Listing to Port

1. On this day, 10 years ago: you said something to a friend that you’ve suddenly realised accidentally came out as kind of insulting. You do realise that your friends probably haven’t had any respect for you since then, don’t you? You should apologise. Only it’s been a really long time, so you’d need a really big apology and they’re still going to think you’re a bit off.
2. Did you know? One of the first symptoms of throat cancer can be a sore throat!
3. You also have one new invitation to something you won’t enjoy by someone who’s taking pity on your social ineptness.
4. Fun fact! A gamma ray burst in the Milky Way could lead to a mass extinction event on Earth!
5. Don’t forget! 12:40 a.m., tomorrow, you’re scheduled to have that dream about the exam hall. Should I notify you 10 minutes beforehand so you can get there in time for everyone to see you have no clothes on, or shall I skip the reminder so that you arrive late and naked?

1. Cutlass Fogarty’s hoard of pony charms. This is a completely legit hoard, they’re made of gold and everything. In fact, Cutlass Fogarty was an unusually successful pirate within the bounds of his niche idiom, and by 1672 he had pretty much gathered up the global supply of pony charms. The only problem is, he was a bit too good at hiding them. It is said that he was finally persuaded to make a map with an ‘X’ on it on his deathbed, but owing to scaling issues the 'X’ covered most of Western Australia.

2. The Holy Omelette of Pope Valentine. Nearly all trace of this relic has been erased from history by some kind of sinister cabal, but it definitely passed into pirate hands in 1890 following the sinking of the Marlborough. For some years there was a rumour that it had been accidentally served up in a restaurant in Punta Arenas in 1922, but was returned to the kitchen due to its unacceptably damp and stale state. Its current location is unknown.

3. John Bonham’s Lost Hoard. John Bonham was in reality Jane, the rather bored daughter of a successful Kentish leather merchant. With little else to do, she decided to embark upon a short-lived but briefly notorious career of piracy along the Thames. Although she had a knack for alarming violence, she did not have a very discerning eye for treasure and as a result her hoard is said to be mostly trinkets, knick-knacks, sentimental dog pictures and the like. It may well be, therefore, that it has in fact been found but dismissed as a rubbish heap.

4. The Golden Chest of Jacques Le Dildo. This hoard is notorious amongst hunters of pirate treasure. Its location is in fact quite easily discernible. The chest, however, is entirely full of live and extremely lairy crabs. Jacques Le Dildo was very fond of crabs, and may in fact have set it up as some kind of crab hatchery.

5. The sacred cave of the Sisters of Hellfire. The Sisters of Hellfire were a renegade order of nuns who took an unusually direct approach to the problem of sacred works being sullied by profane, profit-obsessed owners. Over five decades of raiding, they are said to have amassed a huge collection of fine art, sculpture and relics. They are believed at this point to have retired from piracy and reverted to a more normal type of sacred order; the only difference being a hidden cave beneath their new nunnery, accessible only to the more senior orders.

6. Jack of the Split Ear. Jack considered the greatest treasure of all to be freedom, and as a result his famous chest is empty of everything except symbolism.

7. The Cursed Barquentine of Port Harcourt. The curse, as it turns out, is both real and pertinent to the nature of this treasure. Following an unfortunate incident (said by some to be the deliberate ramming of a peaceful sea serpent by a drunken crew), the brigantine was cursed with eternal seasickness. As a result, their adventures in search of treasure were usually unsuccessful. They also needed somewhere below decks to vomit, and their store of large empty chests soon proved useful for this purpose. In addition, the wreck is still cursed. You probably do not want to go there.

1. Daisy’s Automatic Kibble-o-mat. A laser detection system continually scans the central part of the food bowl. If any part of the bowl base becomes visible, an alarm sounds and an order for three hundred tonnes of salmon is made at the nearest online retailer with same-day delivery.

2. Dave Kitler’s PRODBOT. PRODBOT takes on the onerous task of getting up at 5am to prod the owner into opening a can of kitty food. While the cat has a much-needed lie-in, PRODBOT launches itself onto the owner’s bed and extends its patented claw attachment to provide regular face-batting. PRODBOT is programmable with six different miaows, including ‘get up now, I have just been sick’, 'get up now, there’s probably a dead mouse in the hall’, and 'GET UP NOW!!!’. The 2016 update also includes an award-winning solicitation purr.

3. Princess’s Cat Calendar. Does your cat forget when flea or worm treatment is due? Do they have cause to regret trustingly approaching you as you shake a bag of kitty treats, before scooping them up in a towel and forcing a buttered pill down their throat? Then they need Princess’s Cat Calendar! Fully customisable with a range of easily-recognisable sad and angry cat icons, Princess’s Cat Calendar ensures that cats need never be in the house on a regularly scheduled medicine night again.

4. Mr. Tibbles’ Patent Litter Reassurer. Does your cat get anxious that they may not have buried their excretions sufficiently? Place Tibbles’ Patent Reassurer near the litter area, and your cat will recieve a stream of comforting messages as they poo and clean up, including 'it’s OK’, 'no predator is ever going to find that’ and 'really, you can stop scratching the wall now, it doesn’t do anything.’ Perfect for the cat who poos outside the box.

5. Godzilla Fishface Jones II’s Outdoors Reboot Button. A highly successful invention that sadly plays on the credulity and poor memory of many cats, the Reboot Button has been widely distributed despite its complete lack of function. Godzilla Fishface Jones II claims that her invention has the power to change the state of the outdoor world to one more amenable to cats, e.g. not raining, less windy, no snow, fewer enemy cats, etc. The cat should simply come in, discreetly hit the reboot button, and then request to go out again. Although this fairly obviously does not work, most cats have too short an attention span to claim their money back or, indeed, notice that the product is not working.

1. There was a man who had a secret. He had always felt it was a very bad secret, and perhaps it was. But he had spent so long trying to avoid it that it was like a heavy stone in his mind that he could steer the waters of his thought around; the consequence being that all his thoughts were twisted round it, but never quite touched it. One day, after many years, he finally turned his thought towards it. But all he found, to his surprise, was a hole. He felt an odd sense of loss, as if he had suddenly been erased from the dictionary. After that, his secret became that he had lost his secret, and his story remained that the secret was too bad to tell.

2. There was a man who told him that no secret was too bad to tell, and then proceeded to tell him four or five things that could perhaps not quite be called secrets any more. And his real secret was that he liked it: all the telling of his vulnerable stories, the rush of it, showing his woundable parts to someone else like an upended snail.

3. There was a woman who comforted him one time, and she told him in reply that she had no secrets and no stories. Her secret, of course, was that this was not at all true. Once, as a child, someone had told her that good girls were smooth, seamless. That they lived lived like unblemished eggs, with no way in, beautiful and without feature. It was hard, very hard. But she built that egg, piece by piece, and sealed everything with awkward edges inside.

4. One time she was talking to a woman who replied in turn that she once found an egg inside an egg; an incredible curiosity. The story was well-honed and came out at parties a lot. Her secret was that it had never happened. She had read about it happening to someone else. She felt that her life was not very interesting. Why not add a little extra wonder, why not live some kind of magic realist life? Once, she told the story to a famous actor, and she later read an interview where he claimed the story as his own. Ever since then she had known a kind of smug kinship.

5. Here was the actor’s other story: when he was a child, he saw seven magpies in a storm, tumbling fighting through the sky across the roofs of the housing estate. And after that he always thought he must have a tremendous secret, waiting and gestating somewhere inside him. But as the years went by he realised that the real secret was that he didn’t have one. What is your secret, a fan would ask. I can’t tell you, he would say. And then he’d tell the magpie story.

6. Here is the fan’s secret. She didn’t want to go to bed with the actor, though she sensed that he might ask her, and that she might even accept. What she wanted was to be him. Under her leather jacket she had his tattoos, and sometimes she went for walks out in the flat fields, under the huge skies of her home lands, with her breasts bound. Twenty, thirty, forty miles. And when she came home she went into shops she didn’t know and imagined she was the actor, incognito.

7. Here is the secret of the shop assistant: she knew. She always knew. Somehow she was very good at knowing, when people came in, the things that they were not going to tell her. At first, she would slip these things into conversation in a smug way. By and by she came to know that most of the customers were not comforted by this, and so she stopped. But one day a man came into the shop and she could not tell his secret at all. It was as if it was missing.

1. What’s in the lorry? The point of this game is to speculate as to the contents of the nearest lorry (excluding those with visible loads). As there is no way of knowing if you are right, no points are awarded.
2. Murder mystery. Someone has committed a murder and is even now in their getaway vehicle, on the road with you! Possibly. Your job is to observe your fellow travellers (either in your vehicle or other vehicles) and deduce the guilty party and the details of the murder.
3. Red car stack. How many red cars can you see in a row? You win that number of points.
4. Traffic news bingo. For this you will need a list of your favourite congestion and accident hotspots and a radio with travel news reports.
5. Apocalypse now. The point of this game is to speculate what would happen if an apocalypse of your favoured type (zombie, massive earthquake, asteroid strike, plague etc.) were to start right at this moment. Where would you go? What would you do? How quickly would the road snarl up? Etc.
6. Make a banana. A banana is when you see a yellow car next to a brown car, or, better yet, several cars of each colour together. Alternatively, you can also score a point if you see an actual banana. Pictures of bananas on lorries count as well. Banana.
7. Roadkill or shipping container. You score a point if you correctly guess what you’re going to see on the road next: a dead animal or a shipping container. Entities already visible at the time of the guess do not count.
8. Where’s the letter Y gone? Participants endeavour to keep a letter Y outside the car visible for as long as possible, primarily by looking at numberplates.
9. Count your toes. A fun game for fans of repetition.
10. Road stories. Pick a passing car whose inhabitants and contents are visible. Where do you think they are going, and for how long? What is that dog in the car thinking about? Why the red canoe? Etc.
11. Lorry driver’s elbow. Next time you go past a lorry, note the size of the driver’s visible elbow. Will the next lorry driver elbow you see be bigger or smaller? Score a point if you are right.
12. Placename stories. Your job is to deliberately misinterpret placenames that you pass to make them into parts of a story (e.g. ‘Maida Vale’ -> 'Made of Ale’; 'Loughton Court’ -> 'Lout un-caught’ etc.). Score one point per un-forced happy ending.

4421 Trees
 -4421.1 Seeds, saplings and young trees
    –4421.11 Those that are unfortunately eaten by squirrels
       —4421.111 Those that eventually grow from a mound of squirrel shit
    –4421.12 Those that have fallen from famous and notorious trees, and as a consequence are spread around the world by seekers of curious souvenirs
    –4421.13 Spindly saplings in deep shade
    –4421.14 Those that grow up plastic poles on the side of new roads
    –4421.15 Those that have found their own good place
 -4421.2 Mature trees
    –4421.21 Those that provide shade in a thunderstorm
        —4421.211 Trees that a thousand teenagers have kissed beneath and carved their names on
    –4421.22 Great old oak trees in the middle of cornfields
    –4421.23 Those that are the joyous haunt of birds
    –4421.24 Those grow at jagged angles on cliffs
 -4421.3 Living trees of great antiquity
    –4421.33 Merged together with treehouses of great complexity
    –4421.33 Those that have fallen into the arms of younger trees
    –4421.34 Those containing a startling array of snails
 -4421.4 Dead trees
    –4421.41 Hollow trunks with great beetle-y cavities within
    –4421.42 Fallen logs
    –4421.43 Carved into statues, poles or similar
    –4421.44 Carved into masks
    –4421.45 As planks and boards
       —4421.451 Treehouses
    –4421.46 As paper and cardboard
       —4421.461 The paper in books about trees
 —-4421.4611 The paper in books about books about trees
 -4421.5 Trees only existing in story, myth or legend
    –4421.51 Those that walk at night
    –4421.52 Those that eat people
    –4421.53 Those that steal books
       —4421.531 Those that steal books to mourn their relatives buried therein
       —4421.532 Those that steal books and casually read them
    –4421.54 Those that have fruit of peculiar potency
 -4421.6 Secret or mysterious trees
    –4421.61 Those that have treasure hidden beneath
    –4421.62 Those containing the hearts of ancient witches
 -4421.7 Trees existing partly or wholly outside our plane of existance
    –4421.71 Trees whose only human-perceptible part is the root
 -4421.8 Trees not covered by the previous categories

1. There was once a small public library in Dorking which had a book that one could get lost in. Many books are said to have this property; however, this book had it to an unusual and somewhat dangerous degree. The average time lost in the book was approximately three days, after which point readers would emerge hungry, thirsty and glad that they had not left the gas on. After a number of deaths were attributed to the volume, it was thrown into a locked strongbox by a courageous librarian and dropped from a ferry into the North Sea. It is not recorded exactly which book it was, though I believe it was shelved with the large print doctor-nurse romance section.
2. In the private library of the Duke of Norfolk, for some years, there existed a set of small, yellow books entitled ‘The Trap, Volumes 1-10’. In this case, the title was entirely appropriate, since the books were engineered to violently snap shut on readers’ fingers. Their origin is unknown, but perhaps was some kind of practical joke. In any case, they no longer exist, having been added to a compost pile in 1872. One of the metal frames was preserved as a curiosity and may be viewed in the library to this day.
3. There was a book once that was banned from a bar at the request of its owner, who was tired of having the book come home mysteriously soaked in gin. It is possible that the book had help in its drinking exploits but if so then the real culprit seems to have gotten off scot-free. I believe this book still exists, but it smells a little and some of the pages are stuck together.
4. A Concise Atlas of Eastern Nevada, 1872. Possibly the world’s most pornographic atlas, owing to the unfortunate habit of its compiler, Fred Carson, of doodling various scenes of copulation in the blanker bits of maps. When challenged in court, Fred claimed that, firstly, doodling in the blank bits is an ancient map-making tradition and, secondly, he only ever drew things he had actually seen occurring at each location. These were not accepted as excuses by the court, which did its level best to eradicate all copies. However, it is believed that some issues still remain in the collections of local connoisseurs of that kind of thing.
5. Sidthorpe’s Comprehensive Encyclopaedia of Moles. Only a hundred copies of this tome were ever printed, the publishers rightly assuming that its audience would be limited. However, something peculiar must have happened during the printing process, because owners of the Comprehensive Encyclopaedia soon began complaining that the book would occasionally open by itself. Worse yet, if nobody was about a small grungy kind of goblin-thing would lean out of the book and unleash a thin stream of goblin-piss onto the nearest flat surface. All copies were pulped at the request of the book’s mortified author, one Mrs. Elizabeth Jane Sidthorpe. In later years she came to believe that the incident was punishment for pissing in a fairy ring as a small child.  

1. There was a time that all the bats of the world and all the owls of the world gathered together, somewhere near Marrakesh. They brought with them a great host of white moths, who covered the trees like snowfall until the moon came up, at which point they all whirled into the sky. I am not entirely sure what the bats and owls intended to do together, but in the event they spent the night eating moths and singing mournful songs part-way out of human hearing.

2. As every time traveller knows, there is an awesome party in the late Cretaceous. Nobody is invited to this one; you have to gatecrash or not go at all. Nobody is entirely sure how it started.

3. There was a night when all the people were asleep, even those who were supposed to be working, though they had particularly vivid dreams. That night, London and New York and Tokyo lifted up their built-up skirts and crawled on hundreds of legs to central Siberia, trailing their metro systems behind them. They drank snowmelt water and whispered some of the secrets of great cities between themselves, before trying each other’s landmarks on. Later, Lhasa and Luanda crashed the party and led the cities in a game or two of ‘I have never’. Two of the cities kissed, but I am not telling you which. Many of you did go to this one, of course. You were just asleep. By morning they were back in place, although they left some curious marks across Greenland if you know where to look.

4. Once all the letters had a party and when they woke up they were totally in your favourite book. Except they were in the wrong places; in places where letters aren’t supposed to be. So they waited until the hour before dawn and then ran off across the floor, and they didn’t stop running until they reached a pile of pizza delivery leaflets, where they were able to assume a disguise as typos.

5. There was that party at Anxiety’s place. You know Anxiety? Great guy, hangs around with Insecurity a lot. Anyway, all your friends were invited! But not you. Don’t worry, nobody noticed at all. Until later on in the evening when your name came up and everyone laughed at your badly-hidden flaws.  

1. When you are no longer interested in the world
2. When the physical body dies
3. When the last person who remembers you dies
4. When the last piece of physical evidence that you lived is gone
5. When the last member of your species dies
6. When no living beings remain in the Universe
7. When the Universe itself comes to an end

1. Open the black bag and place parts A, B and C together. Talk to part D nicely, until it reverts into the recessed position. Parts E and F will be delivered when they are needed; slot them in place behind the lintel.
2. Place against a wall in direct sunlight (Side N1 must be flush against a vertical surface). Fill the reservoir (G) with potable liquid. Clanking noises are normal at this point. If they are disturbing your sleep, a muffling device (H1) is sold separately.
3. Important: once the initial phase has developed, the surface behind the device may become inaccessible. Placement should be chosen with this in mind.
4. Keep the reservoir topped up. On feast days, wine or beer may be appreciated. Make sure to prune any extraneous shoots. Diagram F12 shows the proper orientation of growth and should be consulted frequently. Once growth is well-established, the device may start attracting ladybirds. Wipe them off whenever they become too dense.
5. Keep an eye on the red indicator. When it turns purple, you should be able to open door Q. Don’t step inside just yet.
6. Send off the attached postcard to initiate delivery of pack R and rations S. Although we recommend using only the officially-developed supplies, it is possible to enter the device using your own. In either case, no legal responsibility is taken for what may occur. When you feel ready, open door Q, using torch K for illumination. Bring stout walking boots and a supply of spare batteries.
7. Remember to close grille G1 behind you, and DO NOT open any of the accessory hatches. Good luck!

1. The clouds are low and thick near to the edge of the world, and a determined person may climb up into them and squelch around (although it is very wet up there and there is not much of a view). There are several species of trees that grow upside-down, reaching roots into the air in the hope of snaring a passing cloud.

2. The houses at the edge of the world are low and made of light wood, and when the wind rolls in from the edge they sometimes lift up and float; a stout rope being required to make sure that they do not blow away. They say the people who live there have light bones, like birds, and their skin is very dark.

3. Some days the forests catch all the clouds, and on these days the sun is bright and low and fierce and burning, and the beaches and deserts of the edge-world are a syrupy pinky-gold in the light and too hot to walk on.

3. There are birds who fly out to the edge of the world and keep on going, as if they have set their compass by a distant star. These birds never come back, but fortunately there are enough birds in the world to bear their loss.

4. There is an ancient postal service there which uses trained turtles to carry letters. In theory, I believe, one could send a postcard to the edge of the world and back, although it would need a sequence of addresses to make it though all the postal systems in between.

5. The mountains out there, such as they are, lean away from the edge. They have the appearance of low and worn teeth. Sometimes, when the edge-wind blows particularly strongly, rocks roll up their slopes and launch into the air from their summits.

6. Sometimes the earth creaks on its unnatural axis, out by the edge, and the sound is deafening. Great flocks of tawny gulls rise up from the beaches when this happens, and circle over the edge-waters (which are shallow and fast-running) for a day or more until they feel it is safe to land again.

1. Aethelbert’s Torr. This is a negative tower, that is to say, it reaches down into the earth rather than up into the sky, and it is of great antiquity. It is most often encountered in dreams, in various forms. The most common is the dream-trope of a familiar building with extra structures, in this case the extension of a staircase or lift shaft down into the earth beyond its usual limits. Aethelbert’s Torr is thought to have originally been associated with dreams of barrows and mortuary houses, but has diversified into many other forms over the many years of its existence. However, there generally remains a suggestion that something dead may be in its unusual depths.  
2. The Tower of Dornock’s Drift. This otherwise-unremarkable tower has been noted as standing on cliffs overlooking the sea in several old chronicles. When cross-referenced, however, it is notable that at least ten different cliffs are mentioned; and no tower, or remains, are visible at any of those locations. There also remains a curious account of a hermit at Beachy Head that the tower was seen to rise into the sky on a pillar of flame on New Year’s Eve, but had returned the next day.
3. The Necessity Lighthouse. The necessity lighthouse is an odd enigma. It only appears in moments of uttermost darkness; although some of its features seem to suggests that it was intended to appear to those on states of deep spiritual or emotional trouble, it has only been observed in literal states of lightlessness. Thus those in trouble in caves, shuttered rooms at night, or in some cases out on very cloudly nights have occasionally seen its distant beams. Its appearance has also been reproduced in the laboratory in a specially-designed light-free chamber. There are thus some who hypothesise that the necessity lighthouse is in fact just an illusion caused by the eye’s reaction to complete darkness. Less well known is that the subject of the lighthouse experiment claimed to have been able to approach the lighthouse and walk round it, noting the phrase ‘You can do this’ in purple paint around its lower levels. The subject was not observed to move during the experiment.
4. Many examples of clocks featuring elaborate automata, donated by Western emissaries during the Qing dynasty, may be seen in the hall of Clocks in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Less well-known is the Clockwork Tower, a somewhat over-elaborate but fully-inhabitable mechanical tower with many fascinating automatic features. It is thought to have been a gift from a rather over-enthusiastic Venetian noble in 1760. As well as extending, in a not-at-all-phallic way, from three stories to seven at the push of a button, the clockwork tower was also able to scuttle sideways on ten mechanical legs. Observers described it as looking a little like a top-heavy crab. Unfortunately, one day it managed to scuttle right out of beijing and was never seen again. One assumes it must be hiding out somewhere in the Chinese countryside.

1. Consider a perfectly spherical cow of 1 metre diameter and uniform density. This cow needs milking. How are you going to do it?

2. I am pointing a 15 MW laser at the back of your head right now. No, don’t turn around. I’m not asking you to solve this problem, I’m just suggesting that you do have a problem here and asking you to acknowledge it. I probably won’t turn the laser on.

3. Derive Maxwell’s equations. To do this, you will need to use the fundamental constants pi and c. Note: both of these constants are hungry and one of them needs a wee. Your derivation will probably proceed much more smoothly if you can sort out their needs first.  

4. Consider two trains of mass m speeding towards each other. Train 1 is travelling at 50% of the speed of light, and train 2 at 20% of the speed of light. You are a passenger on train 2. Roughly how much energy will be released when they crash, and don’t you think you’d better find a way to get off before answering this question?

5. You are in a Hollywood film in which Love is postulated as the fifth fundamental force. Derive a plausible extension of the Standard Model of particle physics to include the Love Force, based on its observed effects at a macro level (flushed cheeks, hormonal release, last-minute assignations in airports, etc.).

1. Doris Fnorling-Burteley, 1811 - 1920, is mainly known as the first person to explore Woking. Admittedly many people were there living there first, but this did not stop Doris, whose single-minded devotion to surveying the town resulted in a gorgeous compilation of charts, anthropological studies and illustrative plates known to scholars as the Woking Chronicles. A small plaque near Woking Crematorium celebrates her life and works.
2. Sir Audsley Stephenson, 1820 - 2980 (non-consecutive). Sir Audsley is a curious figure, thought to have been inducted into the secrets of time travel by an inter-temporal jewel thief who he caught and seduced in the act of trying to steal his ancestral opals. Although a keen reader of traveller’s tales, Sir Audsley was an almost obsessive refuser of spatial travel. Some have speculated that he experienced motion sickness of unusual severity. Instead, Air Audsley explored his West London mansion and grounds through time, initial concentrating on a single temporal dimension but subsequently making excursions in several others. Unfortunately, nearly all of his works are classified documents and many are considered too pornographic for general consumption. After his death, a selection of monographs were declassified under the strict understanding that they must not be transported back in time. A small detatchment of the neo-Venusian time police in 3011 was dedicated to shadowing Sir Audsley and his works and eradicating the many paradoxes his careless time travel created.
3. Jane Cook, 1831 - 1871. Mrs. Cook was an otherwise unremarkable Victorian housewife who dedicated her life to exploring maps; that is to say, many hours of her time were spent with a magnifying glass, paper and pencil, obsessively documenting the minute ridges, furrows and flaws across her well-worn map of central York to create a new map at double-scale. Subsequently, she mapped her double-scale map and the resulting quadruple-scale map, returning to this exercise another five times before being crushed by a mound of stray paper at age 40.
4. John ‘Cartophage’ Russell-Johnson, 1837-1920. If his tales are to be believed, John Russell-Johnson single-handedly accomplished many of the greatest feats of exploration of the Victorian era, including navigating the Northwest passage, reaching the North Pole, and the discovery of a lost city in the Amazon rainforest.  Sadly, however, his persistent habit of eating his maps, documents and usually shoes when faced with adversity on the return journey means that no documentation or proof of his exploits is available.

1. Think of a number, any number. Add four, and multiply by two. Subtract six. Divide by two. Subtract the number you started with. Now, what do you end up with?
2. There was a number that was caught in a maze, very like the one just constructed, and had to eat its way out. It was a dangerous process, costing an amateur mathematician three fingers and a chunk of thigh meat.
3. The mathematician was stitched up by a doctor at the tallest hospital in the world, which had just been constructed. It was twice as tall as any other building in the world, and one could look down from its upper floors at clouds passing by. All the staff at the hospital were new and none of them knew their way around.
4. The doctor got lost on his way home and had to sleep in a broom cupboard in the kidney department. He had a dream about being served a meal of purple food by a mysterious veiled woman. It would have been such a good dream, if only boiled beets, candied violets, red cabbage, blackcurrants, roast aubergines and plums had had some kind of joint flavour affinity.
5. The woman closed the door of the dream and took off her veil. Then she poled her boat along the river to the next dream she was contracted to appear in and put on a great cloak of peacock feathers. It was a dream for an aging judge, who was to be bent double in a box and whispered to.
6. The judge, however, was late for her dream, because it was snowing that night and the traffic around London had tied itself into a historic knot. It was the sort of knot that one gets in sewing thread, requiring only gentle pulling (or in this case, the movement of a single, unremarkable car) to undo. But nobody had the wider perspective to see this, so it remained in place all night until a squadron of police officers painstakingly cut and unravelled the thread elsewhere.  
7. The road’s four lanes became a silent, black-and-white maze of snowy vehicles, navigated by blanket-wrapped figures. The driver of the car at the heart of the knot spent the night with twenty other drivers who had decamped to a nearby lorry with a heating system. They played cards all night and thought up increasingly ridiculous terms for snow. Hey, said the lorry driver, as dawn began to break. Think of a number.

0092 Geometry of food
  -0092.1 Simple blob forms
    –0092.11 Spherical
      —0092.111 Meatballs
      —0092.111 Berries
        —-0092.1131 Edible
        —-0092.1131 Used to poison the diner
      —0092.113 Assorted spherical items of gastrowankery
        —-0092.1131 Pearls
        —-0092.1131 Ravioles
        —-0092.1131 Spherical plates which have to be broken to access the food
        —-0092.1131 Room-size sugar spheres in which the diner is imprisoned
    –0092.42 One long dimension, two short
      —0092.421 Sausages
      —0092.422 Eggs
      —0092.423 Chips
      —0092.424 Beans
    –0092.43 Two long dimensions, one short
      —0092.431 Burgers
    –0092.44 Other
      —0092.441 Deliberately contrary meat products
  -0092.2 Triangular forms
    –0092.21 Sandwiches
    –0092.22 Triangular eggs
    –0092.23 Other food shaped into triangles, for the dedicated and persistent eater of triangles
  -0092.3 Square, rectangular and cuboid forms
    –0092.31 Sandwiches (unsliced)
    –0092.32 Custard creams and similar biscuits
    –0092.33 Melons that have been grown in glass cubes
    –0092.33 Fudge, gajar halwa, flapjack and other sliced things
  -0092.4 Food of irregular shape
    –0092.41 Steak
    –0092.42 Broccoli
    –0092.42 Other
  -0092.5 Food of uncertain or amorphous shape
    –0092.51 Jelly
    –0092.52 Mists and foams
       —0092.521 Indistinguishable from actual weather
  -0092.6 Complex or architectural shapes
    –0092.61 Food sculptures
       —0092.611 Little people made of butter
       —0092.612 Little people made of sugar
          —0092.6121 Perched awkwardly on top of cakes
    –0092.62 3D printed forms
    –0092.63 Edible chairs
    –0092.63 Edible hats

1. The smell of rain on warm stone.
2. Dappled sunlight.
3. The brief buzz of a bee going past.
4. That one can be too warm.
5. The rustle of wind through new leaves.
6. The sudden burst of smell as one passes a sun-warmed herb bush.
7. Drifts of cherry blossom blowing across car parks.
8. Distant constellations of birdsong in the hour before dawn.

1. There was a letter d, and it was entirely bored of being the final letter in the word ‘and’ in a rather miscellaneous sentence. So one day it swivelled its serifs by ninety degrees and tunnelled out of the book. The hard covers caused it some problems, but finally it was able to slip out from under them and drop silently to the floor of the library. Letters move slowly, and it was two hundred years since it had started to burrow. That is why more letters do not escape. Two days later, a maid left the window open to air out the room and the letter d was blown into the garden, where it stuck to some clover and later mated with a bee. I mention this story merely because, should you encounter an unusual bee or two in Shropshire, it may explain matters.
2. The letter y at the end of Aleister Crowley’s name had become entirely suffused with wickedness during his lifetime, wickedness being the sort of thing that sloshes through a name and gathers in great gloopy puddles at the far end. After his death, it devoured the other letters and became enormously fat. Indeed it was hardly recognisable as a letter y and no font would accept it. Instead, it started its own font which consisted entirely of the letter y; having charmed a number of upper-case Y’s who it persuaded to join. If you should find a book set in this font, I recommend closing it and stepping away carefully.
3. There is a place in a distant galaxy, right in its star-dense heart, where one can look up and see a perfect letter Q written in stars across the sky. It is what is known as an asterism, or stars that are unrelated save that they happen to line up. And no being who has anything like a concept of the letter Q has ever lived in that galaxy. Nevertheless, it is there.  
4. There is a kind of a viral bug that can be passed between different instances of the letter e. It gives affected letters the raging shits which, since letter turds are often mistaken for full stops, is not always noticeable to the careless reader. One may discern an affected sentence, paragraph or book by its apparent overuse of ellipsis.
5. In particularly severe infestations, the letters may crap on the line below like gastroenteritical birds on a wire, leaving smears down the page. These types of outbreak may be identified by their apparent overuse of exclamation marks.
6. There was a king whose ambition was to be a letter, and he thought maybe it would be a letter x. In later years he slept in a hollow in a huge book, which three servants would close over him at dusk. As a result, when the revolution came, he was quite hidden. A rather more equitable form of government was installed and the king’s book ended up in the national library, where the ex-monarch survived on bookworm corpses and by inserting a surreptitious straw from his book’s breathing holes into the discarded coffee cups of the adventurous browsers who came that deep. For some reason, nobody ever opened the book.  
7. There was a letter q that was known for its bad temper. No other letter would come near it. It often found itself confined to the margins of books, scowling and grumbling at stray punctuation marks. One day a book burned down and, unaccountably, the letter u grabbed the letter q between its uprights and hauled it to safety. After that day, that letter q was a much more trusting beast and could often be persuaded to curl up and sleep next to other letters, whereupon it was often mistaken for a letter o. Whilst I would like this to be the reason that q is often found next to u, it is not. In fact, that particular letter q was always rather shy about approaching any letter u thereafter.
8. There was a letter g that swallowed its own tail by mistake, leading to a hole in the page that led nowhere in particular. This was a godsend to the local research institute, which was chock-full of experts in nowhere in particular. They sent a number of tiny probes into the hole and wrote sixteen research papers which were all published in prestigious journals. Later, the tiny probes wrote their own paper but, since none of them had a research track record, they had trouble getting it accepted.  
9. There is a font which is entirely unexceptional, except that the letter o is represented by the rings of the planet Saturn, available only at actual size. As a result, only one letter o is settable in this font at any one time, and even this is rather impractical to use. In consequence, most users omit the letter o from their correspondence.

Ptork P. Snang, Penelope Sudo-Nimming, Lady Esperanza Buttocks, Sir Themistocles Zammit, Blackbird Beasley, Cornelius Q. Face the Third, Professor Flora Maria Pausewang, Robert Robert Robert, John Twice-Toast Smith, Ellifer Pingnose, Helen Wellington Kenno-Lost, Spamanda Andara, Jay the Pickle Caperque, Lara Fellowes-Driftwood, Timebob Snorres, Alice Quack.

[NB. Two of these are actual real notable people who have stuff named after them]

1. On the left breast, you will see a large and obvious patch where a scale appears to be missing. This is a stick-on decoy patch designed to draw the efforts of dragon slayers away from the dragon’s other vulnerable points. Most dragons wear them these days. You will notice if I peel it back that the scales underneath it are completely intact.
2. You’ll also notice some gold marks on the belly. These are exactly what you’d expect. This dragon has spent some time sleeping on a hoard, likely of gold of relatively high purity and softness. Over time, pieces of gold have rubbed off on the belly surface as she’s rolled over or crawled back and forth. Don’t touch!
3. I believe these symmetrical scratches down both sides of the belly are probably mating marks, likely in the dominant position.
4. There are also some scratches on the upper sides, here. These look like rock scratches and probably indicate that the dragon has spent time living in a cave. They may also indicate that she has grown since first occupying the cave and may be looking to expand it.  
5. There is a scar of some kind extending down from the right wing base, possibly the result of a juvenile crash.
6. These scales here are a slightly yellower shade than the rest. I think this is a birthmark of some kind.
7. The dots, as you might expect, are arrow marks. Dragons get shot at a great deal.
8. This sticky stain on the top of the belly is probably custard. Dragons are notoriously fond of custard, and there have been a number of suspicious torchings of custard facilities recently. Note also the matching stains down the neck and left jaw.
9. If you look over there, under the left front leg, you can see a couple of pickaxes. It looks like someone (or several someones?) crossed the boundary between bravery and foolishness. As we might be said to be doing, of course.  
10. These faint scratches on the left side are actually the dragon equivalent of a tattoo. They show more conspicuously in the ultraviolet; this would be quite bright in dragon vision, whereas we are barely able to see it. Note also that what we can see appears to be crossed out. Maybe the dragon equivalent of a regrettable tattoo?
11. The small button-like protuberance at the right breast - see here? - is a flaw cover. Yes, dragons do in fact usually have a real flaw in their belly scales. In fact, a good flaw is often a kind of status symbol. No self-respecting dragon would venture near humans without covering it up with some kind of armour, though. This cover is actually harder than the dragon’s own scales.  
12. There is a small left-side white scar down here - can you see? This is likely a surgical mark. You will notice it’s almost directly above the dragon’s fire bladder, which is highly susceptible to infection and to the formation of cinder stones. Most probably this was for stone removal, which most dragons will have to get done at some point.
13. The ruby just below the base of the tail is probably deliberate and decorative, although it could be from hoard-sleeping again. May I remind you - DO NOT touch.
14. I think the purple smear down there is probably some kind of paint. They do have festivals, up in the Northern mountains. Of course humans who see them don’t tend to come back.
15. As you will notice, ladies and gentlemen, we are not in a custard factory but in a whisky distillery. And I believe the most recent stain here is from a large splash of whisky. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it will not have escaped your notice that a dragon in a distillery is a highly explosive situation. Nevertheless, I believe we have all learned something here today. It’s not often that one gets this close. Now let’s let her sleep it off, and retire to a safe distance. 

1. Snunder. Despite the name, snunder is not a type of thunder but rather a type of rain. It occurs in places that have been subject to some act of public high drama or tragedy and can most easily be distinguished from normal rain by its slightly thicker, stickier texture and its salty taste. It is derived from the spectral mucous of sobbing ghosts. Ghosts are often particularly sentimental, and those ghosts that have no limitations on their travel in space often gather at sites that mean something to them. Note: this is not the gentle drizzle derived from the decorous crying of melancholy phantoms, which can hardly be distinguished from sea-spray. Snunder only occurs in places where sad ghosts are really going for it. Since some ghosts can also travel in time, the unexpected arrival of snunder can also mean that some public tragedy is about to occur; for example, it is rumoured that Princess Diana’s 1997 death in Paris was presaged by a particularly sticky snunder rain.

2. Avioplop. This is the theoretical rainfall that would occur if a sufficiently dense cloud of aircraft above a city all voided their toilet waste at the same time. Needless to say, a rain of avioplop is not a particularly welcome event. Some projections of future aviation demand which have not thought through their premises particularly well suggest that, by 2300, most major conurbations will be subject to avioplop. Little do they know that by 2300 27% of passengers, via a combination of genetic engineering and advanced physics, will have no bladders but instead void directly into a small one-way portal into deep space. Aircraft toilet demand will therefore be significantly reduced and only very flight-dense regions, such as the airspace above Beijing, will be at risk of it.

3. Gin rain. There have in fact been three documented gin rains, as far as we can work out. The first, in rural Texas in 1873, led to a scandalous episode of widespread intoxication. The second and third gin rains occurred in Lusaka in 1950 and in Archangelsk in 2005; less information is available about them. Gin rains are not more widely reported because for some reason governments seem particularly interested in hushing them up. Why governments should be interested in what we assume are the failures of experimental methods of gin production is beyond us. Maybe we should expect the advent of weaponised gin at arms fairs at some point.