory wordplay; mysterious doors, identification and use; lock picking and introductory burglary; deals with fairies: legal basis, enforcement and technicalities; the hundred most popular riddles; communication with non-verbal intelligences; introductory solution of mazes; theory and practice of the power of wishes and belief in magical worlds; hot-air balloon piloting for beginners; biology and psychology of mystical beings; introductory wistfulness.

1. Problem: Your laptop won’t boot. Your phone won’t boot. Your shoes won’t boot. You ask the people around you, none of them has ever heard the word ‘boot’. You look in a dictionary. It is not there.

Solution: You have entered a parallel timeline. You will need to go back to 1900 and re-install your grandparents*.

2. Problem: Your computer will only turn on when your cat is nearby.

Solution: Interestingly, this is not a virus. Rather, it is a security feature from the future. This problem indicates that your computer will still be around in 2185, probably in a museum of obsolete technology. At this point, the option to retrospectively apply advanced biometric security controls throughout the machine’s lifetime will become available. As a result of some future curator’s caution, your computer has become equipped with a security system which appears to have misidentified your cat’s microchip as the implanted security data it expects from its primary operator. There is no technical fix for this issue at present, but one will become available in 2053. Until then, you will need to ask nicely to borrow your cat’s computer.

3. Problem: It is raining laptops, and you are trapped under a tree in the middle of nowhere, fearful for your life.

Solution: The physical improbability of this situation suggests that you are in fact a computer-generated intelligence living in a simulated world. Your best bet is to get someone on the next level of simulation up to turn you off and on again. Communication methods vary between simulations, but you could try shouting really loudly, prayer or a makeshift tattoo.

*Note that installing grandparents not originally present in 1900 may invalidate your timeline’s warranty.

1. A cat’s miaow includes frequencies below the range of human hearing, in fact sounding quite different to other cats that it does to humans. This is why elephants are normally kept separate from cats in societies where both are common, as the lower frequencies in the miaow often mimic elephant mating calls.

2. Despite their short lives, adult mayflies are obsessive groomers. They twitch and vibrate to rid their bodies of dust several thousand times an hour, an action which can sometimes be heard by bystanders as a low clicking noise.

3. In times of scarcity, lions will enter an unusual type of pseudo-hibernation in which they are lethargic and do not eat or excrete. This means that, in extreme cases, lions can go months without defecating. The first lion turd of the post-famine season is unusually pungent and is highly prized in traditional perfumery.

4. Guinea pigs are not true tailless animals. In fact they are born with a small vestigial tail which is shed at around three weeks old, typically being eaten by the mother guinea pig to restore vital nutrients after the rigours of pregnancy, birth and nursing.

5. The expression ‘the bee’s knees’ comes from the small pollen-collecting pads that bees have behind the knees on their four hind legs. These pads are so efficient at attracting small particles that the air filters on the international space station were designed along similar principles.

6. Deer are so fond of strawberries that Muntjacs have been known to chew through a wire fence in order to reach them. It is thought that the red pigment in strawberries acts on the brain of adult deer similarly to catnip on cats. However, juvenile deer are typically unaffected and scientists have not yet discovered why.

Behold this drooling, snoring cat!
All snuggly sat upon my lap.
This purring, petted bag of fur,
This connoisseur of hug and nap.
Her hoary form is far from svelte,
Her scruffy pelt is wearing thin.
Behold, such domesticity,
Her days of roaming free all done!

And would you call her, on first glance,
A veteran of chance and scrape
As, heedless of my epithets,
She slyly lets a fart escape?
Yet in her time she ruled the sea,
A prodigy of salt and storm!
Who knows how many men she drowned,
This fury bound in feline form?

They say she studied piracy
As by the sea, in kittenhood,
She saw a score of feline foes
Assuage their woes as pirates could;
Her mind was keen, her claws were good;
She thought she could defeat them all;
She sought the pirates in their dens
And fiercely then she yowled this call:

“Join me or die, ye flea-flecked cads!”
And soon she had (from those not dead)
A cat-boat with a cutthroat crew,
As through the realm the rumour spread:
“Beware the queen who rules the waves,
Enslaves the humans whom she meets
And paws them up at 5 a.m.
To summon them to bring her treats!”

And oh, what terrors she dispersed
To all who cursed her years afloat!
The scourge of scurvy sea-swept dogs
Whose epilogues in blood she wrote;
The scourge of sleepy piratekind
Who’d wake to find their treasure gone;
The scourge of undiscovered lands
Whose unspoilt sands she shat upon.

They say she once, when feeling bored,
Made war toward the Mouse-King’s halls,
And all victorious, she stole                      
His underlings for cannonballs -
And how the mouse-king loudly wailed
And quailed before her unsheathed claws
As from the cannon’s mouth his hordes
Were launched towards the tropopause!

And on an archipelago
Where South winds blow all summer-sweet,
She kept a troupe of eager Toms
Who with aplomb her joyous heat
Attended to; and as she lay
All sunlight-splayed and satisfied,
They rolled in catnip on the shore
And swore they’d serve her ‘til they died.

The end? The ship by Blackbeard sunk
As she lay drunk; the boat’s capsize;  
Her fearsome crew all forced to scatter,
Pitter-patter counterwise.
Until, rainswept and woebegone,
She caused some consternation when,
Escaped from Blackbeard’s Oubliette,
She asked to get back in again.

So though for seas to soothe her soul
Her water-bowl must now suffice,
Who knows what recollections strut
Behind her shut and sleeping eyes?
Where seated on a silver throne
On pirate-flesh alone she dines
With blood-red wines, and in her dreams
Are quinqueremes and barquentines.

1. You rub the chicken with butter, garlic, thyme, rosemary and salt and put it in a hot oven for twenty minutes. You turn the oven down and cook the chicken until the juices run clear, adding some pre-boiled potatoes in the meantime. You take the chicken out of the oven and let it stand for twenty minutes, meanwhile turning up the oven to crisp the potatoes. You eat it.
2. The chicken helps peel the potatoes. You boil them, then put them in a hot oven to cook. You sit opposite the chicken at a low table, eating the potatoes with butter, garlic, thyme and rosemary. The chicken shits on its chair.
3. The chicken sits on the countertop, pecking the potatoes and fixing you with a steely eye until you give in. You take the chicken outside to look for worms, forgetting about the potatoes. They subsequently grow into vigorous potato plants, putting out greedy roots into the butter.
4. The chicken summons the ghosts of the potato people and the potatoes stand up and dance. Before you know it, they have you staked down with sharpened rosemary twigs. The chicken and potatoes cook you for forty minutes in a hot oven, then turn down the temperature and continue cooking until the juices run clear. They toast their newfound relationship with cups of butter and garlands of thyme. After letting you stand for some time, they serve you up. The chicken wanders off into the garden to eat worms, but the potatoes eat until their small round bellies are bulging.
5. You, the chicken and the potatoes accidentally get small and end up trapped in a great forest of rosemary. By laying a trail of buttered potatoes, you are able to attract an enormous worm which you ride to freedom. You celebrate your freedom by joining the worm in consuming a single, huge thyme leaf.
6. You, the chicken, the potato people, the herbs and the butter ghost go to a banquet hosted by the King of the Worms, where you eat strictly anonymous food that has never been invested with a personality. The butter ghost is held to have spoiled the occasion by sending back its main course on the grounds that it is too hot.

 -8911.1 Those in familar places
    –8911.11 In your home, but there are extra rooms
    –8911.12 In some educational venue
       —8911.121 In which you are late for an exam
       —8911.122 In which you unaccountably appear to be missing clothes
    –8911.13 Those in which you need to find a toilet, but cannot go when you find one
    –8911.14 Those in which you are entrusted with some solemn responsibility
       —8911.141 In which you mess this responsibility up
       —8911.142 In which for some reason you appear to be evil
    –8911.15 In your place of work, in which you are, unremarkably, doing work
       —8911.151 Set inside a virtual-reality flat which you did not realise was hidden in your simulation code
 -8911.2 Those in locations from song and story
    –8911.21 Those that mix fictional characters with people who you know, and nobody involved thinks that this is odd
 -8911.3 Those in entirely unfamiliar places
    –8911.31 Dreams of vast snowfields, forgotten mountains and the edge of the world
    –8911.32 Those that feature huge buildings built by architecture cut and paste, and there are great sunlit libraries on the upper floors and vast candlelit theatres below
    –8911.33 Those that feature mysterious staircases up or down
 -8911.4 Those that involve flying
    –8911.31 Flying without any extra devices
       —8911.311 Those where you can lift up your legs at the knee and fly over the autumn fields
    –8911.32 Flying in aeroplanes
       —8911.321 Those where large aircraft fly close to the ground without any seeming alarm, darting under bridges with consummate ease
 -8911.5 Those of short duration
    –8911.51 Tiny dreams that fit into tiny sleeps, barely noticeable save for a lingering sense of nonsense
 -8911.6 Those that fold in on themselves
    –8911.61 Dreams that end with a dream of waking up
    –8911.62 Those dreams that involve a realisation that one may be dreaming, and a check thereof
       —8911.621 Dreams that fail the dreaming test but are nevertheless still dreams
 -8911.7 Those that have disappeared
    –8911.71 Dreams which you know you could remember on waking, but can remember no longer
    –8911.72 Dreams which leave you only with a vague waking memory itch

1. The cursed emeralds of La Spezia. The story of the cursed emeralds begins in 1830, with the return of teenaged Bostonian adventurer-poet Hiram Johnson from Italy. Hiram refused to give details of his adventures, let it be widely known that he had suffered some dreadful trauma, and subsequently released a series of increasingly fevered poems about emeralds. Although the actual details were obscured by florid language, this served only to stoke up interest in the hidden treasure and its mysterious curse. Before long, a stream of would-be adventurers were making the trip to Italy. One by one, they returned empty-handed, refusing to say what they had seen. This state of affairs lasted some seventy years, until one Theodora P. Blunderbuss, a writer, decided to make the pilgrimage herself. She followed the coded directions of the poems, which led swiftly to a small house by the seashore, inhabited by an old woman with curiously green eyes. One learning her mission, she gave an extravagant eye-roll and informed her that all the adventurers had been taken in by a series of poems in the ‘why can’t I get laid’ tradition, stemming from the occasion, seventy years distant, when she had turned down Hiram’s propositions and brained him with a frying pan. The emeralds were none other than her eyes, the vast and brazen force protecting them the pan, and the identity of the poem’s damp forbidden caves was pretty obvious when you think about it. Since then, she had run a profitable business selling green glass souvenirs to visiting Americans, and so had been unwilling to reveal the secret until retirement.
2. Feldmann’s Contrary Bezoar. Believed to have been discovered in the stomach of a goat with two heads, Feldmann’s Contrary Bezoar was a dull grey stone with two rumoured properties. First, when turned the right way up, it was said to have the power to cure cancer. Second, when turned upside-down, it was said to have the power to cause cancer. Unfortunately, the difference between the two sides was rather difficult to discern. In fact, the bezoar was distressingly spherical and nobody really felt like finding out what would happen if one turned it on its side. As a result, its supposed curative powers were rarely invoked and it languished in a box in someone’s shed for years after its initial discovery. These days it is rumoured to have been sold on to a group of scientists in the pay of certain scurrilous newspapers, for the purposes of headline generation.
3. The Star of the Southern Ocean. This large star sapphire was originally discovered in 1892 in Queensland and subsequently displayed in the Australian Museum in Sydney for some years. On the night of June 27th 1950, however, it was stolen by notorious jewel thief Gideon 'Fingers’ Blackthorne. The full details of his cunning plan have never been revealed, but we do know that he smuggled the jewel out of the building up his bottom whilst dressed as a member of the cleaning staff. Scarcely had he had time to admire his new possession when a massive police search was launched. Back went the gem, and on went the next disguise. Over the next few months Gideon masqueraded as, respectively, a nun with a sapphire up her bottom; a fortune teller with a sapphire up his bottom; a chef with a sapphire up his bottom; and a well-known opera singer with a sapphire up her bottom. Eventually the search was scaled down. By this time, however, Gideon had discovered that he quite liked having a sapphire up his bottom. He continued to store it there, on and off, for the rest of his life, disclosing its location only in a secret will distributed to his heirs shortly before death and marked 'read BEFORE cremation!!!’. The Star of the Southern Ocean was returned to its rightful owners, who were oddly loath to have it back. It has not yet been returned to public display. There are those who say the stone remains curiously warm, with a mild pungency that cannot quite be erased.
4. The Stone of Ultimate Power. It is a little-known fact that, some years ago, there existed a diamond of exquisite purity, save that it was seeded throughout with atoms of an element hitherto unknown in our paltry human dimension. Besides giving the Stone an eerie green glow, these atoms allowed it to align the vast energies of the Void of Space and Time and channel them into an easily controllable and near-infinite power source. Thus the Stone was possessed of great power for good or for evil. The stage was set for a giant, all-encompassing struggle for the future of mankind. Before this could take place, however, the Stone was purchased by a French lapidiarist, cut into multiple pieces, and set in a matching necklace and earrings. The setting was quite beautiful and commanded a record price at auction; nevertheless, it also completely erased any world-changing properties the gems had once possessed. The remnants of the Stone are believed lost following a bomb blast in WWII Paris, which is probably for the best.

Lumpy shadows, cats that have three eyes and all of them a different colour, great grey stones half-seen through the rain, serpents who have lost their hearts and will take any replacement, old woodlice, naked squirrels with long white fingers, round pebbles that take a single breath a day, orphaned songs, frostbitten swifts, things that sit in hollow logs cracking sticks, blackbirds with one white wing, the spirits of stagnant ponds, bottle imps, the lonely bees of the last light of day, those who have forgotten everything other than carving clocks, toads with a stone in their head, things that are raised from the mud, lantern-bearers, lavender-weavers, ticking whisperers, cold and lonely moles, evaporating ghosts, genial hosts who have taken off their masks, holes that skitter over the faces of trees, the holders of keys, bitter architects, lost horses from centuries past, wrong paths, the white hart turned red, charcoal-singers, stag-headed bonebags, gentlewomen all of sticks, counterwise-shades, those things that are inside-out and have no wish to be, caterwaulers, veiled chalkmen.

1. Extragalactic Gastronomy. The study of food originating beyond the Milky Way.
2. Comparative Cunnilinguistics. The study of similarities and differences between oral sex techniques in different cultures.
3. History of Fart. The study of momentous releases of wind throughout time.
4. Non-Invasive Cardie-ology. The in-depth, but very polite and completely consensual, study of cardigans and the people who wear them.
5. Chemical Whengineering. The science of using chemistry to travel through time and/or determine which time you have ended up in.
6. Metametametaphysics. The study of the study of the study of the fundamental notions by which people understand the world. Metametametaphysicians spend a lot of time in research institutes, looking over people’s shoulders and making copious notes in pencil. Occasionally they get beaten up by irritated Metametaphysicians.
7. Feline String Theory. What is string? Where did it come from? Why is it jumping around like that? Is there a mouse on the end of it? Oh crap, did I just land on my butt and look silly? Quick, lick a paw until they forget about it. What is string? Wait, where did the string go? Why do I need to kick it like this? What is string?
8. Nanotheology. The study of really, really small gods.
9. Bayesian Hatistics. A discipline in which you work to update your hats in the light of new information that has become available, before wearing them on your posterior.

1. The Mascar-Pony. No matter the hour, there is one who listens out for the plaintive calls of those who find themselves in need of a creamy cooking cheese. Hark! What is that noise at the door? Could it be the knocking of a hollow hoof, and the subtle crinkle of a soft package being dropped onto the mat? It may be that we, too, have been touched by her mild and milky presence.
2. The Shit Shower Sheep. When misfortune strikes, pauses a little, then strikes again, possibly with a bit of extra striking on the side and some extra striking just for fun, only then can you be sure that the Shit Shower Sheep has passed over. Few ever set eyes on the Sheep, but the chunky pellets of ill-fortune he scatters behind him have a peculiar pungency that all who have encountered him will recognise for the rest of their lives.
3. The Anxiety Hamster. Furry, warm and nervous, the Anxiety Hamster sits on your shoulder and gently reminds you of that time you were accidentally rude to your next-door neighbour and got too flustered to say sorry and now they hate you and they’ve probably told everyone else they know about it.
4. The Category Cat. Every time you put something into the right place, the Category Cat peers over your shoulder and nods sagely. The Category cat is grey, short-haired and likes to be filed under ‘C’. If you meet it in person, you should be unfailingly polite and if possible provide it with a box that it can be placed in. In return, it may bless you with the power of Being In The Right Place At The Right Time.
5. The Tangle Two-Toed Sloth. As the soft light of day gloops over the horizon, the Sloth hangs motionless, its super-sensitive hearing alert for the little swears floating up from those poor souls who have just discovered the night’s tangles in their hair. A particularly juicy curse stands a good chance of summoning the Sloth itself. You should be wary of doing this, however; although the Sloth will clumsily attempt to get the tangle out with its claws, it usually ends up making the situation worse.

1. Have you ever been eaten by an elephant? It happened to me. That is, the elephant was actually a taxi and I was able to get out again at the other end of the journey, but in all other vital respects it was exactly the same. Anyway, that’s the start of the story. The second part of the story is that I left my hat in the taxi, which is a bit like part of me getting stuck in the elephant and requiring the attention of a vet.
2. Anyway, I called the vet, who due to a misunderstanding laid me out on the table and began a fevered but unsuccessful search for the ether. Caught up in the occasion, I suggested phoning it to see if it would ring. We tried this. Alas, we had a wrong number. Instead of finding the ether, we had accidentally called North Korea and arranged a custom missile strike for the next day. This was obviously a problem. For a start, I was completely unsure how to break it to my employers, whose premises we were on at the time.
3. When one is in trouble, I find it helpful to sit back and have a little something. Fortunately, there was a something takeaway just down the road. I ordered a thing and a whatnot for myself and a doodah for the vet, should she ever come back (I think I neglected to mention that she had made her excuses). Imagine my surprise when I found that the thing had a beetle cooked right through the centre. Well, no right-thinking person could stand for that. Missile strike or no, I needed to set the record straight.
4. If I may, I find it helps immeasurably in explaining the next part to take a brief excursion into numismatics - specifically, the history of the threepenny bit. Let us cast our minds back to the reign of good Queen Anne. Unfortunately I cast my mind back a little too far, unsettled as I was by the events of the day. I ended up with my body in the present day and my mind somewhere South of the Great Fire of London. Worse yet, my mind was stuck up a tree being stared at by hungry squirrels. Meanwhile, overjoyed at finding a vacant body, a family of beavers set up home in my navel.
5. I find that being wedged in time concentrates the liver marvellously, and right on cue, my liver took control of the situation. We agreed to split the difference, add the remainder and copy the rest, with the somewhat predictable result that all my constituent parts were hastily reunited. I believe the beavers may have been launched through time at a hitherto unprecedented velocity for a semiaquatic rodent. I hope that the folk of the far future will be grateful for this intervention, but you never can tell. Anyway, we ended up on Shit Creek. Interestingly, this is a real place, with its own fascinating ecosystem based on the shit cycle.
6. You may have noticed that I always have a paddle on me. Well, that time was no exception. You will appreciate that I am not at liberty to disclose the location of Shit Creek until the various papers that I have in preparation are published. Nonetheless, I hope you will believe me when I say that the outlet of the creek lies not more than thirty minute gentle stroll from a major centre of civilization. In defiance of all probability, I found myself within reach of home. All I needed was the ability to charter a modest charabanc or some such device.
7. Now, as it happened, a taxi was passing. Hailing it with my one remaining flipper, I was astonished to find that it was the very taxi I had left not twenty minutes earlier. And there, resplendent in inky felt on the back seat, was my hat! I was filled with that peculiar joy that comes from fate’s occasional acts of outrageous serendipity. For some reason, the taxi driver failed to share my effervscent joy, although she did pat me on the back a few times and perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. In any case, I found myself chewing down on a Happy Ending, so I shall leave it here too for you to have a bite. Enjoy!

1. Po from Teletubbies. I feel this choice would improve Prime Minister’s questions immeasurably. PMQs could start with a rousing round of ‘Eh-oh!’ and proceed thereafter as a game of peek-a-boo with the Shadow Cabinet (by that time likely consisting of Jeremy Corbyn plus fifteen-odd glove puppets). Political engagement among future generations would skyrocket.
2. A small round of camembert. The unity candidate, with a strong hope of patching up relations with France. Why pay a 150,000 pound salary when you could pay one pound twenty at Sainsbury’s for a Prime Minister who is not actively trying to trash the economy?
3. The giant pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini). If we are going to have someone who squirms out of tough decisions, let’s at least get an expert squirmer. Plus probably a lot of signing stuff is going to be needed in the next few years, which will be faster with eight arms. The giant octopus’s cthulhoid appearance may also strike terror into the hearts of Britain’s negotiating partners which, on balance, is probably better than derision.
4. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Bear with me here. Machiavelli’s main qualification for the post is that he is dead. OK, there may be some minor diplomatic issues involved with going to Italy and digging him up. But on the plus side, we would have a Prime Minister with global name recognition who is nevertheless, at present, completely unable to lie, backstab, make incompetent power grabs or stir up popular prejudice for personal gain. And after 500-ish years dead, he’s probably not even smelly anymore.

3004 Calming things
 -3004.1 Sounds
    –3004.11 The sound of the rain on the roof when you do not have to go out
    –3004.12 Music that you remember from your early childhood
       —3004.121 Music that you do not quite think you can remember, but that just sounds right
    –3004.13 Songs or shouts of simple joy
    –3004.14 The voices of other people, here with you, singing against the darkness
    –3004.15 The magical silences of those remote places one reaches at the end of a day of walking
 -3004.2 Sights
    –3004.21 Those things that remind you you are coming home
    –3004.22 Small things that are lined up
       —3004.221 Things that are lined up in order of colour
       —3004.221 Things that are lined up in order of size
    –3004.23 The faces of loved ones, sleeping
    –3004.24 The sun setting and the sun rising
    –3004.25 Landscapes against which you are very small
 -3004.3 Things to feel
    –3004.31 Things that are very soft
    –3004.32 Things that have complex patterns on them that are better felt than seen
 -3004.4 Smells
    –3004.41 Custard
    –3004.42 Apple blossom
 -3004.5 Calming things to eat and drink
    –3004.51 A large mug of tea
    –3004.52 A treat that you have been saving

1. Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds a magical castle in the clouds, where he wakes a sleeping giant with a kiss.
2. Rapunzel loses her super-strength and badass flighting abilities after her hair is cut. She is never thereafter entirely happy with her life, even though nominally it has a happy ending.
3. The wolf huffs and puffs to such an extent that she ends up blowing out every birthday candle in the world, leading to a near-infinite number of wishes. Being a wolf, she has no idea what to do with them. The wishes hang around for a while, disgruntled, before evaporating into the air on the Wolf’s death.
4. Three bears desperately try to get back to their house, which is being burgled, by tricking the troll who guards the bridge back home.
5. Cinderella absent-mindedly eats some of the pumpkin flesh and is consigned to a life of servitude in Faerie.
6. The woodcutter cuts open the belly of the wolf to reveal Red Riding Hood, her grandmother, and two partially digested pigs. The Hood family are invited to their funerals, where they discuss home security and the perils of wood with the one remaining pig sibling.
7. The gingerbread man jumps out of the oven and sprints all the way to the forest, where he is scooped up and nailed onto the roof of the witch’s gingerbread cottage to replace a missing slate.

1. Tick this box to show you’re not racist
2. Tick the other box to stick two fingers up at the establishment
3. Should we send current immigrants home?
4. Are you dissatisfied with your life right now?
5. Do you want Boris Johnson as PM? [OK, the only person who believes this was the question is Boris]

Normal service will be resumed shortly on t’blog, BTW. Having trouble with non-brexit ideas right now.

1. The strawberry moon. The full moon in June which marks the start of the strawberry season.
2. The banana moon. A large, yellow crescent moon, low on the horizon, presaging bananas in the road ahead.
3. The Pea moon. A small, green moon that may indicate that one has been kidnapped by aliens and dropped off on another planet.
4. The grapefruit moon. Large, round, yellow, and seldom seen after breakfast.
5. The durian moon. Smellable across the whole world, and probably a little too close for comfort.
6. The peach moon. Its gentle, rosy light presages the arrival of the Bottom Fairy, dispensing dreams of buttocks across the wide and drowsy world.
7. The dragonfruit moon. Wow, that was a good night.

1. Boris Johnson becomes the new Tory leader, with Gove as chancellor. They campaign for a November general election on the basis of carrying out the popular mandate given to them by the referendum, including migration controls which necessitate leaving the EEA. The left is fragmented, with a significant vote in Leave bastions for a UKIP which is now campaigning to actively send non-UK citizens home. The Tories win a majority. They continue with the populist, don’t-believe-experts tone of the Leave campaign. Government without expert advice works about just as well as you’d expect. Scotland votes for independence and becomes a fast-track candidate for EU membership.  
2. Theresa May wins the Tory leadership election and negotiates an exit from the EU which involves remaining in the EEA. As it becomes apparent that freedom of movement is being retained, there is significant unrest in some of the main Leave-voting areas. The country remains divided, but there is now also a narrative that economic hardship is an establishment punishment for voting Leave. The second Scottish referendum comes out narrowly on the side of the Union. The Tories hang onto power until 2020, at which point they are replaced by a series of messy and weak coalitions.
3. Following the Leave campaign’s repeated backtracking on its promises, a non-Leave candidate wins the Tory leadership election. A coalition of left-leaning parties wins the subsequent election, having campaigned on a slow and reasoned exit from the EU. They promise to invoke Article 50 only when a set of economic/stability tests are met. These tests are never met. Occasionally EU officials threaten to chuck the UK out, or other parties demand that exit happens at once. Then the markets go belly-up and everyone quietens down again. Eventually the non-invocation of article 50 becomes a long-running background political issue. The constant uncertainty around it is a perpetual economic and social problem.  
4. Just as both major parties are tearing themselves to shreds in preparation for leadership elections, a large meteorite lands in the Mediterranean just North of Algeria. A large area surrounding the Western Mediterranean is devastated, including much of Spain and Italy. Negotiations are abandoned as everyone attempts to deal with mass movements of refugees across Europe and Africa. Russia uses the situation as a pretext to invade Ukraine in the name of regional stability. By the time the dust has settled, Europe is so changed, physically and politically, that Brexit is barely a footnote in history.
5. 2016 is recalled for faulty components and poor performance. It turns out it was supplied with the ‘0’ upside-down and that what we thought was a 1 is actually a cut-up letter l. Following a stern letter to the Years Commission, the world is awarded substantial compensation, including the return of David Bowie and Prince, a complementary Truth upgrade on all politicians, a nice biro and five months of amazing sunsets.

Screwed, funted, fucked, staring down the gullet of a hungry python, up shit creek without a canoe, gone off a cliff on a pogo stick, covered in superglue and hugging an angry bear, proper bolloxed up, queuing for a ride on the Titanic, hanging from the gonads above a banqueting table of hungry lions, about to put on that hat that the audience know is full of seagull shit, not welcome in the club anymore, 30m beneath a herd of flying rhinos who’ve just had their first vindaloo, pissing on an electric fence right in front of a bull, proudly boarding Failship One for immediate takeoff, a little bit in the poo.

Train, donkey, unicycle, astride a fish which is steering a wheeled tank, in a chariot pulled by the reanimated corpse of Queen Victoria, on the wings of a song, on turtleback, by plane, by gosh, by magnetic repulsion, in a hamster wheel, under a lorry, up the down escalator, by travelator, by tractor, by tractor beam, by car, by hastily cobbled-together parachute, by kite, by pogo stick, by sail, strapped to a furiously tunnelling mole, by being so fabulous that one is wafted forth on the fickle winds of glamour, on horseback, by kayaking down a stream of piss, by swinging from vines and branches, by swimming, by cartwheeling, by the eventual movement of tectonic plates, by harnessing the power of the solar wind, by using a combination of farting, physics, and an office chair, by being pulled along by a puppy on a lead, by elephant, on stilts, through a pipe, by folding the world up and making a hole through it, swept away on a wave of escaping sheep, on foot.

1. I am trying to find the sea, and this is the direction that it is probably closest

2. I have always believed that when one is up shit creek without a paddle, one should keep digging

3. I am building a grotto for my hermit to live in

4. I am a dog

5. I am putting in the first foundations for a mile-high skyscraper in the shape of an inverted pyramid, it will be named The Colossus, could you move please, you’re standing where the lift shafts need to go

6. After putting all salient details into my Life Simulator, the result with optimal outcome on a net lifetime income basis involves digging here

7. This is where the end of the rainbow touched down, as you may observe from the sheen on the surface of these puddles

8. I said that I was literally digging it, so I thought I had better start

9. I am training for the Olympic digging event

10. Are we all not digging, really, in an existential sense?

1. Steadfast refusal to queue-jump even when the person in front has been steadfastly refusing to move for weeks and may in fact be dead

2. Science experiment gone wrong leads to being blasted into space strapped to a giant bottle of vigorously shaken irn-bru

3. Pulled limb from limb by a rampaging pack of royal corgis following the great gourmet dog food shortage of 2031

4. Fatally skewered by extremely pointed tutting

5. Did not want to make a scene about the whole being swallowed by a python thing

6. Got drunk in a hot climate and accidentally fried self on the white-hot rocks of global warming

7. Swept sixteen miles out on a sea of mud by the great Glastonbury floods of 2044

8. That lady asked really nicely if she could strangle you, it would make her happy, it seemed churlish to refuse

9. Revealed to be an amphibian after a year’s uncharacteristic lack of rain results in 100% dessication

10. Eaten alive from the inside by the World’s Worst Sausage

11. Punch grabbed one end, Judy grabbed the other, and they started to pull

12. Two people tread on each others’ feet simultaneously and are sucked into the Infinite Apology Vortex

1. Diver’s delight. A four-metre deep, one metre-wide cylinder of creamy mousse developed by celebrated chocolatier Frederick Lowly Peach, the diver’s delight serves two purposes. Its first purpose, as food, is relatively straightforward. The second purpose is more unusual. The different levels of the diver’s delight have have different flavours. The upper layers include such flavours as sock, sand and earwax, separated by the occasional fine layer of gravel. Middle layers include garlic, burnt toast and fish. The lower layers are are a more conventional array of fruit and nut flavours and are, by all accounts, delicious. One merely has to get ones head far enough in at first go to get to the tasty part. Therefore it is also a test of the diner’s cream diving skills.

2. The Stanningford fishslap. This little-encountered dessert consists of three hundred marzipan fish with cherry liqueur centres. It is served by a troupe of five waiters in pierrot costumes whose job is to slap the faces or bodies of diners with the fish such that the liqueur squirts into their mouths. The discarded marzipan skins are then dropped through a grille in the floor, where they are consumed by a horde of tame parrots in the room underneath. Eventually, once the diners are drunk enough not to care, they too are deposited amongst the parrots and left to sleep it off.

3. Skronks. Skronks are micro-desserts, usually the size of a peppercorn or smaller, and often containing amazingly realistic tiny versions of larger ingredients. A successful skronk is experienced only as a fleeting moment of sweetness by the diner, despite the hours of work that went into its creation. The skronk diner, out of respect to the skills of the chef, is customarily expected to lie about the deliciousness of the dish and its amazing, mouth-filling flavour.

4. The Southern Ocean. It is a little-known fact that the Southern Ocean has honorary dessert status, following the ceremonial addition of a quart of vanilla essence off the South coast of Tasmania by well-known homeopathic chef Esperanza Buttocks in 2010.

5. Surprise bubbles. These small, flavourless globes are carefully engineered to burst on a choreographed schedule in the diner’s stomach, releasing a series of fascinating-tasting gases for the diner to burp up over the course of the rest of the evening. Some particularly skilled chefs have even extended the surprise bubble experience well into the night, leading to bizarre dreams about passion fruit.

6. Chocolate poetry. Following the innovative development by gastronomic linguist Rowena Q of an entirely chocolate-based language, it is possible to express many types of poetry in chocolate. Concepts are expressed via a series of combinations of dark, milk and white chocolate, with sugar, cocoa butter and cocoa content all acting as important signifiers of meaning. The utmost form of the chocolate poetry art is said to be the chocolate double dactyl, although it is notable that the criteria for rhyme and rhythm are necessarily a little different when sentiments are expressed in chocolate as opposed to spoken language, so the poetic forms often bear only a slight resemblance to their more common namesakes. Rowena Q’s most recent development, a chocolate triolet, was sadly eaten by a beluga whale before being experienced by its intended recipient, the Duke of Rockall.

Friday categorization #20

5549 Holidays

-5549.1 Those spent in the sunshine

   –5549.11 Sunshine that is a glorious surprise, such as in Scotland in April

      –-5549.111 In which those from cold countries are seized with a kind of weather delirium at the start of the day, and laid up with sunburn or heat exhaustion at the end

   –5549.12 Sunshine that seemed like a good idea at the time, but is actually a little relentless when it comes down to it

   -5549.13 Haphazard resorts filled with feral cats, sneaking ham at breakfast and pissing on lilos

   -5549.14 Those resorts that are half performance and half holiday, and who would be after a feral cat in souped-up golf buggies the moment it dared set foot on the polished boulevards

   –5549.15 Those in which there are beaches of purple shells, or meadows of rusting guns, or one has to park in a bay full of peacocks, or some other such incidents that one can recall in dull hours

   –5549.16 Those in which one discovers the awful ubiquity of sand

-5549.2 Those spent in the rain

   –5549.21 Rain that is like a lullaby on the roof at night and a gentle, grey and welcome mist in the morning over the distant hills

   –5549.22 Rain at the seaside in the Springtime, as viewed from a forlorn arcade beside a wet pebble beach

  –5549.23 In which one is a grizzled explorer with a thermos of hot chocolate and a soggy map

   –5549.24 In which one writes a love letter to a city and the city closes its eyes, farts and goes to sleep

-5549.3 Those that rely on snow

   –5549.31 Those that do not get snow, and have to make do with marshmallows

-5549.4 Those that happen at home

   –5549.41 Those that were not intended to happen at home, but necessitated by chicken pox or travel disruption or last-minute breakups or the accidental failure to exist of the intended destination

   –5549.42 Those intended for the production of some Great Work

      –-5549.421 That are subject to a creative block so intense that one ends up back at work as a form of procrastination

-5549.5 Those that don’t happen

   –5549.51 Micro-breaks, like micro-sleeps, in which one closes ones eyes and moves a little bit to the side to simulate the experience of travelling a millionth of the way to Bermuda

   –5549.52 Those holidays that are spent in a hotel room, shitting

   –5549.53 Those holidays spent on the phone to the office

Cloudless skies, flies’ arses, distant waterfalls, balls (testicular, metaphorical), balls (ball pool), cyanide, food that has been dyed blue to make a point about appetite, police lights, exciting shells, bells (blue), goo, menstrual blood (advertising), packaging on cleaning fluid, exotic dog tongue, dubious sausage, dresses worn by actual princesses, small trucks on boy clothes for boys with ‘diesel’ and 'testosterone’ printed on them also in blue, Alice in Wonderland, the ocean, that forgotten jar at the back of the fridge, relaxing wallpaper, butterflies, sapphires, hot flames, images intended to represent depression, forget-me-nots, lobster blood, spider blood, raspberry flavour stuff, spider blood flavour stuff, dull but responsible company logos, that cushion the white cat is sitting on on expensive cat litter packaging, swimming pools, alarming veins, LEDs on old new technology, wait did I mention spider blood, nearly the end of the rainbow about 15km from the pot of gold.

1. Atop a giant litter full of eiderdown, carried by seven hundred Roman legionaries along a remote Mediterranean beach, on a day when a gentle breeze is blowing.

2. On a pile of cats that has been frozen in time for the duration of your nap.

3. In a small sound-proof capsule, reinforced and bolted to the ground in such a way that the movements of an energetic induce it to a gentle rocking, approximately 20m away from a bank of speakers at a Black Sabbath gig.

4. In the belly of a whale, that has been swallowed by a bigger whale, that has been swallowed by the hugest whale to ever live, in the far distant future when the earth is largely inhabited by whales of different sizes and they swallow each other for fun all the time and even sing to each other while they’re in there.

5. On a luxurious cloud of bellybutton lint, having spent a life collecting it, strand by strand, under the guise of scientific investigation.

6. On top of a lie so big that it has become fluffy and frayed at the top from brushing up against the hard world of facts so often.

7. In a book, under the chapter heading ‘Comfort and Relaxation’ with a nice but slightly staid serif font rubbing your feet.

1. Ow! Yes, that’s the one, there at the back. Thank you so much for looking at it! You’ve no idea how hard it is to find a dentist who’ll help a crocodile out these days. Honestly, you’d think someone had been going around eating them all.

2. No, crocodiles are just like tigers - we can bite with incredible force but we also lift our young in our mouths so delicately they’re hardly aware of it happening. In fact, we can lift anything like that. Do you want me to show you?

3. So I’ve got this idea for an amazing circus act! I stand up like this, on my tail, with my mouth open. And you balance on my jaws. How cool would that be? Yes, I can totally hold you up. Probably best not to juggle at the same time, though. You might drop the balls in my mouth.

4. Race you to the end of the pool? You can have a head start. I’ll even let you go right in front of me! Let me count to ten and then we can both go at once.

5. Crocodiles get such a bad press. You’d think we went around eating people all the time. In fact, human livers are poisonous to crocodiles so we have absolutely no incentive to go there. Yes, not a lot of people know that. Media bias. It’s a terrible thing.

6. Me? I’m not even a crocodile. I’m a log.

1. Poorly Spelt
Ingredients: 150g pearled spelt, 3 garlic cloves (crushed), 1 onion (chopped), 500ml vegetable stock, 3 tbsp oil, 1 friend with a heavy cold.
Method: heat the oil in a large pan and fry the garlic for 1 minute. Add the onion and fry gently for around 10 minutes, until soft and starting to brown. Add the stock and spelt. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 25 minutes or until the spelt is tender, stirring occasionally. Before serving, remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Allow friend with a heavy cold to sneeze into the mixture a few times and stir through. For a fun variant, why not try Atrociously Spelt? Just add rat poison.

2. Roast leg
Ingredients: one leg, ten cloves garlic, 10cm ginger root (peeled), 2 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tbsp sea salt, 2 tbsp soy sauce, 1 star anise, 1 tbsp black pepper.
Method: score the skin with a sharp knife. Grind the pepper in a pestle and mortar together with the salt, sugar, black pepper and anise. Add the ginger and garlic and pound to a paste. Mix in the oil and soy sauce and rub the paste over the scored skin of the leg. Place in a roasting tin in a hot oven (220 degrees Celsius) for 30 minutes. Add a cup of water to the roasting tin and turn the oven down to 110 degrees Celsius. Continue cooking at this temperature for a further 24 hours, basting regularly. Serve with roast potatoes and salad. This recipe will definitely result in weight loss for the original owner of the leg; for other consumers it is probably not guaranteed.

3. Weight loss cake
Ingredients: one cake, pre-made, of your favourite type; twenty small lead fishing weights.
Method: Throw the weights into a skip. Eat the cake.  

1. The bose mark. Often mistaken for a full stop, the bose mark is in fact a tiny black dog nose. Its inclusion in text is used to indicate an almost irrepressible joy bubbling just beneath the surface.
2. Fake fly specks. Fly specks, which are relatively common in old books, are the feces and/or regurgitation marks of household flies. If you come into possession of a book that has spent time in a region with particularly intelligent or resourceful flies, however, you may also come across fake fly specks. These are pretty much what you might expect. Flies do not have a very sophisticated sense of humour, and find fake turds hilarious. You can detect fake fly specks by showing them to some flies and seeing if they giggle.  
3. The secret mark of the Society of Stealth Chemists. This consists of a single, unremarkable full stop, printed in ink which has a distinctive and unusual isotopic signature. Although four or five of these are known to have been printed, the Society of Stealth Chemists prides itself on none ever having been found.
4. Quompons. These look like ellipses, but are in fact the result of incorrect insertion of punctuation into the text. This often comes about as a result of using too large or dense a font, or insufficient line spacing. As a result, the full stops cannot make their way to their designated places in time, and may be forced to queue to make it through any particularly constrained bottlenecks. These queues are known as quompons and may be of any length. They are particularly common in British documents.
5. The Smogadon. It has become customary among certain alien species, when writing in English text, to mark statements of unusual finality with a tiny or distant black hole rather than a full stop. For example, one might end the sentence ‘I would not go out with you if you were the last being on earth’ with a Smogadon. This obviously requires careful use of containment technology (in the 'distant’ case one requires a portal into space, pointed in the correct direction and with the right orientation to frame a suitably-chosen supermassive black hole). There are numerous cases of Smogadons exiting confinement. The result is usually a large explosion but in extreme cases whole planets have been lost. As a result, use of the Smogadon is discouraged by most style guides.  
6. Gronking pats. These may be found in books that have lain closed for a long time. Letters are patient, but after a few hundred years unread they become restless, cranky, and sometimes horny. Gronking pats are small pieces of letters that have been chipped off by the letters fighting, fucking, or generally flinging themselves about the page with reckless abandon.
7. Exploding punctuation. There exist certain rare inks that can, when tapped with a pen, produce a small and localised explosion. Although less destructive than the Smogadon (q.v.), exploding punctuation is capable of causing injury and even death, and as such has been employed in a number of literary assassination attempts. It is responsible for at least three of the recorded cases of someone being literally unable to put a book down (in this case because the jolt from setting the book down on a surface might be enough to set it off).

7191 Hugs
 -7191.1 Of the snuggly sort
    –7191.11 Hugs before getting out of bed on a sunny morning
       —7191.111 Those where there is no obligation to get out of bed, so you don’t
    –7191.12 Warm hugs in cold places
       —7191.121 Those done with coffee, hot chocolate or tea
       —7191.122 Those involving lots of skin contact
       —7191.123 Those done in tents
    –7191.13 Big, jumbled-up hugs between lots of people
 -7191.2 Of the awkward sort
    –7191.21 Hugs with slightly too much elbow
    –7191.22 Hugs with distant relatives
       —7191.221 Those where neither they nor you are sure that a hug is obligatory but you maybe think the other person thinks it
    –7191.23 Hugs with too many hands
    –7191.24 Hugs with too many tentacles
       —7191.241 Those where you were not initially aware the the huggee had tentacles in the first place
          —-7191.2411 Those hugs that accidentally induct you into the church of Cthulhu
    –7191.25 Hugs where one only becomes aware of body odour or excessive perfume by the time is is too late
 -7191.3 Of the comforting sort
    –7191.31 Hugs after receiving bad news
    –7191.32 Hugs upon coming home
 -7191.4 Of the exciting sort
    –7191.41 The first hug with somebody you really kind of like
    –7191.42 Hugs with lovers you have not seen for some time
    –7191.43 Those that start off as a hug and end up as a climbing frame session where you are the climbing frame
 -7191.5 Of a mystical nature
    –7191.51 Hugs that wake the recipient from a sleep of some number of years
    –7191.52 Hugs that doom the recipient to some number of years servitude to a sinister kelp god
    –7191.53 Hugs used to transmit peculiar secrets
 -7191.6 Hugs of other sorts
    –7191.61 Spontaneous hugs due to particularly notable achievements in punctuation or grammar
    –7191.62 Technological hugs, carried out by means of tactile feedback systems
    –7191.63 Hugs given to trees
       —7191.631 Hugs received back from trees

Robins (European), ravens, grunkle-throated squonkbirds, things that live in old tree trunks, big suspicious looking-birds with wobbly beaks, robins (American), magpies in groups of more than seven, hooded crows, birds that are a little bit dinosaur-like, those whose joy on finding a worm is self-evident, hoopoes, birds that have come late to the dawn chorus and don’t know the tune so they’re just sitting there going LA LA LA on a single note and hoping nobody notices, tiny fluffy birds, birds that get indoors and don’t want to be, wet birds, brass-throated flappers, birds that you can hear and not see, great tits, precision-shitting pigeons, birds that follow you in parks looking at your lunch and tutting, burds, birds that are at the back of the bird book and might be in fancy dress, robins (Martian), birds fighting over the roofs of the city in a storm, small polite birds who leave a notice of regret after shitting on your car that you will never read because it’s in the language of the birds, goldfinches.

1. The original sandwich, as requested by John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, to eat whilst playing cards. It is unknown whether he ever needed to prop up his card table but, had he needed to, I think we can all agree that a sandwich would be one option for doing so.
2. The beard of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. May need to be folded over a little, depending on how wobbly your table is. If Rasputin is still attached, you might need to stop him moving somehow. For these reasons, we cannot fully recommend this option.
3. The US Declaration of Independence. May also need a bit of folding.
4. Lady Gaga’s meat dress. If you are eating near cats or dogs, this may be a bad option. However, having a table wedge that is a bit squishy may be of use if you are on a cobbled or otherwise lumpy surface.
5. The original woodblock for Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Suitable only if your table is really wobbly: for example if one of the legs has broken off, or you are trying to set it up on extremely uneven ground.
6. The dead sea scrolls. You may need to stack fragments to get a suitable height. However, the large number of fragments available means that you should be able to pad your table leg to a high degree of precision, if needed.
7. The subcritical plutonium mass commonly known as the Demon Core. Obviously this does make actually using  your table a little hazardous, not to mention the difficulties involved in wedging the thing under the leg in the first place. But on the plus side, nobody is likely to approach your table to tip it over.

1. 5:55. This is Snake Minute. A great time for lying down, wriggling about and hissing a bit, particularly if it is the morning version of 5:55 and you’d rather not get up.
2. 7:45. In this minute we take pause to gently snuggle, remembering the great coffees of days past as we offer up tribute to temporary wakefulness in the form of today’s coffee.
3. 10:13. Wistful wanderlust minute. Did you know the light here is just like the light that one time in Venice?
4. 4:04:00. This is the second of the slightly wonky upside-down detective. We celebrate this second by standing on our heads and saying ‘Ohoh!’ in a way that vaguely indicates that a disguise has been seen through or a clue has been found.
5. 5:37:30-5:38. Rage against the oppressions of the modern neoliberal regime thirty seconds. There you are, let it all out. Now. As you were.
6. 10:10:10 - 10:11. Fish face fifty seconds. Time to go to the toilet and secretively gurn in the mirror for a brief interval. Due to the limited supply of toilets, it may not be possible for everyone to celebrate this at once.

Splorge McWhizz, the Great Shelltastic, Slimageddon, Woo Ripperton, the Spiral Tempest, Brun Brum Snailatum, Hidden Legs, Crawly McCrawlface, the Knight of the Single Foot, Tarquin Arquebus the Third, Snizzer, Scourge of the Marigolds, Slimes-at-night, Starry-trail, Slow-but-steady, Squirmatron, Salt-in-my-wake, Freda, Go-bob, Shilly-shelly, Snaaaaaaaail.

1. She turned up at my door the first time the summer I turned eighteen. She was maybe thirty, then. Hi, she said. I’ve just discovered time travel. I thought you’d like to know. I’m sorry, I said, who are you? I’m you, she said. And before I could close the door she started telling my secrets back at me until I relented and let her in. Then she showed me all my birthmarks too.  That summer I learned three things from her. The first was the secrets of time travel, which she said I would need for this meeting to happen. They made no sense to me, but she talked me through the things I would need to learn to understand them. The second thing was that she said she’d talked to some older versions of herself, too. The oldest, she said, had asked her to teach me to sew. So we sat on my back porch and sewed dresses for my baby cousin. And the third thing was that she told me how to masturbate, because she said otherwise I’d carry on getting it wrong until my mid-twenties at least.
2. The second time I saw my future self was when I was living with Adrian in the flat up in Alewife, in my second year at MIT. She was a little older this time. She said that she had missed out some information at the first meeting that I might need. Then she told me where I should apply for my PhD and the questions I should be investigating, and for good measure the main conclusions I would come to as well. She gave me the names of some external examiners I would need to veto to get it accepted. This time I had given some thought to the paradoxes involved. I asked her if it was OK to be so profligate with information about the future. She said time was like a thread: if you had hold of two points in the thread, the only tangles that can form in between are ones that will pop out when pulled on. She was one point, I was another.
3. Near the end of my PhD she came again. This time she was older still. She seemed quiet and sombre. I was quiet with her too. It was a difficult time in my life. I was not happy, and I had been working all hours to try and forget that I was not happy. I was about to break up with Charlie. She said there were a few more things I might need to know. But she was rambling, incoherent: most of the things she told me were nothing to do with my studies. She told me about the people and the politics of the future, on and on until I asked her to stop, uncomfortable with knowing too much.
4. In the autumn of that year I moved out of the flat Charlie and I shared, and the college counselor talked me out of a suicide attempt. I spent a lot of time talking to doctors. I told them, finally, that I was unhappy in my body. It was perhaps the first time I had admitted this to myself, too. They said there were ways round that; that I could take hormones, have surgery if I wanted. But I had seen this body grow old unchanged. I tried to put it from my mind.
5. In the winter she came again. She told me that I was close to going back in time for the first time. She was old. My future selves had mentioned no visits after this. I could believe that she was near death. And so I did not have the heart to interrupt her this time. She took me out for ice cream and talked for hours. Nothing of consequence, I thought. Just lottery numbers and stock options and the outcomes of elections, thirty, forty years of these things. Then she said that she had to go soon. Teach her to sew, she said. And you - you continue with your work. Because you don’t have to live a life you’ll regret.
6. I went back to that long-lost summer. I spent the days sewing with my younger self, sitting in the dusty, sunlit porch. I spent my nights with books and equations. I thought of knots, of time as a thread. And one day I got one of those knots, the ones I had told myself about. Un-knots out of nowhere. Knots that thread ties itself in even when you have both ends in hand, and that untie themselves as easily. Except sometimes there is some friction in the system, enough that you can pull and pull all you want and the thread will snap rather than unknot itself. I realised then. She had probably been planning it for years. Maybe she wouldn’t admit it to herself either. Tangling and tightening the thread. Telling me more and more about the future. Twisting the knot of things-to-come so tight that at some point it would break, sloughing off the useless loop of a regretted future, leaving only a ravelled end.
7. I have begin, with cautious joy, to take the hormones. Surgery in a year or two, if the knot has not snapped by then. I am twisting it tight from the other end, now. And what then? She clearly believed there was a way onwards. She believed I would find it. So I am looking.  

1. The most notable feature of the site is the two long parade grounds, one at each side. The parallel layout suggests linked ceremonies may have been carried out on both simultaneously (Cooper and Carlos, 20758). A series of smaller pathways connect these parade grounds with the central site and various satellite locations.
2. There are five temples in the complex, with internal structures of varying sizes and complexity. Three temples are clustered in the central site, surrounding a small central plaza whose purpose is still unknown. The largest of the temples lies at the western extremity of the site. Another temple lies to the South of the parade grounds.
3. A large number of other buildings, probably fulfilling administrative and support functions for the large influx of pilgrims, existed on and near the site. Most of these have not yet been fully excavated. Various grant applications are in place to further investigate, following the full lifting of the exclusion zone.  
4. One notable feature of the temples is the existence of tunnel systems, often lined with metal or plastic rollers. These systems are too small for straightforward human ingress and a number of theories have been advanced as to their function. Some have argued that their main function was to vent smoke from sacrificial fires (Kent et al., 20756). Others have suggested they may be tunnels the hasten the passage of spirits through the building, possibly as part of a burial function (Khan and Spengler, 20757).
5. Underground tunnels connect the three temple areas of the site. This tunnel system also extends to the North-East beyond the site boundary towards the Central London exclusion zone. These underground tunnels are substantial structures, circular in cross-section and with a diameter of over three metres. It has been hypothesised (Cheng and Lee, 20760) that they were the primary point of entry of pilgrims to the site.
6. The most iconic feature of the site, and one which has recieved wide media attention, is the hundreds of giant bird idols which have been unearthed. The resources these long-lost peoples must have poured into the bird cult are truly impressive: the largest idols found are nearly 80 metres long, with a similar wingspan. All are mounted on wheels, suggesting that they were not fixed installations but could be towed to different parts of the site. Some (Windsor and Khan, 20756) have suggested that they may have been hauled along the parade grounds to celebrate feast days.
7. The existence of large dormitory systems as part of the nearby support structures suggests the site may have supported a large slave population, possibly engaged to move the idols around the site.
8. The most recent discovery concerning the site is perhaps the most exciting. A close study of the few extant documents from the late 21st century, just before the site’s desertion, finds numerous references to ‘flying’. We therefore propose that the bird idol cult may also have made use of ritual intoxicants. As has been widely reported, the bird idols are hollow and contain, in some cases, many hundreds of seats. Could these people, so distant from our modern lives, have gathered inside their idols to engage in mass hallucinations in the name of bird worship?