Listing to Port

A is for Ava, who wakes every hour,
B is for Ben, who can turn on the shower.
C is for Charlotte, who chews all she sees;
D is for Dan who likes trying to grab bees;
E’s for Elijah, who’s climbing the stair;
F is for Fred, chucking food from his chair.
G is for Gabe, sitting sucking his thumb,
And H is for Hannah, look out for her bum!
I is for Isaac, a querulous eater;
J is for Jem who can sick half a metre;
K is for Kelly, who’s kicking your seat;
and L is for Liam, who’s licking concrete.
M is for Mia, who likes snatching toys,
N is for Noah, the source of that noise;
O is for Olly, a bit of a thrower;
P is for Penny, who’s pouncing on Noah.
Q is for Queenie who’s quoting from Frozen,
R is for Rob, always putting his nose in;
S is for Sophie, who’s chasing a swan.
T is for Tim, turn around and he’s gone.
U is for Ursula, clutching your knee;
V is for Viv who’s half-way up that tree;
W’s for Will, and he never will share,
X is for Xavier, pulling Jem’s hair;
Y is for Yasmin, who’s in to the bin;
Z is for Zack, is it time for some gin?

1. Queen Victoria was largely absent from public life for years after the death of Prince Albert. The public were given to believe that this was due to unbearable grief; however, in truth this was only the initial cause of her absence. In fact, she was engaged in a titanic secret struggle for the future of London. After Albert died, the Queen made certain consultations with dubious magicians, leading to a midnight ceremony in the gardens of Buckingham Palace at which they attempted to talk to Albert’s shade with the help of John Dee’s scrying-glass. The ritual went disastrously wrong, raising something from the deep that should never have been wakened. Some of the survivors claimed that it had Albert’s face; but it is certain that it was not Albert. For the next thirteen years, Victoria and her inner circle fought the beast, which was intent on making a nest in central London, eventually defeating it in an epic battle in Regent’s Park which was successfully passed off as a firework display.
2. Greta Garbo did not actually retire from acting at the age of 36. In fact, she was replaced by a robotic replica from the future in 1940, the film Ninotchka having become a quasi-religious obsession in the Patagonian robot cultures of the 3970s. Following this replacement, the real Garbo made a further fifty-seven films in the future before her eventual death at the age of 118. The robotic Garbo tried its hand at acting but proved to be an imperfect copy; it executed its emergency retirement routine and spent a significant proportion of the following years on standby mode in a cupboard. Interestingly, Garbo’s future grave site has become temporally dislocated and tends to wander through time between her original birth date and 4450 or so. Interested hikers near Ushuaia should keep on the lookout for a large and mysterious cube.
3. Another victim of body-swapping was Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion. During a particularly inspired game in 1973, Fischer’s pieces were infested by the Zugzwang collective, a team of sixteen floating spirits who had taken to defining their hierarchy in chess terms. The queen of the Zugzwang collective, angry at being sacrificed, executed a bellybutton-level essence swap with both players, essentially splitting herself in two. Fischer’s body was rather inexpertly controlled by half of the Zugzwang queen for the rest of its life. The whereabouts of his mind is currently unknown.
4. It may seem odd to suggest that Kanye West has a reclusive secret life, as he is not known for being exceptionally reclusive. However, this is because at least sixteen clones of West have been made. Each one spends ten months of the year in strict seclusion, before telepathically communicating with the others for an update on the outside world and spending the next two months as (part of) West’s public face. What they are doing in their ten-month sabbaticals is unclear, but I’m sure the world will find out eventually.

0780 Ghosts
 -0780.1 Those of the long dead
    –0780.11 Those that have forgotten quite what they ever were
       —0780.111 Those who died at sea, having long slow conversations with generations of whales
       —0780.112 Those that drift around the plumbing of cities, feeding on snatched words and truck exhaust, only coming out in the fog
    –0780.12 Those who know how to do one thing very well, and have been doing it for thousands of years
    –0780.13 Renaissance ghosts
       —0780.131 Those from the actual renaissance
 -0780.2 Those of the recently deceased
    –0780.21 Those of the famous or infamous
       —0780.211 Those who, having formed an attachment to cameras, have ended up haunting them, causing irritating lens flare and mysterious particles on the sensor
    –0780.22 Those who have left a story unfinished
       —0780.221 Those who whisper their stories in the ear of people who are falling asleep, and who will not remember on waking
       —0780.222 Those who have taken to haunting their last book, in the hope of forcing more ink out of the page
    –0780.23 Those who died singing and have not stopped since
    –0780.24 Those whose spookily ernest warnings about dangerous rocks, caves or mountainsides have attracted a whole new slew of visitors to perilous locations.
    –0780.25 Ghosts trying to dodge each other in corridors, having not worked yet that they can go straight through
    –0780.26 The moderately long-dead, riding around on ceiling fans, having been told that this will make them look more recently-deceased
 -0780.3 Those of animals, birds or insects
    –0780.21 The ghosts of mice
       –0780.211 Those who congregate in great friendly invisible groups
       –0780.212 Those whose rushing around and squeaking in million-strong flocks is sometimes mistaken for the North wind, but which can be distinguished by an astute observer of cat behaviour
    –0780.22 Ghosts of slow lorises and bush babies that have faded to nothing more than huge translucent eyes
    –0780.23 Cockroach ghosts
       —0780.241 Those that are the source of unexplained crunches underfoot
 -0780.4 Those of objects
    –0780.41 The wandering ghosts of planets that have fallen into another sun, and that now cluster round G-type stars like woebegone moths
    –0780.42 Ghosts of useful objects that have been destroyed, hanging around tutting at humanity
 -0780.5 Those of concepts or other intangible things
    –0780.51 Ghosts of Christmases or other celebrations
       —0780.511 Those ghosts of Christmas who get together for a jolly Christmas lunch, consuming the recently-released souls of hapless turkeys and leaving them double-ghosted.
    –0780.52 Ghosts of disproved theories, hanging round universities, trying to get back in.

1. How to put your hair in a bun. You will need: one bun (wholemeal is best), and some butter. Cut the bun in half and spread with butter. Insert hair.

2. How to put your hair in a ponytail. You will need: one pony. Position yourself close to the business end of the pony. Part the pony’s tail, and insert hair. Note: due to the tendency of ponies to move about, kick and/or shit, this hairstyle may be best adopted for a limited time only.

3. How to put your hair in cornrows. You will need: a cornfield. Go into the cornfield, find some corn that is sort of lined up, and put your hair there.

4. How to rock a Mohican. You will need: to be registered as a childminder in New York State or Massachusetts, and for there to be someone in the Mohican tribe who has a baby that they want minding, and for them to want you to look after their baby, and for that baby to need a nap whilst in your care. Method: lift baby and rock.

5. How to put your hair in bunches. You will need: to decide. Bunches of what? Flowers or bananas?

6. How to put your hair in pigtails. You will need: two pigs with curly tails. Method: wait until pigs are next to each other. Part hair into two. Insert each part through one pig’s tail. Note: due to the tendency of pigs to not remain at constant separation, this hairstyle is likely to be of even shorter duration than the ponytail. Why not just wear it loose instead?

1. By following your nose.
2. By getting to the bottom of things.
3. By keeping logs.
4. By sorting through litter.
5. By working it out.
6. By a process of elimination.

Gold, marigold, forcefully cheerful office, jonquil, jaundice, piss, bananas, fresh chips, autumn tree, bee stripe, custard, cowardy custard, bug-attracting summer dress, surprising bruise, cheese, chartreuse, lemon, warning sign, fairy princess wig, rubber duck, teeming wasp nest, advocaat, road markings, dystopian sunrise, cartoon character looking into a treasure chest, school bus, beachside idyll, turmeric, honey, highlighter pen, generic warm thing illustration, invisibility jacket, trombone, dandelion, swanky courgette, suspect snow, saffron, dramatic llama, ochre, amber, giant hypnotic cat eye, canary, flax, cornfield, you should see a doctor about that, unwatered plant, topaz, mustard, mango, middle-of-the-rainbow.

1. When you would like the pleasure of turning down an invitation to a party, but no invitation arrives.
2. When you come up with a succinct and brilliant answer to a question you were asked and then you remember that you were actually asked the question four weeks ago and the actual answer you gave was ‘dunno, maybe?’.
3. When you learn that someone you know has had an exciting adventure in a mysterious fantasy world existing just beside our own, even though you are clearly the protagonist.
4. When an initial delicious waft of bacon smell resolves itself into the first tentative nasal foray of an unpleasant fart.
5. When you are listening to a list of acknowledgements and you think that maybe your name has not been called yet because you are getting a special acknowledgement at the end, but it is actually just because your contribution has been forgotten.
6. When you know that you had an amazing dream but you cannot remember any of the details.
7. When you finally listen to a tune that has been going round in your head for weeks, only to discover that you were remembering it wrong.
8. When owing to an exciting case of mistaken identity you are spirited away to the palace of the Queen of Cats for the year’s finest feline ball, but you are allergic to cat hair.
9. When you are saving a treat for yourself and you accidentally save it too long and it goes off.  
10. When you check for new notifications, but there are none.

1. This is the mile when I first needed a pee. We were on the way home, on the old road over the hills. The sun was setting and the baby was asleep in the back and we were on the part of the road where it’s just trees, mile after mile. I said, I might need to stop. But there aren’t any services around here, he said. Can you wait?
2-7. These are the miles when I thought it would be OK. Better to wait. I didn’t want to wake the baby. But of course it wasn’t. Here’s the thing, I said to him. I’ve just had a baby. My bladder doesn’t work very well. I think I really need to go. I need to go right now. We have to stop. Fine, he said. There’s a sign to a cafe. Let’s turn off here.
8. This is the mile we drove along the side road into the forest. No cafe in sight. Curious at first, peering through the dappled tree-light. Is it down a path? Did the sign fall off? And then down the rutted track, him cursing me, me cursing him: no cafe, can we even turn round? You’ll have to go in the woods, he said. Fine, I said. But you know I can’t go with anyone watching. Let me at least find a bush or something.
9. I don’t know if this was a mile or not, but it felt like one. Down the great open sweep of conifer forest, looking back all the while: can I see the car? Yes. Can I still see the car? Yes. And then, with the car out of sight: what if there were a stray walker coming over the ridge? What if that shadow is the wall of a house? And onwards, onwards. All the way on to the great old tree, the fallen tree with the dark crack up its side large enough for a person to squeeze in. It seemed like a gift, then.
10. This is the descent into darkness, the descent that went on and on. Was it a mile? It could have been. They said, later, at the checkpoint, that one must know the ritual to get in. Piss in a circle and put your hand on the black patch on the tree’s rotten heart. So I guess I was just lucky or something. Lucky, too, to step back into the tree’s new black fork and not out into the forest, confused in the darkness. The system is meant to keep out waifs and strays. Once you’re in, however, there’s no going back out again.
11. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. They did not know what to do with me at the checkpoint. I think I was there for hours, maybe days. My breasts were filling up with milk. I was desperate to get back. They said there was no paperwork for me. I thought they were wearing masks, and then I realised that only some of them were. They gave me food, which I ate. Eventually they gave me a pass to the House. Ask the Custodian, they said. If you can get in to see her she is duty bound to give you one gift, and it is only one, but that one can be passage back to the outside world. For anything extra, there is a price.
12. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. Don’t leave the path, they said. And at the House, they sent me back, again. This time there were strange beasts in the undergrowth. Someone said I shouldn’t have eaten the food, but too late now.
13. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest.
14. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest.
15. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. It had been a while, by this point. Going there, getting sent back. Someone said I could get beyond the gate if I put a flat copper coin into the mouth of the gargoyle above the door and put the lantern out, and I’d left the path to climb up to the cave with the clockwork dragon and chipped off a single copper scale to see if that would work, but when the lantern was out I could see hundreds of eyes, bright green in the darkness, peering from the ivy, and something scuttled past to block the door, and I knew there must be other protections at work.
15. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. And here’s the thing. Mothers don’t have adventures. Mothers don’t get caught in fairy realms. Mothers are not the subject of the story. When this happens to a mother, the child is the subject of the story, and the story is about abandonment and loss, about a scar that never quite heals. I was desperate to get home. My milk had dried up. I drugged the green-eyed beasts with the purple flowers that grew down by the lake. But I couldn’t find the way through the library.
16.-43. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest, with the weaver’s key and the map of the orangery roof. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest, armed with a silver needle. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest with the needle wiped in my blood and a crown of lavender and bramble. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is all the miles, until the final door, and the Custodian, and her grudgingly-given token of freedom.
44-45. These are the miles I stumbled out of the woods, bramble-torn and muddied, the ink of the Forest Under the Forest splattered up my forearms, out into a winter dawn and an empty lay-by. I knew that it would be later. That’s part of the deal, isn’t it? You never come back to the same time. And down the road, at the cafe we had somehow missed, I found out just how much later. Too much later. Years and years. The awful story was already written. Unexplainable abandonment. Loss. I could go and see it, or not. The thing is, I told the waitress, I don’t have a ride home. Wait until my shift ends, she said. I’ll take you. The thing is, I said, I’m not sure I have a home anymore. I sat there until the sun was high in the sky. Then I went back into the woods.
46-47. These are the miles back into the woods. The path was familiar, now. I stopped for a few minutes at the long crack in the hollow tree. Then I went in.
48. This is the mile to the House in the Forest. Just the once, this time. I knew the system. I knew the way. I knew the words to speak and the forms to sign. I knew the sinister glint in the Custodian’s eye. I need to go back to when I left the first time, I said. Everything as it was. Can you do that? And she smiled, as if this had not been the first time she was asked that, and nodded. What do I need to do to make that happen? I asked.  Well yes, she said. There’s always a price. Let’s talk, I said.
49. This is the mile I walked out of the woods, victorious: the clock exactly where it should be, the car waiting. You took your time, he said. The baby was awake; he was blinking at the dappled light coming through the trees by the lay-by. Well, I’m back now, I said. Let’s get home.
50. This is for all the other miles, sweet stolen domestic miles, home and back again. We don’t use the road over the hills now. It takes too long that way, I told him. There’s talk that his mother may move closer, anyway. I’ve a second baby on the way. I try to live in the moment. Don’t we all? I don’t think about those strange lost years if I can avoid it. But here’s the thing. Mothers don’t have adventures, no. Or maybe I should say, now: mothers keep very quiet about their adventures. But everyone loves it when young men have adventures. So yes, there was a price. He’ll find out when he turns sixteen.

1. Eat words. Devour them book by book. Chew them over, casually and quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Take words on picnics beneath waterfalls. Raid the library at midnight for juicy poetry.
2. Be a fan of words. Follow them about. Ask others where to find the best words and go to the places they recommend and hang about there trying to look interesting. Have sweet reveries about words before you fall asleep at night.
3. Get to know words. Go out for a coffee and bring your words with you and look up five hours later to see that your coffee has gone cold. Stay out with words until it is slightly too late. Have silly little adventures with words that make you giggle, but which you cannot quite explain to other people. Write letters to words and wait breathlessly for their reply.
4. Have a relationship with words. Dream all day of the moment when you get to touch them. Look words in the i and tell them what you are going to do to them, and then do it.
5. Have a bad relationship with words. Lie awake at 5 a.m. wondering where you went wrong with words. Take long walks alone to avoid the messes that you and words have made together. Let words hold you and explain why they no longer love you, but only cry when they have gone.
6. Murder words. Cut them. Cut them again and again until you can no longer quite see what they were before. Wall up words in dead-end paragraphs and leave them there to decay unread.
7. Rewrite history. Raise words from the dead, raw and new and clean, and shape them back into something that can be set free into the world. Keep their history a secret. Let them only know that you love them. Watch them go away from you and hope that they come back.
8. Grow old with words. Let them get well-worn and familiar. Let them be polished smooth like seeds while time roughs you up. Hold words in your hand and live together until you die, then let them close your eyes. Let them mourn. But leave them plenty of good soil, so that they can grow when you are gone.

0012 Categorization systems
 -0012.1 Those relating to books
    –0012.11 By subject matter
       —0012.111 Dewey decimal
       —0012.112 Library of Congress, Colon, Harvard-Yenching or other commonly-used system
       —0012.113 This library is too much of a special snowflake to use a classification system adopted by other libraries
    –0012.12 By colour
    –0012.13 By alphabetical or numerical order
       —0012.131 Alphabetical order by author
       —0012.132 Alphabetical order by title
       —0012.133 By number of pages
       —0012.134 Alphabetical order by some vague concept associated with the book
    –0012.14 By where there is a space on the bookshelf that they can be shoved into
    –0012.15 By where there is a space on a flat surface that they can be put
       —0012.151 Those that utilise low or zero gravity to use flat surfaces in all directions
    –0012.16 Terrifying vortices of utter book anarchy
 -0012.2 Those relating to people
    –0012.21 Categorization by personality
       —0012.211 Those that are general enough that one may see oneself in all the categories
    –0012.22 Categorization by physical characteristics
       —0012.221 Those that miss out, order or suborder people in such a way as to advance a theory of which characteristics are best
       —0012.222 Those involving internet comments sections
    –0012.23 Categorization by point of origin
    –0012.24 Categorization by primary occupation
       —0012.241 Those that imply not having a job equals not being a proper person
    –0012.25 Categorization by general societal role and/or age
       —0012.251 Systems that categorise women into moms and not-moms
 -0012.3 Those relating to objects
    –0012.21 Categorization by size
       –0012.211 Systems that involve lining things up by physical size
    –0012.22 Categorization by colour
       –0012.222 Systems that involve lining things up by colour
          –0012.2221 Those that are basically things-lined-up-by-colour porn for people who like that kind of thing
    –0012.23 Categorization by what they do
       –0012.231 Drawers of thingies and whatnots
 -0012.4 Those relating to abstract concepts
 -0012.5 Those relating to everything
    –0012.51 Categorization systems that include themselves
    –0012.52 Those that do not

The franc, the like, the feline unit of affection, the rupee, the krone, the bitcoin, the dinar, the birr, the utilitarian lump, the ariasy, the pula, the euro, the quetzal, the won, the morsel of exposure, the manly nod, the som, the yen, the trading card, the lols, the pound in your pocket, the ringgit, the guilder, the ruble, the marble, the British Standard Moment of Attention, the chocolate button, the shred of self-worth, the manat, the taka, the yuan, the bottom dollar, the punt.

Outer space, London, the sea, some bunnies, a rock, the black door into the
depths of the Parallel Forest, a very quiet place, long-forgotten pirate
treasure, some clouds, some crowds, a stuffed polar bear, John Dee’s
scrying mirror, the Earth’s mantle.

1. In the year 2560, a secretive security agency determined that there was a high chance of a large rocky body hitting the Earth via a sophisticated future-divination technique. Although the projected collision was confusingly low-velocity, they decided to plan for the worst case. A generation starship project was initiated. In order to avoid mass panic, the project was kept secret, with the ship constructed behind the moon and disguised as an asteroid. It was duly filled with a furtively-chosen selection of Earth’s brightest and best in long-term hibernation units. Meanwhile, a confused Earth was being informed that there had been an unusually large number of deaths and disappearances that year but still, nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, due to a calculation error, the ship eventually set off in the wrong direction, ending up in an eccentric orbit around Earth from which it eventually executed an emergency landing/crashing combination in a field in Mongolia. The prophecy was duly fulfilled. The powers that be kept silent about the true nature of the large rock, which eventually became a major tourist destination. Some three thousand years later, the ship executed its pre-planned wakeup procedures for arrival at the new planet, and a confused selection of the great and good from 2560 blew open the hatches to find themselves in the middle of a giant theme park from the future.
2. It became customary in the 12650s or thereabouts for the discovery of a new inhabited planet to trigger the automated launch of a flotilla of trading craft. The idea was that with the enormous timeframes involved in sending physical ships to the new civilization, the initial contact phase would be well over by the time ships launched at discovery actually arrived. Establishing a trading relationship with an entire planet was a lucrative goal and the losses relatively minor if it turned out that for some reason they found whisky poisonous, had no use for pens, or were not actually able to detect Chanel No. 5 due to lack of appropriate nostril equipment. Unfortunately, the contact process with 51 Pegasi c was aborted at an early stage by request of the inhabitants. A few thousand years later, they interpreted the arrival of a freighter full of aged cheddar as an act of war, leading to the expulsion of humanity from that bit of the galaxy for twenty thousand years.
3. There have also been a significant number of alien spaceship mishaps related an error in galactic positional coding for the Earth. In fact, numerous other civilizations have detected Earth’s signals and attempted to make physical contact. However, the universal positioning system used by most other civilizations has Earth down as the fifth planet from the sun in its system, possibly as the result of lazy data entry. The related automated systems have thus classified the third planet as uninhabitable but used for the siting of data relay systems from the main civilization. Consequently, the planet Jupiter is one of the most-explored gas giants in the solar system and humans have acquired a reputation for being extremely good at hiding.

Unshaven chins, velcro, rope, the floor of the broom park at a low-budget witch conference, hedgehogs, those toothbrushes you find at the back of the cupboard, the dry grass of late August, surprised cats, lost brushes that are looking for their dustpans, artisan carpets, donkey nuzzles, old fences, minor mistakes, little round piglet bellies, injured pride, astroturf, pin feathers, conifers, sackcloth.

To celebrate international Milton Keynes day, here are some things you didn’t know about everyone’s favourite British planned city!
1. Milton Keynes was named after the small village of Middleton or Milton Keynes, close to the centre of the planned city. However, this was not the original origin of the name, which actually comes from the future. In the year 2172, a small cabal of purple economagicians gathered in the English Midlands to attempt to retrospectively right some of the wrongs of the late 21st century. They felt that a new and uniting voice in economics had been absent in this period. As a stop-gap measure, they spliced together genetic material extant from John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, creating a small child intended to grow into a kind of economic messiah. On his fifth birthday, he ceremonially took on the name ‘Milton Keynes’ and was sent backwards through time. Unfortunately one of the economagicians involved made a factor of 10 error whilst coding the spell, sending him back 1000 instead of 100 years. Young Milton clearly accomplished something, as the village ended up named after him. Modern-day historians are unsure quite what, however. There remains a rumour that he is in fact not dead but sleeping in a cave beneath the city’s central shopping centre, where he was discovered during initial building work and quietly sealed back up again after a call to the treasury. If so, the date when he will rise once more to unite the disparate schools of economics remains as yet unknown.
2. The city’s famous concrete cows are not made of concrete at all, but are actually constructed from a form of toffee so hard it is inedible.
3. The grid system of Milton Keynes’ roads is so confusing for native Britons that over three hundred people have become permanently lost on its rigidly rectangular ways. City authorities maintain small depots of food, clothing and fuel for the confused in the centres of major roundabouts, which can usually be accessed by levering up a small hatch marked 'OPEN IF LOST’.
4. Although Milton Keynes’ bicycle and pedestrian paths are known today for their red tarmac, they did not start off this way. Initially, an exciting shade of puce was envisaged. This so enraged the planners who were inspecting the final tests of the surfacing system that they engaged in a furious knife fight with the puce advocates, ineradicably staining the whole batch of surfacing material with blood. Since that time, the paths have remained red as a mark of respect to those who were wounded.
5. Milton Keynes is perhaps the only city which was designed with a hinge, in case anyone might need to open it. Quite what they might find if they did is open to question. Other unusual design elements which were eradicated at the final planning stage include mechanical legs, a self-reciprocating monorail, and the ability to sink the roundabouts into the ground in case of disaster.

1. The Q scale: from Q10 (Those who will always try to answer a question, regardless of whether they know anything about the subject involved) - to Q0 (Those who will never answer a question if they can avoid it, often pretending that they did not even hear it).
2. The D scale: from D10 (Those who can be relied on to do something that they say they will do, but not to not do something they say they won’t do), through D5 (Those who are equally reliable or unreliable on promises to do or not do things), to D0 (Those who cannot be relied on to do things they say they will do, but can be relied on to not do things they say they won’t do).
3. The B scale: from B10 (Those who, once they are reading a good book, cannot be dragged out of that book, even if there is a nuclear explosion or it starts raining money or something) to B0 (Those who will enjoy a good book but can be distracted from out of it by a fly going past, the opening of a flower in some far-distant field, or the surfacing of an idle notion).
4. The F scale: from F10 (Those who would always unhesitatingly step into a portal to a mysterious fantasy land with a compelling stranger if given the chance) through F5 (Those who would at least google the mysterious fantasy land first, ask if there were any catches, and tell someone where they were going) to F0 (Those who would never go).

4975 Mustelids
 -4975.1 Weasels
    –4975.11 Those that are weaselly recognised
       —4975.111 Those who are followed around by a slavering pack of paparazzi at all times, never even having a second to themselves to enjoy a quiet mouse and a cup of tea
       —4975.112 Those that can tie themselves in a perfect weasel knot
       —4975.113 That one that was riding on a bird
    –4975.12 Those that are masters of disguise
    –4975.13 Those that are powered by diesel
       —4975.131 Those that are powered by Vin Diesel, pedalling away on a weasel-size exercise bike with his fingers every morning to charge the weasel’s batteries
    –4975.14 Those that are made out of words and dissolve into a small pile of graffiti when startled
 -4975.2 Stoats
    –4975.21 Those that are stoatally different
       —4975.211 Those gentle, shy stoats who secretly long for the name recognition of weasels, even going so far as to hide out in the undergrowth and paint their tails
 -4975.3 Badgers
    –4975.21 Those who have a fine collection of badges
    –4975.22 Those that badger
       –4975.221 Those that badger you to buy a badge with a badger on it
       –4975.222 Those who merely wish that you subscribe to their newsletter
 -4975.4 Ferrets, mink and suchlike
    –4975.41 Those who live in trousers
    –4975.42 Those who have strong opinions about coats
    –4975.43 Those who have a rather dapper waistcoat and have been making enquiries about getting a tiny monocle ground
 -4975.5 Wolverines
    –4975.51 Those who spend their lives explaining that they’re not that wolverine, thank you very much, actually the species as a whole is quite peaceful
 -4975.6 Unusual or mysterious mustelids
    –4975.61 Mustelids that have lids
       —4975.611 Those that have eyelids
       —4975.612 Those that have screw tops
          —-4975.612 Those that are in fact bottles of ketchup that have got a bit hairy somehow
 -4975.7 Otters
    –4975.71 Those who ott
    –4975.72 Those who do not

1. It looks like they may have used a password that isn’t easily guessable.
2. I’ve written some code to do that. *pause* It looks like it has a bug in it. Let me have a go at debugging it and get back to you.
3. Here is a simulation of this situation. All we need to do now is get data to calibrate it, I estimate about six months of experiments and $100k should be enough to pin the parameters down.
4. Here is a simulation of this situation I came up with at great speed in our time-critical mission. In order to do this, I downloaded some random code off the interwebs and everything is approximated by constant-density spheres moving in a vacuum. The answers are probably OK to a plus or minus 200% level.
5. Of course I can write some code to do that. It will take about a month.
6. These systems are actually not compatible at all so we cannot interface them.

1. Dress as the primary emotion you felt on reading this invitation
2. Wear a costume inspired by your favourite mathematical theorem
3. Dress as the person invited to this party who you like the least
4. Come as your favourite orgasm (historical, fictional or personal)
5. Awards will be given for the best walrus costume
6. Dress to match my living room and/or kitchen, I will be passing through from time to time without my glasses on and if I can see through your camouflage I will throw you out
7. Come as your favourite alchemical material, nobody leaves before we make gold
8. Dress as your favourite meteorite or asteroid, party will be held in a quarry, no smashing into each other or the Earth please
9. Dress as your most recent episode of existential despair
10. Dress like someone who is too fabulous to go to this party

1. On winning a trampolining competition: concentrated blueberry jelly in a rectangular slab, gilded at the edges and topped by little plastic people.
2. On being transported back in time to the 1970s: salmon and avocado jelly, shot through with mysterious meat and served at midnight by the light of a single glitterball.
3. On surviving the fifth birthday party of one of the multitudinous batrachian spawn of Great Cthulhu: kelp, cherry and marshmallow jelly, served on a raft in the middle of the South Atlantic and topped by the faintly squamous cream of your worst nightmares.
4. When one is celebrating the anniversary of a vow of celibacy: chocolate blancmange, served in hemispheres with a raspberry on top, accompanied by fresh peaches and raspberries.
5. On coming to a complicated revelation about fear: the word ‘fear’ in tasteless, steel-grey jelly, which one can wobble from time to time to remind oneself that the only thing that fear is afraid of is the fear of fear itself, or something like that.
6. On the graduation of your dog from their course, class or other training regime: chicken jelly studded through with gently glistening morsels of steak.
7. When a major earthquake hits a populated area without significant loss of life: concentrated vanilla and honey blancmange, topped with your favourite buildings lovingly rendered in chocolate.
8. Upon being visited by the jelly fairy: rainbow jelly with sparkles that, on closer inspection, are tiny sprites trapped inside, and you’re not sure whether you’re supposed to eat them but the jelly fairy seems to be insisting that you do except there’s no online translator for fairy language and actually it’s a bit more awkward that you expected an occasion with rainbow sparkly jelly to be.

The ratio of real US presidents to fictional ones, the number of Mona Lisas, the average number of human legs per human, the number of capybaras riding the London Underground at this moment, the ratio between the energy density due to the cosmological constant and the critical density of the universe, the number of people who are wearing the world’s best hat, the number of vast sprawling alien cities glimmering with tiny red lights established in the oceanic deeps of the mid-pacific, the mass of an electron in kilograms, the ratio of big fish to little fish, the number of living dodos, the ratio of fictional plumbers to real ones, the fine-structure constant, the number of Hitler’s testicles in the Albert Hall, the number of books that have been written about ten billion fictional plumbers (so far).

The Internet is wise and wide;
The Internet’s a sage
Distilling and distributing
The knowledge of this age.
But when I asked the Internet,
Its words meant naught to me:
You won’t believe this one weird trick
A mom once taught to me!

What trick? I asked the Internet.
The Internet replied:
What happened next will warm your heart,
Just come and step inside.
What mom? I asked the Internet;
It answered, Did you know?
How she looks now will haunt you!
Come on, let me list why so.

And I must have quailed or something,
For it said, with unctuous care,
Well, number six is shocking,
Why not try some gentler fare?
Like this dog whose soldier master
Has returned from years apart,
Or these fifteen gorgeous kittens
Who will truly melt your heart?

But still I went on searching
For the meaning of that phrase.
I’d done this wrong my whole life through,
I thought. I searched for days.
And at last, a revelation
Slowly rolled into my brain,
As I read a list of mysteries
That science can’t explain.

What if my search for wisdom
From our planet’s fount of learning
Had been Byzantinated
By a lack of proper kerning?
There was no mom, no crafty mom
Putting the world to rights:
Instead, the demon Amom
Had me squarely in her sights.

Amom, that great spider;
She who haunts each hologram;
The hacker of dropped packets
And the fountainhead of spam;
Who deep within the darkest web
Encrypts your zombie dreams;
And whose trick is slurping people
Through a portal in their screens.

Amom has my soul now;
In a field of burning bytes
She warmed my heart, then melted it
To feed her kitten-wights.
Ignore that patch upon your screen
That’s sort of like a door
This one weird trick will shock you -
Just lean inwards to hear more…

1. The Timely Weaver. Believed to be one Mrs. J. Owolabi, originally from Lagos. Mrs. Owolabi gained superpowers when she was unexpectedly licked by the long-distance train to Kano, which that day was being haunted by the ghost of a dog. Feeling herself called to use her powers for good, she concocted a costume and identity based on the Little Weaver, a bird of which she was particularly fond. Her powers extend only to the telekinetic movement of relatively small items. However, by careful use of these skills she has managed to carve out a niche for herself as a hero who identifies people at risk of being late for important appointments, and subtly delays the trains and buses they might otherwise miss by knocking the keys of their drivers onto the floor and/or hiding their pens and other important knick-knacks.
2. Kachiko. Kachiko is a cat. Her superpower is perhaps the one most wished-for by cats: that of sleep. Kachiko has in fact been asleep for seven years (as of 2016). She is able both to eat and shit in her sleep. Her home in Roxas City is regularly visited by other cats on pilgrimage in search of inspiration; thus it may be considered that she at least passively uses her powers to benefit catkind. Kachiko is believed to have been given the gift of sleep by a grateful rat whose life she saved in a complicated case of mistaken identity.
3. EMD F58PH. EMD F58PH is a train which was once ridden in by a radioactive elephant (it is a little known fact that, at any one time, there is usually at least one radioactive elephant trying to catch a train in America. The constant struggle between these elephants and the US secret service is one of the country’s more surprising state secrets and has been making new presidents say ‘Really?’ since at least 1920). The elephant endowed the train with sentience and a restless super-intelligence which is unfortunately quite wasted on a train. In recent years EMD F58PH has managed to connect to the internet and spends its rather dull days playing chess and arguing with train enthusiasts, most of whom have no idea that they are debating the minutiae of railway mechanisms with an actual train. EMD F58PH has on occasion used its powers to avoid hitting animals that have strayed onto the tracks, but is otherwise careful to remain morally neutral.  
4. Charles Crowley (no pseudonym used). Mr. Crowley was a retired Captain with the Royal Artillery who, at the age of fifty-seven, sustained an unusual power after bumping his head on some helium at London zoo. For the rest of his life, he had the ability to levitate walruses (a walrus happening to be the first creature he set eyes on after the accident). Despite strenuous experimentation, he did not have the ability to levitate anything else. More crucially, he did not have the ability to de-levitate walruses. Being a kindly soul, he felt an obligation to the seven or eight floating walruses he ended up creating whilst testing his powers. Mr. Crowley became a common sight in London, towing his floating walruses behind him like a pack of balloons from fishmonger to fishmonger in search of spare fish matter to feed them. He remains perhaps the only person to be simultaneously banned from all the world’s zoos. Interestingly, the Horniman Museum’s famous overstuffed walrus is believed to be one of Mr. Crowley’s brood and as such still has to be weighted down with a large quantity of lead.

9850 Ends
 -9850.1 Spatial ends
    –9850.11 This end of that thing
       —9850.111 Those that are distant and distinct from the other end
          —-9850.1111 The ends of roads, subway lines and long-distance rail tracks
       —9850.112 Those that curl round a bit
          —9850.1121 The heads of snakes that are eating their own tails
          —9850.1122 The ends of sausages
    –9850.12 The other end of that thing
       —9850.121 Those that are distant and distinct from the other end
          —-9850.1211 The other ends of roads, subway lines and long-distance rail tracks
       —9850.122 The tails of snakes that are eating their own tails
    –9850.13 The ends of things which could be said to only have one end
       —9850.131 The ends of lakes
       —9850.132 Those things you can put under table legs
    –9850.14 The ends of things with multiple endings
       —9850.141 Gruesome deaths in choose your own adventure stories
       —9850.142 Spider feet
       —9850.143 Pom-pom string
    –9850.15 Places that are named after some kind of end but may or may not be the end of something
       —9850.151 Places that are called ‘Frog end’ but bear no resemblance to either end of a frog
       —9850.152 The arse end of nowhere
 -9850.2 Temporal ends
    –9850.21 Sunsets, temporary farewells and other minor endings
       —9850.211 Those which invoke a charming sense of wistfulness
       —9850.212 Those whose thoughtless ease belies the chance that someday they will be a bigger ending
    –9850.22 The ends of years, courses, projects and suchlike
    –9850.23 Those that are not really ends
       —9850.231 That bit in the story where everyone gets married and we stop because that’s obviously the peak of their life right
       —9850.232 Those that involve things you will totally stop doing today or maybe tomorrow
       —9850.233 Those that will be ends if the currently-last instalment does not make enough money, otherwise there will be a sequel along soon
    –9850.24 Deaths
    –9850.25 Apocalypses
       —9850.251 Those involving fire
       —9850.252 Those involving ice
       —9850.253 Those involving nanobots and baked goods
       —9850.254 Those involving mechanically enhanced wildebeest who were only intending to take an ill-thought-through revenge on lionkind
       —9850.245 Those which are frankly too embarrassing to talk about but well done human race, you really did it this time
 -9850.3 Innuendological ones
    –9850.31 Bell ends
 -9850.4 Loose ones

The laughter never stops, open your heart, dreams go on forever, may all your dreams come true, follow your heart, toss your liver in the air with joy, love so totally your left buttock falls off and you don’t even notice, stomp out your spleen, everything everywhere is clowns forever.

1. The Land of No-Nos. A movable dimension approximately the size of a cupboard, the Land of No-Nos is thought to have been conjured into existence by a particularly enterprising toddler. It appears as a large plastic door which can be unlocked by any of the large plastic sets of keys sold for children to play with. Inside there lies a small emporium of all the things toddlers would really, really like to play with and/or eat, including bottles of cleaning fluid, small electronic devices, marbles, cat food and random brown lumps picked up off the ground. The appearance of the land of no-nos can sometimes be inferred by one’s offspring becoming either suspiciously quiet or suspiciously loud.
2. The ButterDome. Back in 1987, at the height of the European Butter Mountain, some enterprising dairy-pusher quietly spirited away a few tonnes of butter into a custom miniature dimension about 30 metres across, creating the ButterDome. A visit to the ButterDome is a must for all fans of butter-related extreme sports. Although the butter is primarily used for skiing and tobogganing, there are also tube slides and a range of Winter Olympic sports available. At the end of each session, the butter is squeezed through a wormhole by a specially-trained cadre of grease-resistant badgers, sending it back through its own timeline to its moment of peak freshness before the courses are relaid.
3. The Hoop of Convenience. A small, grey and unremarkable inter-dimensional bubble, the Hoop of Convenience was conjured into being in 1872 by an anonymous socialite. Under the pseudonym Madame Q, she describes her struggles in being the constantly-shining star of every party with a bladder and digestive system that would rather take an occasional break. Being blessed with dimensional powers after accidentally consuming a cocktail meant for an alien partygoer in disguise, she solved this problem by creating the Hoop. It manifests as a round, wooden ring such as might be used to reinforce the floofier kind of dress. When activated, one can step through into the aforementioned bubble, where time moves at a different pace and one can get out of one’s complicated clothes and relieve oneself at leisure. Madame Q is believed to have passed on the Hoop to her descendants, but today it is mainly considered an interesting but smelly curiosity.
4. Olafsson’s Pocket. Olafsson’s Pocket is a pocket dimension which is an actual pocket. It is transferred from garment to garment by means of an ancient curse, which is widely enough known in cursing sort of communities that inflicting someone with Olafsson’s Pocket is a common practical joke. In use, Olafsson’s Pocket functions similarly to a real pocket in that one can insert one’s hand and/or objects into it. However objects frequently emerge somewhat transformed and, as the Pocket is a little leaky, occasionally they are flung into the interstellar vacuum of another Universe.

Those who cannot believe how lucky they are; those who do not know each others’ names; those who play games; those who are there at midnight; those who snatch delight in the weary interstices of childcare; those who would fight a bear for you; those who shyly touch knees under tables; those who need to argue before they can fuck; those who are rigorously scheduled; those who are on the other sides of oceans; those who have detected in each other a common strangeness; those who do not know your name or their own; those who make nests; those who have a heated secrecy; those who crash and burn beautifully and ask to be lit again; those who love the story of their love but are less keen on the love itself; those who hide under fun; those who would happily brick each other up in a cave; those who are dizzy when they meet; those who love their cozy silences; those who are outraged when they find they are not looking in a mirror; those who have quite a nice thing going; those who wake up glowing; those who contemplate the ceiling; those who are there to close your eyelids one last time.

1. The old Earth, having been lapped by the ebb and flow of temperatures for some time, is finally succumbing to the heat. Life remains only at the poles; great humid forests which grow frantically in the Arctic and Antarctic summers. In the winter they sit silently through the months of wet darkness. On the shores of the polar continents (or what were the shores some years ago, because the oceans are beginning their long slow final evaporation) the outer forest, roots boiled to sterile mush, sits rotting. The edge of the outer forest moves a little bit inwards every year.

2. Although the sun is big and red, the world beneath is still inhabited. By now, so many generations of humans have passed by that any part of the planet you care to choose is nothing but the archaeological layers of past civilisations. Landscapes are walls built on walls built on walls. The only things to mine are ruins and rubbish. Even when they are in some new technological flowering, the people of this Earth stay close to their homes. Some of the ruins are dangerous, and you never quite know in what way.

3. There are no people left on Earth, but the machines they left are more hardy. The machines know that every year a certain amount of new housing is required, which they dutifully build on top of the old housing, there being no other place to do so. Unobserved by human eyes, the towers of Earth are amazing. They tilt against each other, sliding on the crumbling foundations of older buildings which in turn are mined for the materials to build new ones. Sometimes they topple like dominoes. As time goes by, the machines enter a kind of senility occasioned by the action of thousands of years of cosmic rays on their circuitry. Some get stuck on this or that feature: teetering skyscrapers containing nothing but swimming pools; acres of doors that lead only to other doors; planet-spanning corridors lined with avocado bathroom suites. The old planet is slowly destroyed in a kind of telephone game of human culture.

4. The Earth is a bare, rocky ball, devoid of atmosphere or native life. Nostalgic for the homeland of mankind, inhabitants of other planets pay vast sums to stay in the planet’s many dome-based resorts, where they can lie under a blue filter painted with clouds and soak up the ultraviolet in an authentically plastic replica of famous Earth landmarks. The only permanent residents of the planet are low-paid immigrant workers from Titan.

1. You sit down at a table in a restaurant which is decorated with a lovely flower arrangement. You didn’t realise that the table was actually occupied by a horse who was about to eat the flowers. When the horse comes back from the toilet it is too polite to turf you off and just pays its bill and sadly goes home.

2. There is a dinosaur in the wheelchair space on the bus. Nobody seems to know the bus company’s policy on dinosaurs, and you are not sure whether the dinosaur has a legitimate disability or is just not sure where to sit.

3. You think someone is waving at you and wave back, but actually their limbs were just being controlled by a vast alien puppetmaster.

4. You have advertised your fridge as a refuge for stranded penguins on a popular website. There has been great interest. Just as the first penguin family is about to arrive, you remember that your fridge has no ventilation and any penguins who stay in it will suffocate.

5. You pull on a door. It does not open. So you push on the door. That does not work either. In fact it is not a door at all, it is a camel that has eaten a doorknob.

6. You go shopping for camembert and durian fruit. On the way back you accidentally get into a lift with the entire British aristocracy and it gets stuck between floors.

7. There are two doors in a corridor at a door convention and they both hold themselves open for each other. In their rush to get through, they bump into each other and fall over onto the floor. All the following doors fall through them onto the floors below, creating a horrific yawning maw into the depths of the earth.

1. One or the other of you had taken an inconveniently binding vow of chastity.
2. You kissed on the understanding that one of you would turn into something else, but nothing happened.
3. You kissed on the understanding that neither of you would turn into something else, but one of you did.
3. The one time you managed to both exist at the same point in time, you were haunting a weevil, they were personifying an unusual shade of green, and you were both travelling in different temporal directions.
4. You had the kind of love that could have smashed universes, stopped time, lit the sky on fire. Other inhabitants of your universe were perhaps understandably not on board with your relationship and eventually managed to split you up.
5. You realised that you were actually in love with the idea of love itself. The idea of love refused to return your phone calls and floated the idea of a restraining order.
6. You were in love with a teacher, guardian angel, god, anthropomorphic personification or other professional superior, and all concerned felt that a relationship was probably a breach of ethics.
7. You were waiting for them to make the first move. They were waiting for you to make the first move.
8. For some reason having to do with mystical woo stuff, you were unable to fuck without causing some kind of apocalypse.
9. One or both of you were already in a monogamous relationship with someone who was engaged in saving a country, continent, planet or other geographical entity, and whose work would be put in jeopardy by emotional upset.
10. You were a bee. They were a bee. When you tried to bee together you were shut down by the bug police for excessive buzzing.
11. You swore that you would die for them and then you did.
12. You just weren’t that into each other.

7020 Roads, tracks and pathways
 -7020.1 Major routes
    –7020.11 Motorways, freeways and other roads with multiple lanes
       —7020.111 Those upon which one roars towards a spectacular neon horizon, Kraftwerk playing on the stereo, a mote in the bloodstream of an endless city
       —7020.112 Those upon which one sits in grunting, farting traffic for hours
       —7020.113 Those which have suffered an unusual change in use
          —7020.1131 Vast roads mid-demonstration, wild and free and full of dogs and signs and humans
          —7020.1132 Those that are cursed with unexpected roadworks
    –7020.12 Those that go ever on
       —7020.121 Ring roads and other circular routes
          —-7020.1211 Those acting as a prayer wheel of discontent, funnelling all the frustration of the metropolitan area into the centre of the city
          —-7020.1212 Those inhabited by bands of eager adventurers who have not yet discovered that they are going in a circle
       —7020.122 Those roads that go ever on if you have the right passport, visas and a suitable amount of cash, and otherwise end ignominiously at a border point
    –7020.13 Those that are a great parade of multicoloured shipping containers
 -7020.2 By-roads
    –7020.21 That road that goes past your house
    –7020.22 The road that you followed on Google Maps, the one that wonds round the mountains, out past the point that you will ever travel to in real life
    –7020.23 Roads to get lost on
       —7020.231 Those which look obvious and easy to walk down on the map, provided one neglects to take into account the contours, temperature, dubious surrounds or local laws
 -7020.3 Paths and tracks
    –7020.31 Paths that are less taken
       —7020.311 Those featuring No Trespassing, Danger Falling Rocks or These Llamas Will Eat You signs
    –7020.32 Paths that should not be left for any reason, no matter what you see or hear to either side
    –7020.33 Those that you cannot go down until you know their name, which is the answer to a curious riddle
    –7020.34 Those that are clearly a shortcut to where you need to go
 -7020.4 Minor pathways
    –7020.41 Those tiny paths off to the side of the main track, imbued with some peculiar sort of glamour, as if one might go down them and find something magical at the head of a waterfall instead of ending up with one leg in a bees’ nest
    –7020.42 Paths that are maybe paths and maybe not and might in fact exist only due to the human brain’s peculiar genius for making patterns out of geographical noise
    –7020.43 Those that were made by one person wading through the long grass, realising there is no way through, and wading back
 -7020.5 Dubious or mythical pathways
    –7020.51 Those left by dogs or foxes in the woods
    –7020.52 Those left by malign ghosts in the woods, forever leading down to that crack in the tree at the valley’s base
 -7020.6 Those that no longer exist
 -7020.7 Those that will exist some day, but not yet

True love, dust, ceremonial swords, locked boxes, wrappings that shiver in undetectable winds, Christmas trees, spiders, obsolete technologies, nests of cables, murder victims, lecture notes, obscure heirlooms, insect cities, toys that have gone on an adventure, doors into other attics, plutonium, haunted ballgowns, mystery plastic things, fibreglass, stuffed parrots, hatstands, theatrical costumes, stories written in exercise books, suitcases, bare bulbs, crutches, the last breaths of emperors, mummified cakes, cards from distant restaurants, unwanted furniture, aerials, dead clocks, lost bears, glass bottles, silence and birdsong.

1. The Department for Cockups (DfC)
2. The Ministry for Folding Cats (MfFC)
3. The Department of Sitting Around In Chairs Looking Important (DoSAICLI)
4. The Department of Being Sincerely But Ineffectually Concerned about Things (DoBSBICaT)
5. The Department that has Big Impressive Corridors But No-one is Quite Sure What it Does (DthBICBNiQSWiD)
6. The Department for Carefully Gathering all the Scientific Evidence and then Ignoring It (DfCGatSEatII)
7. The Department of Hey Look it’s a Dancing Pony Pay No Attention to What’s Going On Behind You (DoHLiaDPPNAtWGOBY)
8. The Department for Doing Things Tomorrow (DfFTT)

1. Canaries in coal mines. Interestingly, although canaries in coal mines did serve as a warning of a problem in the mine, their presence was often unrelated to the release of carbon monoxide. Miners in the Victorian era often strayed into strata containing so-called ‘bird stones’ - large dark blue or purple slabs with the unfortunate property of slowly transforming the humans who came into contact with them into birds. Therefore the appearance of canaries in coal mines indicated that a bird stone had been uncovered, necessitating the cessation of all operations until the stone had been found and removed. In later years, mines instituted strict daily height checks and feather inspections to catch the problem at an earlier stage.
2. The time when a wren learned of a deadly peril to the King of All Cats. Being a gentle and naive soul, the wren risked its life to inform the King of the danger. Unfortunately, cats have an extreme aversion to anyone else knowing that they do not have everything under control. Although the King of All Cats is largely a ceremonial role, the insinuation their King might have been in trouble was taken as a grave embarrassment to the entire species - the equivalent of being seen to fall off a wall, miss a short jump or get their head stuck in a box. Since this time, cats have taken an especial pleasure in killing and eating birds.
3. The night before the Great Fire of Rome, five eagles appeared in the Circus Maximus; bystanders claimed that they appeared to be having an intense discussion, although other observers claimed that they were fighting. In any case it seems likely that the eagles had travelled backwards through time in the hope of sending some kind of warning to Rome. One theory is that they were the last remaining standards of the Roman Legions from a time when the Empire was well-decayed, brought to life by some rough magic and sent back through the history of Rome to try and avert major disasters in the hope of producing a more favourable historical outcome. Sadly, the eagles were chased off by some civic-minded shopkeepers before they could finish their plan, which seems to have been shitting out a message in inexpert Latin onto the stadium floor.
4. I have also heard tell that the hoopoes of Ashgabat can predict ill-fortune; although, the details of this having been highly classified during the Soviet era, it is difficult and potentially dangerous to try and find out more.
5. That time, shortly to come, when you woke up and the sky was full of birds, streaming from the East, and they came all day; millions of birds, as if the world out there was emptying out. The next morning they were still coming. The last few ragged fringes of the cloud passed over at noon, some of them raining down to land, squawking and dying, across the fields. You tried posting about it, but for some reason nothing would post properly. There was some dead celebrity and a political scandal on the news. Eventually a bored contractor came by in a van and took the dead birds away.

1. Postmodern pentathlon. This largely seated event consists of sub-contests in irony, self-referentiality, deconstruction, moral relativism and beard stroking. Contests are scored individually, with the overall competitor with the greatest overall combined score deemed the winner.
2. Shit put. Competitors in the Shit Put compete to throw a turd against a specified target, then turn round and sprint away in the shortest time. Points are also awarded for style and kick-ass haircuts.
3. Rowing. Unlike the more commonly-known Olympic rowing event, which confusingly still has the same official name, competitors in the alternate Olympic rowing event compete by having a massive argument. Points are awarded for volume, passion and persuasive arguments. Lying and landing blows on your opponent are cause for disqualification, although gesticulation is encouraged. The subject of the argument changes in each round and is set by the committee of judges beforehand.
4. Buy-a-thlon and Try-a-thlon. These two twinned events form the Olympic equivalent of the scavenger hunt. Competitors are only informed what a thlon is on the starting line. The first competitor to figure out how to purchase one and bring it back to the judging panel is deemed the winner. Subsequently the Try-a-thlon measures their ability to work out what the thlon actually does. Interestingly, because the definition of the thlon never changes and is a closely guarded secret, candidates can compete in these events only once and they cannot be televised, hence the sport’s comparatively low profile.
5. Modern High Jump. Perhaps the only sport you can be disqualified from by having a clean drug test. Competitors in the Modern High jump initially get high, then compete in jumping over a series of obstacles in the shortest time with the fewest faults. According to the International Modern High Jump Federation, the current mandated competition drug is marijuana, but there are a number of splinter modern high jump organisations using different intoxicants.
6. Major Hurdles. Unlike standard hurdles, which are up to 107cm in height, major hurdles are typically 480cm or higher. This makes a major hurdle race extremely hard to compete in and to date no medals have ever been awarded.

1. First you will need to choose your book. Although it is possible to get lost in a short book, it is much easier in a long one. Some people find it easier to get lost in a good book, whilst others relish the hypnotic tedium that comes from getting lost in the phone book or a detailed technical manual.
2. Obviously you cannot get lost in your book without going in. To do this, you will need to find the book’s emergency exit door. It is usually around page 32. Try turning the page on the ‘wrong’ side - if it opens, you have found the door.
3. To go in, you will need to get small. When you have got small, pack a bag with supplies for a few days - we recommend energy bars, bottles of water and a warm blanket - and enter the book.
4. You may want to leave your shoes by the way in. Some books are very particular about this.
5. Books differ, but you will generally have a choice of ways to go. Always remember that your primary aim is getting lost. Do not follow any routes that look like they will lead to the end of the book. In particular, you will want to avoid any resolution of plots, the revelation of secrets, deathbeds, the use of objects casually mentioned earlier on, weddings and journeys home.
6. Explore subplots. If you can find a subplot of a subplot, go there. If you can find a story within a story, go there. If you can find a circular plot or paradox, go there. Paradoxes are particularly good places for a picnic.
7. It is easier to get lost by going down than by going up*. If it feels like you might be about to get a good view of the plot, take another route. If the route starts to seem familiar to you - perhaps the first flowerings of a juicy trope - take another route. Some books only offer the option of navigating via familiar routes. You will have to work extra hard at forgetting to get lost in these books.
8. Do not explore too deeply in books that contain infinities, or mathematical texts concerning particularly large numbers, unless your goal is to be lost forever. If your goal is to be lost forever, bear in mind that the sort of book in which you can be lost forever often does not contain much in the way of food or drink. You will need to be resourceful, and perhaps bring a large knife.
9. If it all becomes too much, remember that you can generally find your way out of a book by always turning left.
10. Do not forget to pick up your shoes on the way out. It is very bad manners to leave shoes in a book.

*You should take care not to get stuck in a footnote when using this method, though.

1. Due to inflation, the financial outlay involved in purchasing the Thing will seem ridiculously tiny when you look back on it a few decades hence.
2. That Thing will bring you joy, which surely only the greyest and most solemn bureaucratic ranks would put a monetary value on.
3. That Thing looks a little sad where it is and you could probably give it a better life.
4. You probably will eventually so why not do it now?
5. It’s not every day that a Thing comes up for sale. If you don’t get that Thing now then you may never get the chance again.
6. Just look at that Thing’s little tentacle finger bits, aren’t they adorable?
7. Also by purchasing that Thing you may just be saving the casts of the 1982 and 2011 The Thing movies from a terrible fate.

4975 Fish
 -4975.1 The wet swimmy sort
    –4975.11 Small silvery fish
       —4975.111 Those of which there are plenty more in the sea
       —4975.112 Those that are fish singularities, darting in and out of existence, singing fish songs like no-one else in the ocean
       —4975.113 Those that hide between waterlilies
    –4975.12 Colourful ones
    –4975.13 Big fish
       —4975.131 Those in small ponds
          —4975.1311 Those who were only on holiday in the small pond but whose lift home has unaccountably failed to turn up
       —4975.132 Those who regard the reader as dinner
    –4975.14 Those that will nibble the toes of the living or the dead and do not care which
    –4975.15 Those that are in fact mammals and not fish
       —4975.151 Those who lurk by the shore, flirting with tourists and making extravagant eye-rolls at their ignorance when unobserved
 -4975.2 Those that are dead
    –4975.21 Those that are for dinner
    –4975.22 Those that are the first awful indicators of a Problem with Water
    –4975.23 Those that are haunted bones or haunted sand or haunted oil
 -4975.3 Fish of myth and story
    –4975.31 Those that have swallowed a magic ring
    –4975.32 Those who have eaten some human with a Destiny, and feel inclined to spit them out
    –4975.33 Those having a series of splotches corresponding to the exact location of the treasure, the true name of God, the location of a really great party or some other such useful information
    –4975.34 Those that have been kissed
 -4975.4 Curious and mysterious fish
    –4975.41 Air-breathing fish with two arms and two legs, indistinguishable from humans except for the suspicious way in which they drink
    –4975.42 Those with robotic exoskeletons
       —4975.421 Those that are martyrs to rust
 -4975.5 Fish of art and architecture
 -4975.6 Those that probably only exist in anecdote and metaphor
    –4975.61 Those who need a bicycle
       —4975.611 Those who came fifty-seventh in the Tour de France and are disgusted that the human-centric media refused to take on their story
    –4975.62 Those that are fuel for lazy surrealists

1. On nights when the moon shines through the windows, the books in the horticultural section may rise up on their ribbonlike stems and open up to the moonlight. The energy gained from moonlight powers the growth of new pages, often detailing highly unusual plants. Therefore it is worth your while as a librarian to site the horticultural books near a window with a good view of the sky. The opening of the books is often accompanied by a great swarm of b’s out from the other books in the library to sip at the illustrated nectar. By the morning they will be back in place, just a little fatter and shinier.
2. Gymnastics books like to slip from the shelves in the dark and practice bending and stretching. Often they can be observed (if one has set up a book hide in the library, that is) performing slow flips across the floor and back again. This is why books on gymnastics often have cracked spines.
3. Much of the nature section will be particularly quiet, for fear of waking up the animal books. Animal books hibernate for most of their lives, but can be induced to wake by a dark but noisy environment - for example if the library is situated next to a nightclub or main road. The other books dislike this and will sometimes sing book lullabies in the hope of stopping it happening. The consequence of a mass book waking is usually a vast and savage bookfight between works on predators and works on prey. Sometimes a book on both may even attempt to devour its own interior pages in a frenzy of curiosity. Needless to say this also wakes up the b’s, which will grumpily swarm around and may sting any stray librarians who have the misfortune to still be present.
4. Books for babies often wake up in the night and will sometimes fling themselves off the shelves or spit up pages onto the floor. Those without fluff or mirrored pages can be found poking those with these things. Books for slightly older children, usually shelved in an adjacent section, can sometimes be found jumping back and forth in an effort to rock the baby section back to sleep.
5. Needless to say, many of these happenings involve a fair bit of mess. Look out for those unusually conscientious books who clean up the mess, mend pages and poke the plant books back into their dust covers in the morning. It is difficult to say which books will take on the role of book shepherd - it varies by library - but often large print fiction, young adult novels and works of philosophy can be found helping out.

1. DogMail Pro. Designed both to simulate the experience of having a dog and to encourage extreme responsiveness to email, DogMail Pro accompanies the arrival of an email with a cheery animation of an item of post coming through a letterbox. Unless the user opens the letter, at some randomly-chosen point between one and ten minutes later, a cheery animation of a dog walks past and eats it, at which point the email is irretrievably deleted.
2. ClutterMaster Retro. Designed to replicate the feel of an old-school filing system, ClutterMaster Retro assigns each email coming in to a random folder. Each time you access a folder, the emails in it are randomly shuffled.
3. ButtleMail. An augmented-reality email client. To check for email in ButtleMail, you need to find the virtual-reality set of bells on one of the walls of your house and ring for the butler. A virtual-reality door will open and a butler will emerge (available settings include most major thesps, including Sir Ian McKellen and Brian Blessed). The butler will inform you if there have been any communications from the village and can send a return telegram on your request.
4. Paper pigeon. Paper pigeon prints out all your outgoing emails in an amusingly florid handwriting font and automatically chooses a delivery method for them based on the geolocation of the recipient: paper plane for short-distance emails (folding printer and launcher included) and carrier pigeon for longer-distance ones. The pigeons are all contractors and are paid peanuts. For transatlantic and other oceanic emails Paper pigeon contracts with Frigate Bird International.

1. The giant, indestructible umbrellas of children’s literature, usable as helicopters and boats and sails, always taking you somewhere exciting and absolute proof against gentle rain
2. Umbrellas with holes in as a cunning assassination strategy against foes who are water-soluble
3. Those umbrellas that are actually giant robotic craneflies in disguise, waiting for the windy autumn of their dreams so that they can fold back their wings, stretch their legs and leap from the umbrella stand to bat up against the windows and out of the house
4. Cocktail umbrellas that completely failed to keep your margarita dry in an unsuspecting tropical storm
5. Umbrellas living in the graveyard of lost umbrellas, those which were turned inside-out by the wind and perched on the lip of a damp bin, but have been rescued by something with clacking claws in the dead of night and taken to a creaking, scraping sanctuary somewhere underground
6. Umbrellas against rains of frogs, having on their upper surface a large pool for safe spalshdown and an escape valve for when one is passing a pond
7. Umbrellas for protection against things other than rain, sun, wind or frogs; for example: unwanted acquaintances, embarrassment, bullets or melancholy

1. Millions of tourists visit the Tower of London every year. But did you know that if you wade six steps into the Thames beside the Tower and reach down, you can find the Iron Chain of Spatial Instability which, if pulled, will suck your soul down into an alternative sewer dimension whilst a bored mud monster operates your body like a flesh puppet for the rest of your natural life?

2. Few experiences can match the excitement of arriving in Venice, ready for a wonder-packed few days exploring the canals and back streets of La Serenissima. If you’ve ever wished you could do nothing else but arrive in Venice, believe it or not, you’re in luck. Hidden away behind a snack machine in the Santa Lucia railway station is a time loop which activates every second Thursday in July. Well-informed travellers can spend a thousand years continually arriving in Venice in the space of a few minutes, before their dead-eyed and exhausted husk stumbles to the nearby Trattoria Il Vagone to sample the limoncello of existential despair.

3. Think that the best beaches are accessible only to the super-rich? Think again! By reciting the simple mantra ‘Sator arepo tenet opera rotas’ three hundred times, you too can gain access the Beach of Dessicated Souls, a pristine strand of pale gold sand made from the lightly crumbled souls of all who venture there, gently lapped by a turquoise sea of mermaids’ tears. Don’t worry, your body can go home any time it wants - and it’ll have a great tan, too!

4. One of the latest crazes to sweep the globe is the cat cafe. For a small fee, patrons can spend time with the world’s most adorable felines while nursing a much-needed coffee. If this is your mug of java, why not go back to the source of the craze, in Japan? For those who wish to try a new take on the trend, we recommend Neko ni kuwa in Osaka. The store’s expert baristas will, if asked, gently roll your soul from your body in the form of a small glowing ball, and give it to the cats to play with forever.

5. Do you long for the glitz and glamour of the Golden Age of Hollywood? Well, let us let you in on one of the closest-kept secrets of Tinseltown. There is a reason why stars walk down the red carpet with a spring in their step and a sparkle in their eye, and it’s not what you think - and you can be part of it too! For just two hundred dollars, you can join the magic circle of the Fae of Old Hollywood, giving you the right to attend their fabulous midnight ceremonies in which your soul is wound out from your body on long sticks and hand-woven into the area’s famous red carpets. Let your body go home and do all the dull stuff - your soul could be right there in underneath those famous feet. Go for it!

Date and Time: 05/16/88934, 00:34 GCT
Parcel Status: Shipped by seller from North Cassini floating logistics station using GalacticTrust Shipments ltd. Congratulations on choosing GalacticTrust! No estimated time of delivery for this parcel is available.

Date and Time: 05/16/88934, 16:88 GCT
Parcel status: Parcel in shuttle transit to Titan Orbital Hub.

Date and Time: 05/18/88934, 05:16 GCT
Parcel status: Processed by GalacticTrust at Titan Orbital Hub. Your parcel delivery will be handled by BargainZoom InterCosmic.

Date and Time: 05/19/88934, 07:12 GCT
Parcel status: In transit on BargainZoom InterCosmic intergalactic freighter. Due to the nature of this delivery method, some time dilation may be applicable to estimated delivery times. Please accept our apologies if this affects your parcel.

Date and Time: 12/01/88936, 15:20 GCT
Parcel status: Due to the takeover by AstroParcel Logistics, all BargainZoom parcels in transit will be rerouted to the AstroParcel Processing Centre in orbit around Jupiter. Depending on your parcel routing, some time dilation may be applicable to estimated delivery times. Please accept our apologies if this affects your parcel.

Date and Time: 04/04/88943, 12:08 GCT
Parcel status: Parcel recieved at AstroParcel Logistics Hub. AstroParcel Logistics Hub has been in the Jupiter Tariff Zone since the start of 88940 and it is a legal requirement that all transiting freight pay a fee of 5% of stated value on a delivery year exchange rate basis. Your parcel will be stored at the Logistics Hub until we recieve a fee of $42:50 New US Dollarquid.

Date and Time: 04/07/88943, 01:18 GCT
Parcel status: Sadly we are unable to process your payment due to the ongoing space pirate incursion. We will update your parcel status as more information becomes available.

Date and Time: 04/20/88943, 06:22 GCT
Parcel status: Your parcel has been transferred to Jolly Roger InterCosmic Transit. To ensure prompt delivery and that your parcel is not flushed into the vacuum of space, please send a fee of $400 New US Dollarquid.

Date and Time: 04/23/88943, 22:40 GCT
Parcel status: Thank you for your payment. Your parcel is in transit on the Royal Solar Express to Venus 1.

Date and Time: 01/02/88944, 08:19 GCT
Parcel status: Parcel recieved at Venus 1. Please note that all parcels from the outer Solar System are irradiated on arrival and are subject to a six month quarantine for Borb’s Disease.

Date and Time: 07/05/88944, 08:19 GCT
Parcel status: Parcel released from quarantine and in solar transit to the Lunar Logistics Hub with Cosmia Vision.

Date and Time: 07/31/88944, 08:19 GCT
Parcel status: Due to the temporary closure of the Lunar Logistics Hub following damage sustained during the Fourth Terran War, your parcel has been rerouted to the Titan Orbital Hub. This delivery will be fulfilled by GalacticTrust. Depending on your parcel routing, some time dilation may be applicable to estimated delivery times. Please accept our apologies if this applies to your parcel.

Date and Time: 02/28/88958, 03:40 GCT
Parcel status: Parcel recieved at Titan Orbital Hub and processed by GalacticTrust. Due to the extended projected delivery time, you are legally required to appoint a descendant or other authorized person to recieve the parcel on your behalf. Your parcel will be held at the Titan Orbital Hub until we recieve this information and a processing fee of £8 Titanian Punts.

Date and Time: 03/02/88958, 07:41 GCT
Parcel status: Thank you for your payment. Your parcel is in transit to Antarctica Three Station with Solar Spider Freightliner. Depending on your parcel routing, some time dilation may be applicable to estimated delivery times. Please accept our apologies if this applies to your parcel.

Date and Time: 06/06/89006, 09:18 GCTA
Parcel status: Due to the destruction of Antarctica Three, your parcel has been recieved for processing at Antarctica Four.

Date and Time: 06/06/89006, 18:55 GCT
Parcel status: Delivery error: send address: city no longer exists. Parcel returned to sender.

1. Cats and dogs will lie down together and make adorable litters of puttens and kippys. You will not really care that it is the end times because look at their little faces they are so cute.
2. Radio stations will drop off the air, one by one, calmly and without any great fuss. Eventually, there will only be three stations remaining: two of robotic voices endlessly reciting numbers (one in a language you know, one in a language you do not), and a station filled with small clicking noises a bit like the conversation of cockroaches.
3. Bananas will eat monkeys. Bananas will eat sheep. Bananas will basically eat anything. It’ll be kind of like you brought a bunch of little caterpillars into your house and then they wriggled loose and ate all the food in the cupboards overnight and now they are the size of your arm and a bit intimidating and they’ve shed their old skins and are growing new ones. There’s that one in town that’s the size of a sofa and sometimes you come across its trail of scraped yellow skin down the road and go the other way. Nobody is quite sure if they pupate later on. Nobody will get to find, out, anyway.
4. There will be an odd yellow cast to the air, a little like everything is being filmed in sepia. It will make for amazing selfies. The beautiful people of the day will respond by going to their doom in top hats and waxed moustaches.
5. Coffee will run out before wi-fi. Chocolate will run out before the post stops being delivered. You will still be able to get a phone signal right to the end, but by then the networks will have fused together into a giant electromagnetic squid thing so you’ll have to be OK with tentacles to make a phone call.
6. Fake messiahs will be everywhere. Most of them will be made of plastic, although a few more ambitious ones will be made of metal. Fake messiahs will be used to prop open doors, weigh down the piles of paper of the vast bureaucracy of the end times, and hang coats from. Fake messiahs will serve as plinths for expensive shoe shops. Occasionally you will trip over a fake messiah on the way to the shops and vaguely ponder a lawsuit against the messiah factory.
7. Also there will be the bit where all the humans go; this might be one of the signs of the end times for some other species, like rats or horses.

5505 Cities
 -5505.1 Those that never sleep
    –5505.11 Those cities that never sleep because they have far too much exciting stuff to do
       —5505.111 Cities that are like small dogs, bursting with disorganized excitement, full of twitchy crowds standing round waiting for awesome things to happen
       —5505.112 Cities that will dance in a frenzy of joy until long after the other cities are all laid down
       —5505.113 Cities that are building something in there, though no-one is sure quite what
    –5505.12 Those cities that never sleep because they have awful, intractable insomnia
       —5505.121 Cities that are additionally grumpy, weepy and forgetful
 -5505.2 Those that sleep entirely normally thank you
    –5505.21 Those cities which would in any case rather not discuss their sleep with you, and if you could refrain from prying about other things and just let them be that would be great
    –5505.22 Those that cannot be having with the antics of those other cities and would just rather the trains ran on time
       —5505.222 Those that cannot really be having with anything
    –5505.23 Those whose statistical yearbooks record the exact optimal level of sleep and maximal citizen happiness
    –5505.24 Those who need sleep to grow, who are constantly waking with new limbs and appendages
 -5505.3 Cities that sleep amazingly, expansively, that sleep for years
    –5505.31 Those that cradle their inhabitants in the precise mathematics of perfect days
    –5505.32 Those that radiate false calm, and whose anger is locked away
       —5505.221 Cities that have terrible dreams and that wake up with a dew of night-sweat running down their tallest towers
    –5505.33 Those that are cursed to sleep but always on the verge of waking
    –5505.34 Those that sleep like dormice, cute and curled up between the mountains and the sea
 -5505.4 Cities built on mystery and lies
    –5505.41 Those having as their foundation a large and unpleasant secret, and the corners of the secret are occasionally dug up and tugged upon and then hastily put back, and for the few days following nobody makes eye contact
    –5505.42 Those cities that have not looked in the mirror for some time
       —5505.421 Those that know they are great and old and grand and powerful, so long as they remain unexamined
       —5505.422 Those cities that know they are too nice to be angry
    –5505.42 Those that are built on absurdity and would fall apart if their problems were to be fixed
 -5505.5 Cities that are dead
    –5505.51 Those whose ghosts seethe gently at the modern age from under trees
    –5505.52 Cities caught mid-death like flies in amber, and buried
    –5505.53 Cities that are dead but still walking
 -5505.6 Improper cities
    –5505.61 Those cities having no proper location, that might more properly be called cuckoos, settling down in the nests of other cities to make neighbourhoods oddly familiar from other cities in other places
    –5505.62 Cities of plaster, paste and clockwork, convincing only to a distant eye
       —5505.621 Those that consist only of a dog chasing a bus, endlessly, looped onto a webcam, empty of humanity

Broken bottles; stars; discarded fairy wings, half in and half out of the mud; piles of swords; brass knobs; a shaft of frozen dog piss, collected at source in Antarctica and shipped to your grotto in the freezer compartment of a serious research vessel; the Crown Jewels; the carapace of a shiny green beetle; a pair of glasses at the bottom of a river; toenails painted with glitter polish; traffic jams on a sunny day; the plastic crowns of the invading army of tiny princesses as they step out of the sea onto the land; the sea itself; a red-splotched carp seen between waterlilies; chandeliers; a level 3 trombone fire; nuclear accidents; cloth of gold; a million tiny eyes; the shattered mirrors of failed enchanters; icicles; space blankets; fleets of alien vessels; the glitter glue shelf at your local craft shop; ice castles; bullion.

1. There is a small black door of rough wood that opens into the high-glamour halls of Faerie, the ones where fabulous beings dance all night in their masks and lace and finery, and once a month at midnight it unlocks itself and for an hour the dancers emerge on tiny silver chains. And the trapped ones are all blinking and wide-eyed and wondering where the last ten years went, and the other ones are staring hungrily at passers-by with their big yellow eyes. And after an hour a bell sounds and some great beast inside, slightly too far away to see clearly, starts the winch going to haul the chains back in. The odd thing about the chains is their fragility against the wider world; an untrapped human could melt them away just by breathing on them. But for some reason the wider world has always assumed that what is going on is some kind of goth club, and no-one has investigated further.
2. There is a door that leads to a world almost exactly like this one, except that in some key respects your life there has taken a different path. I do not know exactly what this door looks like, only that one may meet it a few times in a lifetime and that it bears a plate stating its nature and warning of the consequences of entering. Nobody remembers going through the door; your memories, too, switch to the shape of the new world. You have no way of knowing how your life in the other world differs from this one. Some people will always go through the door, and some people have never been, and some people will go only once. I do not know which of those you are.
3. There is a door, a white upvc door but it must be a door into some other world because if you go round the other side it’s a brick wall. And when you open it the world on the other side is oddly indistinct, as if what you are seeing is alien enough that your mind needs more time to make sense of it. People talk of a passageway or maybe an opening. Some say that it is white or that it is rapidly flickering between colours. Common to all accounts is the sense that there is something large on the other side that is moving towards the viewer very rapidly. And then you slam the door, and you spend a little time just breathing, and then you go home and dream about it for a few nights. And maybe, some years later, you talk about it. But by then you have forgotten where the door is or why you opened it in the first place.
4. There is a door to all the other worlds at once, a great area of cracked space like a smashed mirror in more dimensions than you care to count. Although it isn’t a door in the normal sense, it is a thing that offends the eye, and most worlds have tried to cover it up or wall it over. Some say it is the consequence of a great explosion between realities, far away in a world that does not exist in the normal sense any more, the runaway consequence of someone inexpertly tring to make doors. If you find it, I would not recommend going through. The open ways through to each individual world are tiny, far too small to fit a person. Every so often a gust of blood-smelling air emerges as someone passes into the cracks from some other world far off.
5. There is a door that you go through every day, into a world that is almost exactly like the one you were born in. The only difference between the worlds is some fact or other. It varies. Something like: the exact definition of ‘xylophone’, or the way that doctors deal with umbilical cords, or suchlike. It isn’t that you have trouble remembering which is the right version. It’s that some of the time you are living in a world where one version is true, and some of the time you are living in a world where the other version is true.

Dear Mr. Heracles,
                We are pleased to inform you that the operation was successful. We removed from the dog’s (dogs’?) stomach the following items: one golden apple, toothmarks to upper side; piece of wooden club, rather splintered; aconite leaves; a large quantity of snake bones, too many to count; several handfuls of earth and stones; remnants of three dog collars, heavily chewed, bearing identical tags (‘Cerberus, if found please return to Underworld’); several laurel wreaths; some fragments of lion-skin; short length of chain, apparently made of adamant; three or four arrow shafts; a large hairball, appears to be wool from some sort of golden fleece; a belt; some cattle dung; and a rattle. We expect him to make a full recovery. Please note that we are still awaiting our agreed payment of one hundred cattle.

We regret to inform you, however, that we have some concerns about the treatment and training of your dog. It seems apparent that he is not offered much affection or exercise in his day-to-day life. He is rather fond of chasing snakes, which is a problem given that he persists in mistaking his tail for a snake (to be fair, so did we initially!). Additionally he seems to be fond of leg-humping, which I’m sure you will appreciate is also a problem given his size and threatening aspect. We recommend that he is given at least two long walks per day, and ideally that he also has a course of sessions with our in-house pet psychologist. He also needs to be microchipped. As I am sure you are aware, 'Underworld’ is not an adequate address and also appears to be that of a previous owner (we did contact the band Underworld, but they denied all knowledge). If you have not made any progress on these issues by the time of the follow-up appointment, we may sadly be forced to contact the necessary authorities.

Yours sincerely,
Faithful Friend Vets Ltd.

1. Netbasketfootsportsball. A spirited but ultimately rather confusing attempt to merge all the different things that people do with balls together. It is rarely played anymore, but sometimes people accidentally do a few rounds when knocking balls around in a multi-sport environment. If you end up dangling by your foot from some kind of hoop while someone else is fervently apologising for elbowing a ball into your face, you have probably been playing netbasketfootsportball. Interestingly, a recent revival movement has been sparked by the claim that the game’s problems could all be solved by introducing some tennis elements to the mix.
2. Tossing the ball over the fence and then having to go and ask for it back. You may think of it as an idle childhood game, but in fact there is an international ball fence toss league who meet once every five years in Tashkent. The top level game combines elements of physical skill (getting the ball over the expert level fence in the first place) with verbal dexterity (making the argument to get it back from the league’s ferocious selection of professional next door neighbours).
3. Mouseball. The closest thing that mice have to an extreme sport, mouseball is played in the summer with the contents of a single peapod, the game being deemed over when all the peas have been won. Two teams of mice assemble at either end of a garden, while the mouse referee places a pea in the middle. At the referee’s signal, both teams race for the pea and attempt to get it to their end of the garden, frequently biting each other in their energetic attempts to get control. A bonus of five peas is deemed won if the active pea is inserted under the chin of a sleeping cat.
4. Giant ball marbles. Giant ball marbles has similar rules to conventional marbles, except that the balls used must be the largest ball of their kind in the world. Thus one could bring the world’s largest ball of rubber bands to the giant ball marbles arena, for example, and pit it against the world’s largest hairball. Games of giant ball marbles are sadly rare, due to the effort and expense involved in transporting large balls to the main arena, a field in central Kansas.
5. Four-dimensional basketball. You’re never going to be able to play this, but after the aliens land you might occasionally observe a three-dimensional slice through a game being played. The best place to view is in the same plane as the basket sphere of one team or another - see if you can get your alien hosts to put you here or orient the pitch so that you are here naturally. Then you will at least be able to tell how many baskets have been scored. By one team, at least. Make sure your hosts put you back afterwards or you may find yourself perpetually dislocated.
6. Ball. Perhaps the purest ball game, ball consists of placing a single, perfectly round ball in an open space and contemplating it for a while. There is no set game length. Touching the ball after the initial set-down is grounds for immediate sending-off.

1. Being as how we sometimes want to sit on the toilet and look at our phones without flagging up to the world that we have chosen to take something with us that  is not strictly necessary for the task of excretion; or similarly
2. Being as how some of us do menstruating and need stuff to deal with that and may not wish to announce this to the room; and
3. Being as how we may someday be in a contest of riddles deep underground, and the answer to ‘what have I got in my pocket’ is an easy one if we have no pockets, and thus we will end up eaten and there will be no-one to defeat the dragon; and
4. Being as how we sometimes need something to do with our hands when slouching around, and crossing arms or fiddling with things attracts a certain breed of amateur psychologist; and
5. Being as how a lady sometimes needs to have to hand a discreet contraceptive after she has jumped from a helicopter, abseiled down a building, drilled through the back wall of a bank, fought off a few security guards, picked the lock, taken the diamond and hijacked the getaway car, not to mention needing a place to put the diamond; and
6. Being as how one sometimes needs a warm place to put a baby kangaroo whilst one searches for its mother; and
7. Being as how losing a bag is significantly easier than losing a pocket, the latter occurrence requiring one either to get naked, battle something with claws or have really badly-made clothes; and
8. Being as how you can pull pockets inside-out and use them as sock puppets when you are bored:

we, the undersigned, are of the opinion that DRESSES AND SKIRTS SHOULD HAVE POCKETS; and that furthermore TROUSERS FOR THE FEMALE-IDENTIFED SHOULD HAVE POCKETS TOO; and that furthermore these pockets should be actual functional ones that do not spill their contents when you sit, squat or bend; that fake pockets are Satan’s spunkstains and let us not speak of them further; that good pockets are big enough to hold at least two of a wallet, a phone, keys and a handkerchief and that given the fundamental symmetry of human beings it is usually no hardship to put at least two pockets on; and that frankly we do not give a fuck about the fabric draping marginally differently compared to the ability to conveniently carry stuff around in the way that people with penis-enabled trousers take for granted.