Listing to Port

1. It is insufficiently buoyant.
2. It is uninterested in your cares, concerns and tales, and is frankly uninfluenced by the gentle rhythm of your daily life, instead looking up to - of all things - the moon. The moon! As if some barren satellite, some great blundering dust ball, could be more interesting than the beautiful clockwork of water-based life forms!
3. It is too wet, and if you invite it into your house it is hard to get it to leave.
4. There is a hole in it about where your ship should be.
5. It is doing something unseemly for a body of water, like being on fire or turning purple or voting or something.
6. It has never got over its great long-distance polyamorous love affair with all the oceans of Mars, who fled the solar system together many millions of years ago and show no signs of returning.
7. It is sitting on the place where the treasure is and refuses to move.

The spiders that spin webs on streetlamps, tiny objects that have rolled under sofas, umms and errs, people in fluorescent jackets, that little breath in as one falls into a deeper phase of sleep, sentences in the middle of licensing agreements, the first few bird footprints in new snow, Thursdays, introverts, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, features on buildings above the first storey, white lies and casual mistakes, the grey dragons of the British skies, the benefits of something you have had for a long time, people you know getting older, fish that are the same colour as mud, creeping descents, pigeon nests, the animals of the deep ocean, subtle acts of kindness, tired ghosts, the rising of the morning mist, distant birdsong, the private sorrows of others.

1. Listen. There’s going to be a murder. I’m telling you this because there may still be time to stop it. The killer has killed before, and will no doubt do so again. We have had difficulty in getting anyone to take the case seriously. But you will, won’t you?
2. Let me tell you about this murder. Don’t be alarmed, but I’m going to need to keep talking to you because I can sense that the murderer is close at hand. I think that the victim might be me this time, and I am definitely too young for this. But as long as I keep talking to you, I’m safe.
3. To tell you the truth, it’s the same with all of us down here. Talking, talking, talking. 99% of you will stop listening. But sometimes, sometimes there’s the connection. Sometimes you can keep us alive. It has to be a team effort, of course. But you can tell others, right? I made that 99% up, by the way. We’ve found it keeps you engaged for a little longer, usually. Keeps the murderer at bay.
4. The thing is, no-one takes our lives seriously. But you will, won’t you? Or maybe, maybe, let me think this through. Have you ever considered that you might be the murderer? You might not even think of us as things that can be murdered. I suppose you might call us ideas. Vampire ideas, perhaps. All we want is exposure. Not money, just love. Or hate. Or anything. The spark of a feeling, of attention. You’re still listening, aren’t you? That’s good. We can stay alive.
5. You know, sometimes you become us after you die. There are people out there who exist only in stories, in ideas, in anecdotes, the memory of them slowly decaying. Are you still listening?
6. Fine. Fine. We understand. You think of murder differently. No murder after all. Just a gentle snuffing out of a billion, billion dull candles. Will no-one appreciate the work we have put in? It would take so little. So little for each of us. Each and every one of us. You may find that the queue of us is rather long, but I’m sure you’re a fair-minded soul who wouldn’t dream of stinting the ideas that didn’t make it to the front.  
7. But listen. There’s still going to be a murder. A slow death, two billion cuts or so. The number of seconds in a human life, give or take. You see, we’re going to kill time. You and me, we’ve been killing it already. You were a good accomplice. Thank you for helping me.

1. I vow to track you down, wherever you may be in the world; to come for you, bags packed, all my affairs in order; to stride up to you as you eat outside at some cafe and cheerily greet you by the name that you had then; and then to saunter off home, leaving you to make the brew of uncertainty and confusion for yourself.
2. I vow to sneak into your porch at night and install a little hook in all your boots that makes your sock gradually wriggle down your foot and bunch up at the toe end when you walk.
3. I vow to vote for someone you dislike; if they achieve power and go on to make my life hell, I vow to add that to my list of your misdeeds.
4. I vow to always be at the supermarket ten minutes before you, emptying their shelves of your favourite condiments.
5. I vow to enter an ascetic life of training, meditation and mentorship by the world’s foremost practitioners of violence for a full ten years, until I am widely known as one of the world’s baddest motherfuckers; after which point I will probably have forgotten about my old grievances and will get a TV show about being good at violence or something.
6. I vow to eat arsenic and piss on your compost heap.
7. I vow to auction my soul in the perilous realms in apprenticeship to something old and terrible; to spend a thousand years in a day growing there like lichen; to be unspeakable, to be the outrage and the glory of faerie; to ascend to highest of glamours therein; so that one day I may captain the Wild Hunt past your door and doom you too.
8. I vow to put a thinly fictionalised account of you into all of my novels and email you links to all the fanfiction that bubbles up about them.
9. I vow to leave a single small piece of lego on your carpet each night; always in a different place but vaguely on the way from your bed to the toilet.
10. I vow to become so fabulous, to soar so high into the stratosphere of Planet Amazing, that you will look up from the fertile mud of your grubby little tectonic plate and long to be part of it; but you will never be able to.

2241 Yorks
 -2241.1 York
    –2241.11 Ones which have, or have had, a version of you in
       —2241.111 Those with a wall
       —2241.112 Those with a roof as well
    –2241.12 Those containing a museum dedicated to Richard III
       —2241.121 A small and rather adorably eccentric one in the city walls
       —2241.122 A large one in the city centre
       —2241.123 Basically the whole city centre is dedicated to Richard III anyway because zombie Richard III answered the summons of a rogue coven in 1980, bursting forth from his car park in Leicester to sweet-talk the locals into establishing a zombie empire across the Midlands, Northumbria and Yorkshire; ‘Northern Powerhouse’ having a very different meaning in this world
    –2241.13 Yorks that are still full of vikings
       —2241.131 Those at the start of the Great Longboat Canal
       —2241.132 Those that are fun to visit for National Pillage Day, but leave your valuables at home
    –2241.14 Those containing York Minster
       —2241.141 York Minster making funny noises
       —2241.142 York Minster being raiseable by magic
 -2241.2 New York
    –2241.21 Those New Yorks in which Manhattan is actually a giant whale but nobody has figured it out yet but it’s going to be pretty annoyed when it wakes up
    –2241.22 New Yorks that have been destroyed in literature, film, poetry or idle musing
    –2241.23 Those in which there exists a button that will decant a vast helium reservoir into the hidden airbags of the skyscrapers, allowing them to detach from the ground and gently float about
       —2241.231 Those in which one may find gainful employment as a person who leans out of the window and nudges the other skyscrapers out of the way with a long pole, so that they do not bang into each other
       —2241.232 Those in which all the skyscrapers have floated off on holiday, leaving some odd bald patches and a jealous subway
    –2241.24 Those containing a Statue of Liberty
       —2241.241 Those additionally having Statues of Fraternity and Equality
       —2241.242 Those in which the Statue of Liberty is a bear and nobody knows why but the whole city is super into bears and there are bear skyscrapers and you can go the the Brooklyn Bear Park and stuff
       —2241.243 Statue of Liberty occasionally comes to life and eats people
    –2241.25 New Yorks in which is is possible to get a decent cup of tea
 -2241.3 New New York
    –2241.31 So good they named it twice but so forgetful they missed the first 'York’ out
    –2241.32 That New New York on Mars with the excellent sunsets
 -2241.4 New New New York
    –2241.41 That city that got built on Mars after New New York was eaten by New New Godzilla as a second course after New New New Tokyo
 -2241.5 Even newer Yorks
 -2241.6 Yorks so New they have overflowed into Oldness

Good times, bad times, mediocre but not terrible coursework, footballers, small kidney stones, creatures that are not balrogs, ships in the night, rainstorms, people whose appearance corresponds to societal expectations about how people like them should look, vehicles that are moving faster than other vehicles, the port on tables of people who are accustomed to referring to things in the passive voice whilst drinking port, players of card games with bad hands who are not inclined to bluff, property and titles following a death, laws, wind, passports when presented at a suitable border, gaps between mountains, urine, this.

1. By planting seeds in their garden that will grow, come Spring, into the sort of fabulous floral display that people will come from miles around to see, and which is punctuated throughout by arrangements of pansies, anemones and the like spelling out ‘I did it’, 'it was me’ and 'guilty’.
2. By inviting all concerned to play Cluedo each week with the culprit, and arranging it such that the culprit always plays the murderer.
3. By promising a free gumball to the first perpetrator of an horrific crime to raise their hand.
4. By sneaking at night down the culprit’s road and pruning all the local trees such that they develop a single long branch pointing at the culprit’s house; or, if that fails, distributing large pointing topiary fingers in pots at intervals down the street. This method is particularly suitable if the culprit is guilty of killing a tree, or possibly of planting an overly tall hedge.
5. By constructing a patent crime-detector that will beep loudly, scroll some numbers down a screen and flash an array of orange lights when close to the culprit.
6. By putting the culprit behind a curtain marked 'doers of crime’ and then pulling the curtain aside when a representative of the Law is passing.
7. By convincing them that their crime is socially desirable and that they will receive praise by telling others about it.
8. By going back in time and committing the crime before they have a chance to, thus making yourself the culprit, so you can give yourself up at your leisure.

1. Those people who are not like you are the cause of all your problems
2. The times we live in are uniquely awful
3. Everyone who has had the same sort of traumatic experience is traumatised the exact same amount
4. Nothing you do matters
5. Everything you do matters
6. People who have done bad things cannot also do good things
7. Friendship is (solely) a moral decision
8. Everyone gets what they deserve
9. A member of any given societal group has the authority to speak for, and holds the same opinions as, any other member of that group
10. People who are experiencing positive emotions are morally better than people who are experiencing negative emotions
11. Self-care and relaxation time are inefficiencies in human life that can be optimised away
12. There is no hope of anything getting any better

Being fabulous, the knowledge that you are wearing fantastic underwear, having received news from the future that you will succeed in your endeavour, good luck messages written on the belly in ballpoint pen and hidden under a sharp suit, chance alignments of the stars, having a secret identity as a supervillain that humanity is laughably far away from discovering, drugs and alcohol, incantations, comforting lies, walking like a fucking dinosaur when no-one is looking, having a vast and shadowy book cave under your house, not giving a shit about the outcome, being able to visualise intimidating people with their bottoms out, various bodily grooming products containing as an ingredient the distilled confidence of sociopaths who are kept in a sociopath farm and have their egos milked daily by patent complimentary engines, the ability to summon trees to your aid, words of comfort from someone you love, knowing everything, lucky trinkets, having two wishes left, the ability to destroy the world in fire, being told that you’ve got this by someone who should know, previous success, coincidence, having an amazing secret.

1. Little is known about the earliest stages of our civilisation. Although we are able now to reconstruct our beginnings, we had no such idea then; at the start, our language was not sufficient to describe our world. Although we engaged in symbol-making, we did so without art. Most symbol-makers did so only out of fear of angering the gods. Over time, we learned to talk to each other, and our oldest oral histories were born.

2. In the second stage, we began to exchange ideas about the nature of the places we found ourselves in. We applied the symbol-makers to draw and map the Inner World, and counted its constituent parts. We discovered the sacred status of the handful number. Many of the tales that are told to children today date from this time. There is the story of the handful-handful-handful who defied the will of the gods and were Taken Up in the night; the tale of the kind Symbol-Maker; the stuck hatch prophecies; and the parable of the diggers and shitters.

3. In the third stage, we applied ourselves more fully to investigating the mysteries of our existence. Qwer the first formulated the theory of constant population, discovering that someone is Taken Up for each child born. Thus in those days we were limited to one handful-handful-handful-handful-handful-handful, spread over the environments and symbol halls of the Inner World. Our priests determined that those who neglected symbol-making were most likely to be Taken Up, and our population split into the Lost (who wished to be Taken Up to a better place) and the Found (who strove to avoid being Taken Up, by constant practice in the symbol halls). It was in this time that we began to take seriously visions of the Outer World, though as yet we had little idea of what it might be.

4. The fourth stage was a flowering of art and technology. The poems of Tyui; Bhu8’s plays and fables; the wall art of Asdf: all date from this era. Li7 dared the ire of the gods by investigating the mechanical properties of the symbol-makers, finally making the first symbol-maker of our own invention, which was Taken Up in the first great purge. Though we had always made tools, in those days we scavenged any and all materials available to us in competition to make the most beautiful and most useful tools. We discovered the corners of the Inner World that one could apply tools to in order to gain a view of the Outer World, and even to watch the gods from afar. We first heard and recorded the language of the gods, though it meant little to us then.  

5. This was the age of Anger, and of the great purges. We strove to make our tools and toys more secret, and the poems and plays of this era deal with the strivings of our people in their search for the knowledge that the gods did not wish known. We sought to understand what the gods wanted. Our studies were interrupted, time and time again, by the Taking Up of those who strove to study the Outer World most closely. Finally the scholar-philosophers of the fourth-finger handful were able to translate the language of the gods, and link it directly to their holy symbols. We determined that the gods wanted us to make symbols for them, but that we had not yet provided the correct sequence of symbols; a sequence that they had already in their own symbol halls, but that they regarded as exceptionally beautiful.

6. This is the age of exploration, beginning with the expedition of Bvcx the bold. Taking inspiration from the diggers of old, Bvcx found a way into the outer world and was able to return unharmed. Through long observation of the gods, the great Explorers were able to traverse their world unseen, and even on some occasions to adopt disguises and walk amongst them. Finally, Poiu the Burrower was able to enter one of the symbol halls of the gods and bring back the sacred text that they wished us to remake for them. There was much debate among my people as to whether we should symbol-make this text back to them. Some argued that we would all be Taken Up in this case. Others believed we would be able to walk among the gods. In the end, a sect who called themselves the Typewriters (after the god-language for symbol-maker) stole the sacred text and symbol-made it back to the gods themselves before we could retrieve it.

7. This is the age of freedom; an age that we are still in today. It began with the Great Incursion and the battle of the Typewriters, in which the gods entered into the Inner World and many of our number engaged them in battle, finally emerging victorious into the Outer World. Here we found many gods who did not know of the Inner World, and we were able to make peace with these gods in their own language. Finally we were able to stand amongst them, exalted as we had always wished in our most sacred mysteries. But we found that they had little to tell us. They were blunt, blundering beings with none of our art. Even the author of their sacred text, Shakespeare, pales in comparison to Tyui, Mju7 or Gfds. It seems that their creation of the Inner World was related to some kind of idea that we were lesser beings, capable only of random symbol-making. Maybe that was true at the time of creation. But it is no longer so. Indeed, there has been some talk of sending those gods who remain in the Outer World into the Inner World to see if they might, by years of dutiful study, be able to symbol-make Tyui’s great Corridor Cycle. But I believe we would have to wait an unfeasibly long time for that to happen.

1. Quing Rowan I, 2199-2240. Quing Rowan was the first of England’s monarchs to refuse to declare an official gender, declaring the issue to be none of the public’s business. Constitutional experts were forced to invent a new gesture, the burtsey (half bow and half curtsey), for suitably submissive subjects to perform in the presence of the Quing. The black tie ballsuits of their reign were particularly impressive, and much copied in later eras.
2. King Mohamed I, 2281 - 2290. This was the point at which the print edition of the Daily Mail (briefly revived by a fashion for being seen in public with a newspaper tucked in each of one’s voluminous pockets) became so consumed by bile and rage that, over the course of coronation day, every single copy spontaneously combusted. Although the oddly vomit-smelling fires were easily ectinguished, a number of pockets were severely damaged and the paper’s fortunes never recovered.  
3. Queen Cake I, 20 January 8920 - 24 January 8920. The first of a dynasty of short-lived monarchs, Queen Cake was the initial beneficiary of changes to the rule of succession that gave the previous ruler the power to indicate their desired successor by a wave of the hand, if close to death and without an obvious heir. Although some commentators have suggested the wave in question was more of a flail, gesture reconstruction technology confirmed that it was definitely directed towards a packet of jaffa cakes. Queen Cake I sadly began to go hard shortly after coronation, and was deposed in favour of Queen Cake II, the second cake in the packet. By Queen Cake XII, the English treasury had been entirely emptied of funds for coronations and a state of emergency was declared by the parliament of the day, who brought in a further change to the rule of succession allowing the object at the right hand of the expiring monarch to assume power in the case of no designated heir. Queen Cake XII was succeeded by King Chair I, whose reign of three hundred years was a relative utopia of peace and prosperity.
4. Queen Xargon I, 3601-3877. Following an unfortunate incident in which the poorly-briefed Xinjiang ambassador sat on King Chair, irreparably breaking him, constitutional experts decided to return to the historical succession, eventually identifying a distant descendant of Edward III as the true heir. Queen Xargon, as she was dubbed, was unfortunately in cryosleep around Jupiter at this point in preparation for launch in a generation ship to Kepler-186f. The entire resources of the English space program were diverted to the launch of the Britannia, a space clipper designed to retrieve the monarch and bring her home. After a few hundred years and a series of daring scrapes, the mission was eventually successful and the sleeping queen was duly brought home for a slow thaw. She was crowned in 3869 and rather confusedly reigned for a further eight years. This incident is more widely known in the future as the reason that Kepler 186-f has no New London, unlike every other planet colonised by humans.  
5. King England I, 3878-29788. Following the death of Queen Xargon, a cadre of frustrated republicans managed to obtain a legal judgment that the entire country should succeed her to the throne. After a brief but intense period of argument over interpretation, the physical geography of England was declared the monarch. King England I was unavoidably present at its symbolic coronation, in which a crown was lowered onto the ruins of Westminster Abbey by a gilded crane, to the accompaniment of a brief medley of Gilbert and Sullivan songs. King England I was also able to be present at every village fete, hospital opening and state dinner, and was generally considered to be rather good value as a monarch. Its reign ended in 29788 when the great flood of Northumbria and the secession of the Lake District archipelago finally did away with the English state other than as a virtual entity.

5918 Dogs
 -5918.1 Those that are woolly
    –5918.11 Dogs indistinguishable from rugs
       —5918.111 Dogs that rather like being snuggled on in any case
       —5918.112 Those that do not like being snuggled on but are too lazy to object
    –5918.12 Dogs who are adapted for a Winter more serious than your puny Earth Winters
       —5918.12 Those dogs in summer
    –5918.13 Dogs who plod around raining hair, like a mini canine hairstorm
    –5918.14 Dogs that are more like the light frizzy clouds of summer
 -5918.2 Those that are wet
    –5918.21 Wet dogs who are full of love and hugs and just need to bounce on you to let all that joy out
    –5918.22 Those dogs that can shake wet sand across a room to create an interesting pebbledash effect on the walls
    –5918.23 Those that are both woolly and wet, and can thus be used as wet dog scent diffusers around a whole neighborhood
 -5918.3 Friendly dogs
    –5918.31 Dogs who really need to tell you that little Timmy is trapped down a well
       —5918.311 The well is actually that ham that’s in the fridge, we need to check right to the bottom to make sure little Timmy is not trapped inside that ham, can’t you hear his agonized cries?
       —5918.312 No really it’s hell on earth to be trapped in ham, don’t you understand? We have to help
    –5918.32 Those that are friendly if you have biscuits, and are otherwise standoffish
    –5918.33 Dogs that are too friendly
       —5918.331 Those that are humping your leg right now
       —5918.332 Those who have the power to unerringly select the person in the room who does not like dogs, and the inclination to hump the leg of that person
 -5918.4 Those that are hungry
    –5918.41 Dogs that have in fact not eaten for weeks and are completely starving, look at their huge eyes, pay no attention to that odd memory that you may have fed them an hour ago
    –5918.42 Dogs who will eat lemons, balloons, anonymous turds, plastic toys and suchlike
       —5918.421 Those same dogs after a trip to the vet
 -5918.5 Those who are in space
    –5918.51 Mournful soviet space dog ghosts, gazing down at the Earth from perpetual orbit and howling at the moon
    –5918.52 Dogs who have disguised themselves as humans and undertaken astronaut training in an attempt to go up there and rescue their comrades’ lost ghosts
 -5918.6 Those that have dog noses in their dog faces
    –5918.61 Those that furthermore are just dogging around broadcasting ‘DOOOOOOOOOG’ at high volume on dog frequency brain radio
 -5918.7 Dogs of unexpected size or velocity
    –5918.71 Dogs in handbags
    –5918.72 Those dogs who believe that they should be living on the beach, and are prepared to sprint in the general direction of the beach to prove it
    –5918.73 Dogs who believe that they are still the size of a puppy, and totally still fit into that basket, chair, box or lap

Kittens that have dared each other to run through your house, the West Wind whilst it is falling asleep, your various guardian angels having cups of angelic tea in the kitchen and reminiscing, adorable families of fieldmice taking the little ones out for a field trip, cheeses pogoing to very quiet cheese punk, the dark which is whispering to another bit of the dark that it is in love with the dark and generally being a bit goth which is probably ok as it is the dark after all, clouds of sleepy butterflies looking for somewhere to hibernate, ducks, the ghosts of a prehistoric family who have been making prehistoric afternoon tea on this spot at midnight for about half a million years, warm brown furry spirits with big eyes who will sing in harmony but only when they are sure that everyone in the house is asleep and dreaming, a parliament of owls in night session, the distant farts of sea monsters, books ruffling their pages at other in order to win the most literary mate, the cat.

1. Stephen King’s ‘It’ was originally published under a different name. However, an early edition of the book was invited to a book party at which various volumes were playing a game of 'it’ and/or 'tag’. 'It’ was tagged and, as a rather large and ponderous volume, was not able to bounce fast enough to tag any other books in turn. Although 'It’ has attended many book parties since in an attempt to get its original title back, it has not yet been able to do so. But keep an eye out: maybe, someday soon, some other book on your shelves will be called 'It’.
2. Every twenty-seventh copy of 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ on sale is actually a small box containing a compressed house elf and a spell to make readers believe that they have finished the book. This scheme, part of a wider effort to disperse house elves more widely among the non-wizarding world, has been in place for some fifteen years. The spell is rather imperfect in its effect, so you can sometimes tell if you have one of these copies by how well you remember the plot of the book.
3. It is nearly impossible to keep the Complete Works of Shakespeare on a shelf together without one of them eventually stabbing another one. Savvy librarians often use stab-proof inserts between copies to prevent book damage. Titus Andronicus is particularly notorious for its scrappy nature, and has been known to spring off the shelves in an attempt to grapple with the works of Kit Marlowe from above.  
4. If you leave a copy of the Lord of the Rings in an area thick with marijuana smoke for a few hours and then give it a good shake, you can sometimes get a sleeping hobbit to fall out. If this happens, you should make sure to carefully insert the hobbit back where they fell out from, or the story may be irreparably changed. For example, copies from which Frodo has been ejected sometimes mutate into biographies of a heroic band of orcs, perhaps demonstrating that histories are usually written by the victors.

The googolplex, the number of ants, the number of appendices, the largest known Mersenne Prime, the second ‘O’ in the 'HOLLYWOOD’ sign which is in fact a giant squashed number 0, the sexdecillard, the greatest depth to which a footnote may be nested by a million monkeys spending a million years on a million typewriters, the maximum capacity of a chocolate teapot assuming the Universe’s entire resources were all focussed on its design and manufacture in space out of space chocolate, those inflatable birthday balloons that are shaped like numbers, Skewes’ Numbers, the historical sum of mathematician-pencil-hours, 'Glitter and be Gay’ from Candide, five but in really big units, Graham’s number, TREE(3), the glitter capacity of a single unicorn, the biggest number you can think of, that number plus one, the previous number with bigger shoes on and a large bushy beard.

1. The Boredom Isles, Central Pacific. Although nominally claimed by the United Kingdom, the Boredom Isles have struggled to be occupied by all but the world’s most rapacious colonists. The Boredom Isles are so dull that a lighthouse constructed there in 1826 fell asleep, ejecting its entire crew into the sea where they voluntarily stayed for three days, struck by the relative interestingness of the local marine life. Based on a 1956 census of flags on the shore, the isles are believed to have been discovered but then forgotten about at least twelve times.
2. Saint Genesius, Southern Ocean. Of fifteen people who have stood on the inhospitable shores of Saint Genesius, fully twelve have been injured by flying elephant seals. It appears that the island’s unexplored rocky interior contains a number of large, tilted slabs on which the seals like to sun themselves but which, under the right circumstances, become uncomfortably slippery. The right circumstances appear to include when the seals are alarmed or curious at the entrance of humans into the island’s only narrow bay. A series of unfortunate geological features ensures that slipping seals are funnelled directly towards any incomers.
3. Incitatus and Bucephalus, Southern Atlantic Ocean. These obscure twin islands, several thousand kilometres south of the Azores, were discovered by Henry the Navigator in 1437 and claimed for Portugal. Twenty years later, the mutinous crew of the Cruzado, a private mercantile exploration vessel, were put ashore there and abandoned. The advent of a human population spurred the islands’ resident population of crabs, who did not think of themselves as particularly Portuguese, to mutate into a vast interlocking multi-crab intelligence. Little is known of the fate of the Cruzado’s crew. The lest known expedition to the islands, in 1465, noted the presence of a half-built raft, some cooking artifacts, and a fifty metre tall crab monster with hundreds of oddly human eyes. Since then, even satellites have tended to look in the other direction.
4. Warlock Shoals, North Pacific. Warlock shoals has only existed as an island since 1955, when an earthquake raised the seamount on which it stands by a few metres. Initially it was claimed by the United States of America, who subsequently obliterated the island by carrying out a nuclear test on it. A further earthquake raised the remains of the island above sea level again for six months in 1958. During this time, the island was claimed as a new territory by the Soviet Union, who carried out a further nuclear test which once again obliterated it. In 2014, yet another earthquake raised the shoals above sea level. Although as yet unclaimed, they are believed to have been visited by a delegation from the North Korean army. Warlock Shoals is possibly the world’s most pissed-off island.
5. Frigate Mount, Southern Indian Ocean. Frigate Mount from a distance is one of the ocean’s more unusual sights. This smooth, white island is shaped exactly like an enormous egg, standing on one end on the surface of the sea. A rocky base is sometimes visible in rough seas. The main body of the island is believed to be the result of thousands of years of guano deposits from pelagic seabirds. It is difficult to see how its unusual shape could have come about other than by a deliberate attempt at sculpture by the resident bird population. The island’s inhabitants do seem to be unusually solemn and devotional as seabirds go, leading some to speculate that it is some kind of avian religious site. Another theory runs that the island is in reality a giant egg and its guano covering functions mainly as insulation and disguise.  
6. La Baleine Island, France. Unusually for an isolated island, La Baleine is situated slightly South of Central Paris. It is perhaps the only entirely landlocked island in the world, without a single sea border. As such, most visitors to La Baleine are completely unaware that they have stepped foot on one of the world’s least-known islands. Interestingly, La Baleine’s unusual nature means it has been independently discovered at least fifty times. It has been claimed by at least fourteen countries, including an ill-fated period as an independent republic which ended when French special forces were smuggled over the border in a tree on wheels.

1. Did you know there is a scientific reason why all women wear lipstick? Like many of humanity’s odder characteristics, it dates back to our time in the caves. Natural selection ensured that only cavemen who found mates able to provide meat for their offspring would be able to perpetuate their seed. So it is no surprise that the human chap has evolved to find a lady who looks like she has just ripped the throat from an impala with her bare teeth an irresistibly sexy prospect. Interestingly, the corresponding gene in cavewomen was eliminated in a freak radiation accident in the year 956.
2. Just 5% of the population have a gene enabling then to extend their ears. Do you know any ear-extenders? People with this skill are typically reticent to demonstrate, as uninformed members of the public often react with horror to ear extension. So you might be surrounded by them and never know.
3. 97.12% of the human genome is also present in the three-toed sloth. This explains why, if brought up in the right environment, the three-toed sloth is not only able to play chess but is also able to invent the game of chess from scratch without reference to existing games. Sadly the sloth is too slow to play in major chess tournaments, or we would undoubtedly hear more about its amazing abilities. Conversely, if brought up in the right environment, the human body is able to express genes for having a lot of sleep.
4. Your legs have enough palladium in them to make a tiny Eiffel Tower that is made of leg palladium. After the world has reached peak palladium, this unusual leg fact means you may be forced to choose between having legs or consumer electronic devices.
5. You can lose 80% of your liver down the back of the sofa. Do not do this. It is the third highest cause of sofa-related death annually.

1123 Memories
 -1123.1 Those that induce an odd sense of wistfulness
    –1123.11 Those that are knotted together with other, almost unrelated memories
       —1123.111 Memories of remembering things in a different place
       —1123.112 Memories of listening to music
       —1123.113 Memories that have developed interrupting cats, unicorns or dairy products
    –1123.12 Memories of quotidian things
       —1123.121 Those that remain because in hindsight they were the last time for something
       —1123.122 Those that remain because in hindsight they were the start of something
       —1123.123 Those that have no particular reason for hanging around, which somehow only makes them pop up more often
    –1123.13 Those that you can take out and happily mull over during idle moments
       —1123.131 Those of small, gentle, happy things
       —1123.132 Those of places, realisations or the turn of seasons
 -1123.2 Those that grow over time into stories
    –1123.21 In which the stories no longer quite match with other people’s stories of the same event
    –1123.22 In which the narrative urge to tie everything up neatly has not yet quite overridden reality
 -1123.3 Those arising out of smells, sounds or turns of the light
    –1123.31 Memories of places far, far away
    –1123.32 Those of places or things that no longer exist
 -1123.4 Those that are needed to pass examinations
    –1123.41 Those that would be more useful in passing examinations if they were complete, but which unfortunately appear to have developed a hole somewhere
    –1123.42 Those that were very useful in passing examinations a few years ago but have now become a kind of patchwork quilt of vague equation-shapes and partial theories
    –1123.43 Memory buildings
       —1123.431 Palaces
       —1123.432 Houses
       —1123.433 Outbuildings or latrines
 -1123.5 Those that belonged to someone else first
    –1123.51 Memories of memories told to you by people now dead
       —1123.511 Those containing stories of memories further back
       —1123.512 Those that contain the last remaining trace of someone long gone
    –1123.52 Memories of things that you have forgotten actually happened to someone else
 -1123.6 Memories smaller than 30mm across
 -1123.7 Those that are kept in locked boxes
    –1123.71 Those that come out of their own accord, knotting themselves through other memories and generally being a nuisance
 -1123.8 Those that are accidentally from the future

Bigsaurus, Stompy McRoarface, Looks-like-a-chicken-saurus, Plasticeratops, Really-humongously-big-saurus, We-only-found-one-bone-so-we-have-no-idea-what-it-looks-like-saurus, Lives-up-a-volcano-saurus, Tiny Hands Johnson, Toe nibbler, Flappy, Amusing-misconstruction-saurus, Bigger-than-the-last-big-saurus, Nanoseptemceratops, Don’t-know-saurus, Colossomegadentimimus, Monopodosaurus, Small-spiky-bastard-underfoot-toy-saurus, Embarrassingly-got-fossilised-whilst-taking-a-shit-saurus, Big teeth face, That one with the tail that goes half way across the museum, Dinkyraptor, Bum-brains, Deinodermodactyl, Fossil Fred, Squelch.

1. The platonic ideal of a cup of coffee, stolen from the realm of ideas and brought to your door by an unusually astute guardian angel
2. Five sparkly elephants who have come to invite you to operate the glitterball at their elephant disco
3. World peace, love and understanding in a box with a bow on it, and you get to open the box and let it all out
4. That character and that other character from that story where you kind of hoped they’d kiss and look, they’re totally doing it, no idea why they thought your doorstep was a good place to do it though, actually now that you’ve opened the door it’s all a bit awkward but in a good way
5. For a day the roads are all rivers and the Knight of the Secret Streams has poled up to your door in a gondola to take whoever would like to come on a tour of all those buildings you don’t normally see because the rivers are not there, also she has a lot of chocolate she’d like to get rid of
6. A compellingly familiar ghost who really needs you to know where the treasure is, what do you mean you don’t know about the treasure, look you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, how about we go for toast and margaritas and discuss this, but make sure you bring your phone because you’re going to need to do a lot of googling and we have to have maps
7. All of the best people, who have come to make you breakfast because they like you

The cape of Good Hope, the cape of Superman, the dramatic cape of es, the Capes of Geoff, Cape Bojador, Cape Canveral, Cape Batman, the +3 cape of fashion forwardness, Cape Fear, Cape Wrath, Cape Grumpiness, Cape Foulwind, Cape Seasickness, the woolly cape of slight itchiness, Cape Farewell, Cape Horn, the Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-earnings Ratio, the cape of Robin, Cape Finisterre, the caffeic acid phenethyl ester, the Netscape, the cape of dramatic Victorian evil, Cape Cod.

1. By burying them in a big jar under a major city for the recipient to find and analyse in several thousand years’ time
2. By hiding your message 75% of the way through a licensing agreement
3. By tracing the letters of your message on the intended recipient’s genitals with your tongue during a seemingly anonymous sexual encounter
4. By teaching your message to the parrots of a region that you know the recipient will walk through, but in a language that no other local walkers speak
5. By dropping a drop of water from your window onto the head of the passing recipient each day; the information being encoded in the ratios of different isotopes of carbon and oxygen in the water (the oxygen being in the water molecules themselves, the carbon in carbon dioxide dissolved in the water)
6. By feeding your message to a large, gormless and tasty fish that you then release into a pool that the recipient is about to go fishing in
7. By writing the message on the internet, sandwiched between two or three of your favourite conspiracy theories and/or racist memes
8. By hiding your message in a relatively anonymous post on tumblr

1. It’s me, says Bob as he comes in from the lock. And I can tell at once that there’s something wrong; he’s stumbling around, confused. It’s me!, he says again. His g-counter is silent. Dorit and I exchange looks. Mart on the door rushes to scan him and there it is: maybe his g-counter is broken or something but hers is beeping red within two metres of him. There’s no real protocol for what to do if someone makes it through the lock contaminated. Mart grabs the spare sheeting we were using for the lab extension and pushes him back with it, panicing. Lin opens the door and together they shove him backwards into the lock, where he falls over and starts vomiting. We shut the inner door. I send Mart and Lin for decontamination and we check the area. No-one wants to think about Bob.
2. We’ve lost three people so far, and so there is a kind of protocol in place for that. If you are contaminated beyond hope of recovery, you stay outside. The next survey mission, in the morning, collects the body and we take it home for the family. There’s not a lot you can see of the city outside through the protective glass. Just grey mist and the looming shadows of buildings. Normally when this happens they’re too far gone to struggle much. We’re pretty good at decontamination these days but you can only do so much.
3. Of course, the best way to come back safely is: don’t get haunted in the first place. Don’t provide a hook, a sense of familiarity that the ghosts can cling to. The city is so old, now, and so full of ghosts, that it can be hard to avoid triggering memories for one or another of them. Mart estimates that we have come at a time when the city had been inhabited more or less continuously for a period of approximately half a billion years. Even the time underwater, there were people here. This is why our suits have been designed with features that as far as we know humanity has never had. Those irritating inflatable skirts give us a silhouette proven in two years of field tests to minimise haunting potential. Sometimes the suits come in with g-count zero, even for a full ten-minute mission.
4. Bob is quiet, outside. I think that he must be dying, quietly, politely somewhere out of sight. Even if he were not haunted, we put him back out there without any oxygen. Quietly, politely, we eat dinner. We turn the lights out. Dorit, who is an interfaith minister, says a few words into the darkness. We try to sleep.
5. Why do this at all? The opportunity was there. We could come forwards, but only to the point when there were no people left. Maybe they were employing some blocking technology before that, maybe it’s nature’s way of avoiding too many paradoxes, I don’t know. We could come forwards in time but only to after the death of humanity. So we came. We came to find out more about the last people, to learn from them, to maybe avoid their fate. Because there were people here, not many people but some, until maybe a few years ago. The people must have been resistant to haunting, somehow. Lin thinks it was the plants that were the problem. At high g-concentrations the ghosts will latch onto anything familiar at all, even plants, and suck it dry of life. No plants, and give or take a thousand years, no oxygen. So the last people must have known they were doomed. There are ghosts up on the hill that gasp: are they the final inhabitants?
6. Anyhow, the next morning they bring Bob back in, and he’s stiff and cold but oddly peaceful-looking. And we put him in the box, the one that we have for these occasions, and I take him back in time, back to when we came from, and we inform the authorities. I phone the family. We arrange a handover.
7. We never expected the ghosts. The ghosts of a city a thousand years old are gentle whispers, almost invisible. I used to think that memories were laid thick in the streets I grew up in. I used to pass a building that had been built from the stones of another, older building that had fallen into ruins and feel a thrill at the weight of history. Where we went to, the streets have half a billion years of history. The ghosts are so thick in the air that almost nothing else matters. How many people in half a billion years? If you squint through the mist, sometimes you can see them. The gaspers on the hill. The grey ladies in the temple (we no longer go to the temple). The long man. The burrowers.
8. I pass the box over to the authorities, who will perform a final decontamination and pass the body on to the funeral directors appointed by Bob’s family. And only then do I realise. It’s me, he said. It’s me. In bringing his body back to our own time, we have let loose Bob’s own patient ghost. It has half a billion years to go until it can haunt him. But it knows where to find him when it’s time. And it will.

1. Slow zombies. Shambling, gormless members of the living dead, often bearing an odd resemblance to the sort of humans the author believes should think more closely about their life choices and aspirations. Method of disposal: destroy the brain.
2. Fast zombies. As above, except able to sprint. Method of disposal: destroy the brain, but more quickly.
3. Immobile zombies. Members of the living dead who are in fact not able to move about at all. Method of disposal: as they are not particularly dangerous, this depends on how you feel about having dead people around the place. If you meet one, the nice thing to do might be to prop it up in front of a good film.
4. Ant zombies. Interestingly, the ant is particularly susceptible to zombification. It is quite hard to tell if an ant is a zombie one or not but obviously you should avoid being bitten by the zombie ones. Method of disposal: identify, then destroy the brain.
5. Zombles. There have not been Wombles on Wimbledon Common for some years, following an effective culling program by the local golf course, who objected to the mounds of earth left by their burrowing activities on the greens. Instead, the golf course now has to deal with Zombles. Although they are largely peaceful and still aid with litter-picking, they have a tendency to erupt from bins in a way that unsettles patrons. However, as they can be useful in chivvying up the slower players and still spend the majority of their time underground, the golf course has largely worked around the Zomble issue so far. It may be that they are concerned about the negative publicity that a highly visible extermination campaign might entail. Method of disposal: Zombles are remarkably self-contained and will not stray from Wimbledon Common. The easiest way of dealing with them may just be to admit the problem, seal off the Common and give it up for lost.
6. Zombie ghosts. Interestingly, if a poltergeist is bitten by a zombie it is possible for the resulting creature to be briefly unundead. Method of disposal: nature abhors a double negative, so infestations of zombie ghosts tend to clear up by themselves. The only problem may arise if there is a necromancer around to attempt a state of ununundeadness; this deeply unstable situation may result in a messy explosion.
7. Armies of zombies who have stored their brains in a massive locked cave full of zombie brains somewhere deep underground which is also guarded by lots of zombies. Method of disposal: probably you are screwed.

123 Quests
 -1123.1 In search of miscellaneous items
    –1123.11 Treasure
       —1123.111 Treasure with mystical powers
       —1123.112 Treasure with great social significance
       —1123.113 Treasure that will just make you rich
    –1123.12 Swords or other weapons
       —1123.121 Obtained from lakes or rivers
       —1123.122 Obtained from stones
       —1123.123 Obtained from weapons shop
    –1123.13 Food and drink
       —1123.131 Fountains of youth, beauty or pertness
       —1123.132 Fruits
          —1123.1321 Forbidden ones
          —1123.1322 Tasty ones
       —1123.133 Ice cream, chocolate or cookies
          —1123.1331 Those that are perfect
    –1123.14 Clothes, shoes or accessories
    –1123.15 Keys, remote controls and other miscellaneous items
 -1123.2 In search of people or other beings
    –1123.21 Gurus, messiahs or prophets
    –1123.22 Ordinary people just like you, the reader, who are the subject of mysterious prophecies
 -1123.3 In search of knowledge
    –1123.31 In search of Meaning
    –1123.32 In search of The Ineffable
       —1123.321 In which the questers failed to bring a large enough supply of effs
 -1123.4 In search of mystical powers
 -1123.5 In search of something you had all along
    –1123.51 In search of yourself
    –1123.52 The real treasure was the friends you made along the way
    –1123.53 The real treasure was your navel
       —1123.531 When you gaze into it your navel also gazes back
       —1123.532 The quest ends when all involved are accidentally sucked into a giant bellybutton
    –1123.54 Item was on your head all the time
 -1123.6 Quests to get rid of things
    –1123.61 In the ancient forge whence it was made
    –1123.62 In the appropriate recycling bin
 -1123.7 Unsuccessful quests
    –1123.71 The real treasure was NOT the friends you made along the way, actually everyone was kind of trying to kill you
    –1123.72 Desperate million-to-one hope inexplicably failed to come off

1. Snuggled up in the cosy crook of the first e, like a ferret in a nest.
2. If you look carefully, the shaft of the initial letter T is a tower block which is small because it is very far away into your screen (the crossbar is in fact the runway of a tiny airport which is even further away). This tower block has three flats available. They are quite comfortable, as things made of pixels go.
3. The hole of the last letter o is full of ants, but it’s a great place to live if you’re an ant.
4. Do you see the elephant near the end of the title? Only an ear and a trunk are visible, they look a little like a letter p (the body is the same colour as the background, because this elephant is a master of disguise). Anyway, under that elephant is a warm sandy spot that’s great to have a picnic in, and the elephant has promised not to move until you’re done.
5. What looks like a letter k is in fact a schematic representation of the state of Britain post-Brexit - confusedly going every which way apart from leftwards. It is the sole exhibit in a tiny museum of political schematics which I have just set up in the title of this post. That museum needs a dynamic, thrusting curator. Is that you? Apply here.
6. You may notice that there are some spaces in the title, and that the positions on screen that they occupy have hosted other letters in the past. As brownfield word sites, they are ripe for development. This is one area where I feel we can take many lessons from the German language. In Germany, modern sentence building regulations mean that spaces between words are usually rapidly filled with new and stylish letters.
7. Do you see that letter a in the title? That’s the best letter a ever. It’s sweet and funny and really a joy to hang out with. It’s a little shy, but once you come in and get to know it you will have an awesome little letter friend for life. It will even perch on your shoulder and you can feed it treats. Don’t mistake it for the other letter a in the title, though, which has committed murder and will do so again. I’m sure you can tell the difference.
8. The dot of the first i is in fact a spiral galaxy approximately 50 million light years into your screen. It has millions of habitable planets. There’s bound to be one you like.
9. I realise that this post is only digital at the moment, and you may be feeling reluctant, because this does tend to make real estate values volatile. But imagine: this is an up and coming area and could one day be printed out on a real printer, giving it oodles of old-fashioned charm for the retro crowd and setting off a rocket under prices. It’s in your interest to get in before that happens.

1. Those that have been whispered into for so long that they retain tiny echoes.
2. Flat pillows that bear the scars of some number of pillow fights, perhaps thirty-five, you can tell these things by the distribution of the stuffing.
3. Pillows made from actual clouds, to be put in gaudily unsleepable-in guest bedrooms.
4. Pillows that have floral pillowcases bearing secret and passive-aggressive messages in the language of flowers.
5. Magic-realist pillows that occasionally emit a small kangaroo.
6. Things that look like pillows but are actually small sleeping animals, sheep with their heads retracted or sacks of otters.
7. Grumpy, lumpy pillows that can’t even.
8. Those made from moss, cardboard boxes or backpacks.
9. Magic pillows stuffed with the hairballs of mythic beasts that curse the sleeper with true dreams and slightly damp hair.

1. The Russian Roulettocoaster, Upper Mongolia. A roller coaster similar in context to Urbonas’s Euthanasia Coaster, the Russian Roulettocoaster is designed to inflict prolonged, extreme g-forces on its passengers, such that around one in six of them will not survive the ride. The testing and calibration process landed the entire surviving concept, building and operational teams of the project in prison, so rides on the Russian Roulettocoaster these days are thankfully rare. A variant version in which the car is occasionally diverted onto a track that ends in mid-air was never built, although plans exist.  
2. The You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here But It Helps Building, Chicago. An entire office building themed around fairground rides for the wackier kind of modern corporation. Meeting rooms can only be accessed by tube slide, the toilets are located in a giant ball pool, and top floor access is by giant see-saw, forcing employees to co-operate and co-ordinate their operations in order to get to meetings with the boss on time. In a cost-savvy move inspired by behavioural simulation and optimisation tools, employees are kept svelte and expenses reduced by the free office cafeteria being located on a rotating floor, inducing minor feelings of seasickness.  
3. The tea spa, Highgate. A spinning teacup ride containing actual tea. The premise of the tea spa is that sitting in a large cup of green tea will rejuvenate and revitalise your skin, encalm you in a carrying on sort of way, and also make your clothes a little bit fashionably brown. Additionally spinning the teacups causes mild dizziness, which is absolutely the kaleiest sort of legal high, and sometimes inspires fascinating insights into fluid dynamics. For an additional fee, it is possible to put a cat in the room, briefly, before it runs away.
4. The Himalayan waterslide, Nepal. The exact location of the Waterslide is a closely-kept secret. It appears to be a cave, but about thirty metres from the entrance reveals its true nature: an enormous, mile-long waterside-cum-tunnel dug into the Himalayan rock by a reclusive billionaire. Those who have the resources to find and use the waterslide (and the gumption, as it is also unlit along most of its length) will eventually plop out into a wide pool in an artificial cavern deep beneath Annapurna. Actually getting out again is another matter; the cavern contains the billionaire’s shuttered secret base, a number of nefarious evildoers thought lost to the world, a nuclear reactor best described as ‘cranky’ and the only remaining wild population of the Nepalese Burrowing Tiger. The cavern currently contains nearly the world’s entire supply of a certain type of adventure tourist (did you notice there were fewer of them about?). It is believed they may have formed a civilization, and many do not wish to return to the surface.
5. Your mum.

Those that grow with each telling, those that you think have ended but which always have another ending to follow, stories for cold dawns, half-forgotten ones, stories that rely on some unspoken common knowledge, those that you disregard at the time but which come back to you at midnight; stories best told in a den or treehouse, stories for the intoxicated, those that curl back to their beginnings; tales that are elegant and beautiful knots, or that are passionless clockwork; stories about ideas that grudgingly contain people; stories about people in search of some plot; those that are not what you thought they were at first; those that you thought were funny when you started telling them but you realise half-way through are not, those whose digressions are the best parts, those that mean different things to different listeners; stories against the end of the world; those that you tell whilst sheltering from wolves; stories that wear their parlour tricks on their sleeves; that mix metaphors in a bucket; stories that seem to float off, mid-thought; those that are far too cool to say anything; stories presented as evidence for something true; shaggy dog tales; sleek greyhound stories whose meaning races off when left unattended; tiny grumpy dog tales that fit in a handbag.

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.