Listing to Port

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Humans still mostly have noses, for now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*because they are not true

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fireflies, candles, passing headlights, someone else’s dumpster fire, lights indicating the beginning or the end of tunnels, the international space station, glow worms, ghost fires, lost and drifting lanterns, the eyes of large predators, incoming bolides, the surgeon’s earlight, the lights of good ideas coming on and winking out over the heads of the world’s dreamers, oncoming trains, the campfires of the opposing army, the Northern lights, dragons arguing in their nests high on the mountainsides, the far-off deaths of planets, the moon reflected in deep water, the glow of that great ghastly pale thing that is even now awakening up on the hill, torchlight, distant galaxies, light-up dinosaur stickers, christmas trees, streetlights through the rain, passing ships, camping stoves, the lures of deep sea beasts, radioactive watches, nightlights, boxes of treasure and bulbs, phosphoresence, passing aeroplanes, lit cigarettes, the lights of those who have come to rescue you, the first light of dawn.

1. Dear Sir! I write concerning your letter to me of the 31st October 2015, which you wrote in reply to my letter of the 17th December 2015, which I am writing to you now, on the 30th October 2016. I feel we must communicate further on the matter of the cottage on the peninsula, which I understand you to be the rightful owner of.
2. It was in the woebegone depths of last Thermidor that I and my companions departed for the cottage, in the hope of overcoming our addiction to the French Revolutionary Calender once and for all by the judicious application of trees and stuff. But our idyll was not to last long before I was forced to confront once more my initial suspicions that the initially calm, peaceful Peninsula of Bloody Death might harbour some dark secret.
3. My first thought was for the lights in the sky, which some of my more susceptible companions claimed to be alien vessels bristling with a variety of rubber probes. Others of my companions pointed with fear at the wide variety of corpses in the cellar of the building, though I understood these to be part of the unique character of the place and exceedingly well formaldehyded besides, such that their odour hardly disturbed my rest. On the third night, however, a gentleman who might best be described as a zombie knocked at the door, and proved uniquely hard to disinvite from the property.
4. It was perhaps a stroke of luck that, as I understand it, the bosky slopes of the peninsula are inhabited by the sort of gentle, melancholic wolfy things who take quite an objection to the loitering of the wrong sort of undead. Anyhow, just as our unwanted visitor had begun to tear off sundry limbs and feed them through the remains of the bathroom extractor fan, a hairy chap of quite some momentum took him off in a Southerly direction, from which we later heard an exuberant crunching. Alas, it appears that our first visitor was poor fare; for the hairy gentleman returned in a state of considerable hunger. I and my companions had just removed the door of our cottage for no particular reason, and so we were forced to flee for our lives.
5. I am sure you will be most concerned to hear that we all at once fell over.  As a young lady who has had and enjoyed sexual intercourse, you can imagine my surprise when the cold hand of the beast closed on my companion’s neck instead. In the confusion, I wriggled free! I was able to extract myself fully from my present peril by diving into a nearby bunker lit only by the dreamy glow of cerenkov radiation, and by slamming a giant keep out sign I found handily nearby over the only entrance.
6. Now, you will appreciate that during this fandango I had had precious little time to shave and thus it was that my first emotion upon bumping into my old piano teacher was pure embarrassment. This was swiftly replaced with the fast-blooming pity that one feels for those who have been newly installed with foot-long teeth and a deathly pallor. Mrs Bellingham (for it was she) affected not to remember our merry hours tinkling together on the jolly old ivories. Instead she expressed an interest in my jugular vein that I feel was far from polite. I had just begun a headlong sprint into the bunker’s inner bits when all at once I fell over again.
7. At first I thought that I had merely been reintroduced abruptly to gravity by the wrathful ghost of Sir Isaac Newton, who I dimly remember insulting one wintry morning in key stage 3. You can imagine my consternation, as a lover of the written word, to find instead that my ankle had become completely ensnared in one of my own sentences, which had looped around itself and become stuck in a particularly tricky conjunction somewhere North of Swindon. As the beast approached, I tried again to rise.
8. Here it gives me little pleasure to say that my companions were indeed right about the lights. Scarcely had Mrs. Bellingham begun to drain me of my lifeblood than she was snatched from this Earth forever by a tractor beam of such width and force that it quite punched a hole in the roof of the bunker, allowing me to escape and make my way to the nearest road. Here I relayed my story to a cadre of unbelieving agents of various agencies. Anyway, pending the outcome of the legal case I am not at liberty to say any more about my current circumstances, but you must appreciate my dilemma. I cannot in good conscience give a positive review to your cottage. I know I indicated to you in my initial communication that I had left my heart there. Sadly, I meant that in a quite literal sense. I believe it is in the drawer by the stove. If you could find someone willing to mail it to me, I would be willing to delete the negative comments I have posted elsewhere. Let me know?

1. House Spectronic. You like gold lame trousers, sparkly unicorns and serious Science. Your dorm has glitterballs. The glitterballs have lasers in. House Spectronic hold a yearly dance-off to showcase their movement-based mathematical notation and are generally into stuff like that.
2. House Jectibor. You are an arch-rationalist who believes that sorting people into different groups based on arbitrary personal characteristics is at best pointless and at worst a dangerous type of segregation promoting the formation of divisions and filter bubbles. House Jectibor campaigns for the abolition of Houses and also organises midnight trips out to get drunk on cheap cider in the hills.
3. House Oraculorum. You have ear hair of over 3cm in length. It can be used to tell the future, if burnt in the correct sort of vessel. You didn’t know that? Welcome to House Oraculorum! Members of this house take a joint vow of secrecy about the future and have a tendency to pass exams with top marks and make large lottery wins.
4. House Quotusal. You do not have any particularly unusual characteristics. You can sort of recognise yourself in most broad definitions of personality types. You have no particular loyalty to people who are just like you. You still need somewhere to sleep.
5. House Vellilarum. Mainly notable for having only one member at any one time, House Vellilarum is reserved for budding dark lords, criminal masterminds and/or lone psychopaths. Occasionally other people are sorted into House Vellilarum, but after a few days the House typically reverts to having one member again and a small hush bonus is paid to the cleaners.  
6.  House Beddagorg. Relatively few people know about House Beddagorg, because members rarely make it to classes. Those in House Beddagorg can typically be found in bed, which is their natural habitat and from which they are rather loath to be removed.
7. House Buggeroff. Did you ask to be sent to the sort of school that does sorting and dorms and suchlike? You most definitely did not. You’d rather be at the sort of school that you go home from and maybe go out to a gig in the evening or something.
8. House House. You are a house. Quite why you are interested in attending classes rather than hosting them is a bit of a mystery, but top marks for ambition. House house is often the biggest house, in terms of volume and mass at least.

0331 Minutes
 -0331.1 Those before the next one
    –0331.11 Those that additionally come after the previous one
    –0331.12 Minutes partly out of sequence or of unusual shapes
       —0331.121 Those coming back around again to the next one once more
    –0331.13 Those threaded through time, coming back as themselves again and again
 -0331.2 Those underlined in some way by historians
    –0331.21 Minutes of the death of kings
       —0331.211 Those in shadowed sickrooms
       —0331.212 Those on the battlefield
          —-0331.2121 Those unattended by a horse
    –0331.22 Those minutes surrounding the birth of twins or the fulfillment of prophecies
    –0331.23 Those containing the first tiny sign of some disaster
    –0331.24 Those during which the ink dries on the signatures of peace treaties
 -0331.3 Those pertaining to music or literature
    –0331.31 Of songs
       –0331.311 Those minutes that are the best minutes of their respective songs
       –0331.312 Those minutes that are only minutes of said songs
    –0331.32 Of art or sundry things
       –0331.321 Those minutes when you see something that you cannot later unsee
    –0331.32 Of literature or film
       –0331.321 Those minutes when sense swims up out of the dense morass and breathes and sinks back down once more
       –0331.322 Those in which everything changes
       –0331.323 Ends
 -0331.4 Minutes of unusual length
    –0331.41 Those emboldened by the addition of a leap second or two
       —0331.411 Minutes stuffed full of leap seconds as a gift for lovers of time to open on New Years’ morning
    –0331.42 Minutes that have been time-dilated into flabby lumps of spaceship time
    –0331.43 Those spent falling off a cliff, receiving terrible news, in unusual ecstasy or being a bit bored
    –0331.44 Those minutes inhabited by malfunctioning time machines
 -0331.5 Minutes that have been forgotten
    –0331.51 Those in which nothing happened
    –0331.52 Those in which things happened that no-one saw
    –0331.53 Those attended by too few elephants
    –0331.54 Those in which things happened and people saw them and which subsequently those people successfully joined the foreign legion to forget
    –0331.55 Quotidian minutes in the lives of the long dead
    –0331.56 This minute, many years from now

400g butter, 1 pinch salt, 2 mangoes (peeled), that fish your mother warned you about, 300g flour, 10 cl viking piss, 1 tbsp baboon shavings, the lichen that grows at the end of the world, an unfamiliar horse, 70 candied violets, gold leaf to taste, 2 tbsp Antarctic snorting water, a bay leaf, a pumpkin that is shaped a little bit like a bottom, 4 cups gin, the winner of the 100m sausages, an egg, a spoon, 80g of that bubbling blue potion from that TV show where someone is totes doing Science, 5g ground parthenon, the moon, 20 cl eau de toilet brush, 400g of those bits of the frog that the witches always put in the bin, balls, eye of aye-aye, Macbeth’s hat, ½ pinch fairy dust, lighly roasted rat rectums (< 0.1%).

1. Hi its 2100 here. Congratulations on ur new baby! Dont forget, u need to get them an IP address before u leave hospital. Otherwise under the illegal immigration act 2086 ur car is legally obliged to take riders without an IP address to the nearest detention centre.
2. Hi, still 2100. Come to the local truck factory this weekend, we are seeding the consciousnesses of 80 new trucks from individually mapped chick brains. It is so cute when they cluster round mother factory and honk for their first taste of biodiesel!
3. Hi its 2100, u will have to wait to use ur car it is updating to fix a critical vulnerability in the code governing vehicle speed past adverts from ur key sponsors. Or I dunno u can use w/o updating but u might get hacked on the motorway.
4 Hi its 2100 again. I dont know what ur objecting to this is correct international English as specified by the 24th Edition Oxford International English Standards.
5. Hi, guess when? Anyway following the communities act 2097 ur toaster is legally obliged to provide relationship advice. Try it out! U can sue ur toaster if it tells u to stay in a bad relationship so it will probably tell you to leave the bastard whatever u say to it.
6. Hi, 2100. Yes I know. Anyway u dont want to go out today, there r gangs of pensioners in robotic exoskeletons on the streets and they have jailbroken them which u need to do to get them to go up stairs properly but it also means they have no prohibition on trampling ur tender unprotected flesh underfoot.
7. Hi u know when it is. I just wanted to add, u cant go out today anyway, ur door is waiting for a message from ur key sponsors to download and ur no 1 key sponsor is offline right now bcos its connection is being held hostage by hacked mining robots. But u should definitely go out tomorrow bcos u need to do something patriotic to top up ur citizenship points. Have a nice day!

1. That more travel locations were accessible to the sort of guests who occasionally drop giant icebergs in the heat
2. That white would come into fashion again, specifically so that some of the other continents yes I’m looking at you North America and Europe could be a bit more admiring and stop making comments about being jilted at the altar and/or left on the continental shelf
3. That others would learn to look beyond its icy and frozen exterior and see the awesome fossil jungles beneath
4. That penguins would shit less and snuggle more
5. To not be so bloody cold all of the time

1. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. Someone tells you that you are the only person who can save this world from disaster. It turns out that this is a thing that the inhabitants of that world find hilarious to say to inhabitants of your world, for some reason. You go home feeling a bit grumpy.
2. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It is quite nice. Sometimes you still go on holiday there, although generally only on day trips because of the difficulty of exchanging currency.
3. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. At least you think you have. The two worlds are so similar that you cannot tell the difference. It is possible that the old woman operating the portal is a con artist.
4. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. You meet the parallel-world version of yourself and sleep with them. You cannot decide if this counts as masturbation or not.
5. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It has a strain of influenza that is slightly different from our version. You bring it back into our world, causing a global epidemic that kills fifty million people.
6. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. You discover a huge conspiracy by the cognoscenti to keep the parallel world secret, because you can get really good cakes there and nobody wants them to run out.
7. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. The parallel world just beside our own also journeys into you. You become doomed to spend the next few billion years as an honorary universe. It is a little uncomfortable, but you think you might get used to it.
8. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It smells repulsive. You return to our world and warn the next person in the queue that they might not want to go in there.
9. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. The inhabitants are charmed by your unusual skillset for a human and you get invited to all the best parties.
10. You have already journeyed into a parallel world just beside your own. You made the outbound trip somewhere around January 1, 2016. I would have thought you’d have noticed by now. There’s still time to go back, if you can find how you got in in the first place.

Those who have seen it all and generally twice; those who are fearless and steadfast and dead; those who once tried to organise a pissup in a brewery but decided in the end that it was not ethically justifiable to prioritise one brewery over another; those who only want the love of everyone forever and ever; those who are in love with facts; those whose grasp of the facts extends only to facts that agree with their worldview; those who are oddly forgetful; those who will believe anything that gets them elected; those who know one large thing only; those who went into politics out of a vague sense that it is what people like them do; those who dance around questions; those who absolutely agree with you no matter what it is you believe; those who are perpetually nudged away from disaster by a cadre of fretful underlings; those who plunge into disaster with a gleeful laugh and emerge from it somehow covered in mucky glory; those who know how the sausages are made; those who like how the sausages are made; those who are pioneering a new form of sausagemaking in which sausages poot fully-formed from the rear of a magnificent unicorn.

1. Take the next left, twice around the block, up the stairs and knock gently.
2. Three times around the block and wait until Monday. There stops here on Monday at dawn. Make sure you’re awake or you’ll have to hang around for another week, and the coyotes come on Tuesday at dawn so you might not want to be waiting then.
3. You see the chap with the phone? Follow the chap with the phone. He’s going there. He’ll duck into a supermarket at one point and come out of the staff entrance with a different coat on, so be ready for that.
4. Here is a book about there. That is probably the safest way to get there. Should you get a little too deep into the book and find yourself physically there, page 48 discusses a book there about here, which you might be able to use to get back.
5. Go three thousand years backwards in time and kidnap your own grandmother, who you will find is also a time traveller; persuade her to take up town planning and deposit her in 1840, dressed as a gentleman, from which you may be assured she will be able to get home on her own in time; and make sure that she designs in a left turn just ahead of where you are now. Then come back here and take the next left.
6. Dig three hundred metres straight down. Follow the cave as far as it goes, enlarging any openings as required. You may wish to trail a red string behind you if you have friends and relatives who will come looking for you. When you reach the statue, turn the left ear and do not touch any other part. Descend. After the cave-in, take the next left. It may be helpful to have the nuclear launch codes on hand, just in case.
7. Go to the nearest hardware shop and purchase a hook on top of a tall enough pole. Turn left and carry on until you are in a good enough place. Raise the pole above your head and wait. They will come and get you eventually, if you wait long enough.
8. You are already there. One day, when you are no longer there but have come at last to here where you thought you were, you will come to realise this, and it will haunt you for the rest of your life.
9. Oooh, you don’t want to go there. Try redefining here as there instead. All you will need is a letter ’t’ and some word glue.
10. Actually, you can’t get there from here.

8440 Mythical Beasts
 -8440.1 Those that appear like normal beasts, but with some special power or feature
    –8440.11 Those that can speak
       —8440.111 Those who can be found dispensing choice wisdom to travellers who look a bit like protagonists
       —8440.112 Those who speak or sing only when unobserved
          —8440.1121 Those whose capture is the key to untold powers
          —8440.1122 Those whose capture leads only to melancholy
    –8440.12 Those that are unusually shaggy
       —8440.121 Those whose mythical power is largely based around avoiding shearers and/or hairdressers
    –8440.13 Those appearing only in mirrors
    –8440.14 Those holding up the sun, moon or sky, ferrying the dead, or employed in other god stuff
        –8440.141 These who could really do with better pay and conditions given that they get all the god responsibilities without any of the god benefits like smiting and worship
    –8440.15 Those that are unusually attractive
    –8440.16 Those who began their lives as entirely usual creatures, but had the misfortune to be swept up in someone else’s story and get all mythologised
    –8440.17 Those that hang around the makers of myths, moving small objects around, snuffing out lights and generally performing the more quotidian sort of miracle in the hope of being noticed
 -8440.2 Those that are scaly or flappy
    –8440.21 Those that are born in fire
       —8440.211 Those that additionally sneeze, fart or perspire fire
    –8440.22 Things that are driven from villages with pitchforks
 -8440.3 Those that have an unusual number of something
    –8440.31 Heads
    –8440.32 Legs, limbs, tentacles, protrusions or similar
    –8440.33 Eyes, ears, teeth and suchlike
    –8440.34 those that might rather be termed collectors
    –8440.35 Mythical beasts of porn
 -8440.4 Those that are part one animal and part another animal
    –8440.41 Part animal and part human
       —8440.411 Those in which the top or front part is human
          —8440.4111 Those where the human part has to keep telling the animal part to sit
       —8440.412 Those in which the back or bottom part is human
          —8440.4121 Cases where this arrangement runs counter to expectations, e.g. landfish or giant ants with buttocks
       —8440.413 Those who are arranged some other way
    –8440.42 Part animal and part some other animal
    –8440.43 Part human and part some other human
       —8440.431 Frankenstein’s monster
 -8440.5 Those that are of an unusual size
 -8440.6 Those that appear in the metamyths that mythical beasts pass amongst themselves when gathered around certain special fireplaces
 -8440.7 Those of a vegetable nature
 -8440.8 Those normally living in the deep oceans, the poles, the upper atmosphere, in space, or in the human brain

1. Nicholas Hawksmoor, or for that matter any other currently-deceased architects

2. Carnivorous earpod vines

3. Shark whisperers, if your route takes you past the sea

4. People who are currently being the protagonist in an action film

5. Any of the four commuters of the apocalypse, particularly War, who has a tendency to cause fights to break out

6. Killer robots, particularly if they are labelled as such

7. Upwardly mobile buddleia bushes

8. Anyone who is asleep and having a dream that they are on a train, in case that you should find yourself only a figment in their dream to be snuffed out when they wake

9. Other trains which have decided to try and get a seat on this one for laughs

10. Negative people; that is to say, those made of antimatter where it may well be that accidentally brushing legs with them causes a planet-obliterating explosion. Feel free to sit next to people who are merely a bit down

11. Anything that admits to having an insatiable appetite for human flesh

12. The great god Pan; in this case it might also be wise to get off at the next stop too

I am with you in the burned out factory, in the basement, in the pipe bomb crater from the last war. Just look for me, oh look! I will be that silent electricity in the air, that catch of the frosted breath, and you will the reason. All you need do is raise me. And think what we could do together, the life that we could make. If you want me to write in blood I will. I will write you a poem inside a clot inside the black heart of the wolf, as he dies in the snow on the mountainside. From secret reliquaries I have the crumbling blood of a thousand fake Christs. I will wet it up to paint your portrait. I will give you things that nobody owns. Oh, I will be generous. I will give you Saturn and the Northern Lights. I will give you Love, the abstract concept, and for a giddy year or so we will keep Love to ourselves in our haunted submarine, and nobody will be able to use it in the movies. I will plot us a course free from mirrors, from whales, from the light of the moon. I will plot us a course that threads the seven seas around. And we will still write letters, I from my cabin and you from yours, and in our letters to each other we will burn cities and make them over again each morning. And we will still meet at night on the white beaches of distant islands and make lightning together. I will make you a tarot of glass that we can keep in some attic together, a host of glittering portraits to keep us young. And when in the end you are all over sideways I will be colours and light for you; I will make you the stars; I will draw for you constellations in indigo so fine that you will never miss the real ones. I will curl bluishly in the duck egg of your final dreams, and in the end either you will close my eyes or I will close yours, and our commingled ashes will be a shocking grey; a grey like the dawn on that morning when an apocalypse arrives uninvited and no-one knows what to do with it.

1. The diners are served a banquet of lies; amazing, outrageous and mouthwatering ones. Each lie contains its own recipe. The diners cannot wait to get home so that they can try to make the lies for their family and friends as well. Conveniently, the lies address why everyone is still curiously hungry.
2. The dining room and all the furniture in it are made of pasta, as the diners discover when their chairs collapse. Chorizo trapezes are lowered from the ceiling for them to perch on. Everything else (pasta, coats, bags et cetera) falls through the newly opened floor into a vat of boiling water to be cooked. Nozzles in the walls dispense cooling sprays, sauce and wine for the diners. Those whose credit cards have been boiled are allowed to call on the audacious ghosts of the Futurist movement to avenge their loss.
3. The first course is plants. The second course is a bird that has been fed on those plants. The third course is a beast which has been fed on those birds. The diners are given the option of discreetly leaving before dessert. After a long and occasionally agonizing wait, the candied flesh of the remaining diners is served to the hooded waitresses, who have been tapping their fingers on the table all this while.
4. The supper is a great gathering of mighty worms from space. They intend to eat Brazil (the coast for a starter, moving on slowly to the pampas, with the rainforest to finish). For some reason humanity insists on referring to this as an invasion rather than a light and civilised supper. Nuclear weapons are deployed. The worms realise there are little stinging creatures all over their meal and retreat to Alpha Centuri. The wormish chef is deported to the Large Magellanic Cloud for gastronomical stupidity. In the centuries to come, lovers in low Earth orbit will eat their suppers by the light of the rainforest and call it beautiful.
5. Diners enter a well-decorated library of fairy tales. A roast wolf is served on a great platter. With a theatrical flourish, a woodsman enters to carve the wolf. From the steaming cavern of its belly rises Little Red Riding Hood, rosy with heat and wrapped only in an indigestible space blanket.

The bibbler, the nobbler, the snorkel worm, stings-through-clothes, decipedes, the dog-eating botherer, the swarm of eeeeeeees, the lob-legged scuttling insectface, the glittery pink fritillary, the buzzer in the night, the glory bee, Beelzebub the Unswattable Menace, the earworm, the rubber arachnid, the cheese scorpion, the clacker in the broomstick crack, those whose lifecycles you wish you didn’t know about, the bug, the mite, the mite not, the dildo fly, the macho sting bug, the flitting colours of the world’s fat middle, the weevil of perpetual discontent, the things under the stones, the leg-nibblers, the joyful little friends to all humanity, Throckmorton’s tongue snail, the oh god what is that, the seventeenth ant in line, the very good tick, the bungee spider, the bug-eyed flapper, the leg-haver, those insects that you will miss when you are gone, those who get in and cannot get out again, the moth of the drum, the clockwork bee, the peafeaster, the smaller flea ad infinitum.

The itch of the if
At the back of your brain,
Returning and turning,
Again and again.

If only I hadn’t,
If only I had -
If only I wasn’t
So mad or so sad,

If I could have faked it
Until it was true;
If I wanted the things
Others wanted me to;

What if I was wrong?
Am I wrong even now?
Have my distant mistakes
Caused disaster somehow?

Or - what if those days
Had been just a bit colder,
Or I had been wiser,
Or stronger, or bolder?

You can’t slake it by scratching.
That spreads out the spot -
Draws your memory threads
Through its thick sticky knot.

Oh there’s words and there’s music,
The bottle, the spliff,
Things that drown out the sound
And the itch of the if.

But the sole cure is time,
Time and time ‘til it clears -
A medicine measured
In years upon years.

So seal it in stone
With a terrible glyph,
Drop it five fathoms deep -
But the itch of that if!

1. You are a farmer who has to cross a railway track with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain. You can only carry one at once over the bridge because you have worn out your arms doing semaphore at the passing aircraft of your long-lost love as he departs forever to the Southern hemisphere. In what order should you take the fox, the chicken and the grain over so that none of them eats the other, and why are you carrying around a fox in the first place?
2. You are another farmer who is in solitary for doing a murder. Sometimes, the warder will take you to another room where there is a light bulb which is either on or off. If you correctly assert that everyone else in solitary has visited the room, the warder will set you and all the other prisoners free onto the nearby railway tracks where you can finally slake your ever-growing taste for blood. You met with the other prisoners at the start of the exercise and decided your strategy. If your propensity to murder grows by one crow per day, will you escape before you kill the warder, or abscond in a dramatic prison break afterwards? Assume the warder picks between you and a hundred other prisoners in solitary at random.
3. You are one of a hundred drivers on a trolley, who may or may not have recently escaped from solitary confinement and stolen the trolley. After so long in confinement without mirrors, all of you have forgotten what colour your own eyes are and also how to speak. You have decided to get off the trolley if you find out what colour your eyes are. Why on earth did you do that?
4. A driverless trolley is speeding down the rails. In its path is a farmer tied to the track. You are a fox. You can pull a lever to redirect the trolley to another track, on which there is another farmer who is also tied to the rails. You know that one farmer always tells the truth, whilst the other one always lies, but not which is which, because you are a fox and to you all people look the same. You have time to shout one question before the trolley reaches the junction. Assume both farmers have mysterious pasts with foxes and probably understand fox language.
5. You are a private detective who has a giant block of ice. You are desperate for it to be the solution to a riddle. You come across the body of a farmer who has been run over by a runaway trolley. The police have not yet been called. How can you set the scene up so that they conclude the ice was implicated in the farmer’s death?

Q1. What do you believe is the main problem affecting the country today?
A1. The economy
A2. Jobs
A3. Crime
A4. Kids these days
A5. Health
A6. The cost of Marmite

Q2. What do you believe the cause of this problem is? (Note: we agree. Absolutely. You are so right. Thank goodness we can at last frankly and fairly talk about the thing you think is the cause of the problem!)
A1. Immigrants
A2. Badgers
A3. The French
A4. Poor people, but only the bad sort of poor people of course
A5. So-called experts
A6. The sneering liberal metropolitan elite

Q3. What solution to this problem will make you vote for us in 2020?
A1. Building a great big fuck-off wall in the sea and instructing geographers that we are now part of the North American continent
A2. Issuing blue passports to the tiny percentage of the population who can afford to go abroad
A3. Naming and shaming
A4. Send them back to where they came from, unless they had the temerity to be born next door in which case send them somewhere else
A5. Something involving detention centres but only in a very polite and British way support our troops look here’s a big flag
A6. Let’s get something nice for the Queen, like a yacht or a gilded cupcake or Easter Island

Insect repellent, three tins fine caviar, binoculars with one eye blacked out, any keys that you might need, a plunger, a puncture repair kit, some small object that will make you quietly happy when times are dark, rope, two jars of pickled arguments, buns sufficient for a minor bunfight, the incomplete works of Shakespeare, high heels that you can run in and that if necessary you can eat, condiments for the high heels, duct tape, WD40, chalk, a pen, a knife, a sturdy rucksack, the antish pope, a shoulder carrier and antisquash cage for the antish pope, a map, another map showing the location of a place where you can get better maps, birdseed, a firm hand, fruits from your own garden, a book of poems suitable to read to the guardians of doors, a red hot poker, a suitable quantity of small change in a sock, another sock (empty), one packet stick-on googly eyes.

1. The Revenge of Lost Pages. A dress that one may summon together by means of an ancient spell, known to the librarians at Alexandria and passed down in fire ever since. To make the Revenge of Lost Pages you will need a vial of old-book-dust, an inverted page thrice-dogeared, twenty shillings to pay your predecessor’s late fees and the legendary slice of bacon that librarian lore has it was once left in a returned book as a bookmark. The Revenge of Lost Pages summons from across time all of the remaining pages from books that you started but did not finish, stitching them into a dress of a design appropriate for the amount of material therein. If you have abandoned a lot of books mid-way through, for example, it is a relatively cheap way to get an unusual wedding dress. It is rather hard to remove the Revenge of Lost Pages, so you should be careful about summoning it to situations where it may be unwise to wear paper.  
2. The Emperor’s Old Clothes. A small travelling wardrobe featuring a selection of bodysuits designed to replicate the naked bodies of various current and historical emperors and empresses, allowing anyone who feels so inclined to re-enact the fable in more punishing climates without having to experience cold or nudity. The phone number to hire the Emperor’s Old Clothes is one of the things that rulers receive on accession to the throne, along with a nice shiny crown and a tea set from which to elegantly drink the blood of unicorns.
3. The Robes of the High Lord of the Navel. Woven from the delicately-spun thread of pure bellybutton fluff, the Robes of the High Lord of the Navel are a shimmering grey and can be used to pad around in unobtrusively at night. They may be hired from the London Guild of Navel Gazers for a small fee by people with interesting bellybuttons; for example, those who have had stomach surgery or have recently been pregnant.
4. The Message. There are eleven instances of the Message known about. They all were constructed in the same way: a lone walker would come across an object in the woods half in and half out of our physical dimensions, with moving things massed about it a little like calligraphy serifs. They would let it be known that the walker could become a host for a message to humankind. The beings were very persuasive. Taking their alien inks, they would write the message on the walker’s skin in great bold characters, layer upon layer of them, until the walker’s body was grey-black with alien inkstuff. The ink would dry into a thick, warm bodysuit that would later need to be cut off at the local hospital. No way of separating the letters could be found. Putting old, shed Messages on is said to be enormously comforting. They are normally kept in government Repositories of Things.
5. Hitler’s jumper. A white, woolly cable-knit number that may, or may not, once have been worn by Adolf Hitler. The right to wear Hitler’s jumper is awarded as a penalty for invoking Godwin’s Law in the face of an historically-appropriate comparison of something to Nazi Germany. As such, the roll of temporary owners is long and complex and generally the official custodian of the jumper, a rather morose dachshund, is not able to deliver the jumper to each owner before having to reroute in an attempt to reach the next one. Nevertheless, the jumper does sometimes reach its destination; so, if you should find a jumper-carrying dachshund at your door one morning, it may be worth reassessing your recent online activity.