Listing to Port

1. So it all started at the local shop. You know the sort of thing. Stacking shelves and stuff. Complicated by the fact that payroll had messed up my contract so thoroughly that I ended up paying the top rate of tax, child support to a fifteenth cousin in the Shetland Isles and interest payments towards an outstanding parking fine incurred in 1875 near my place of birth. So my take-home pay was 1p. It is OK to discuss pay, isn’t it? Modern age and all that. Fortunately that was in the days when 1p sweets existed, so at least I got to go home with a banana duck once in a while. Anyway, one of our customers used to hand over his cash with his fingers twisted up like this, and one day I was a bit bored so I did the same thing back, and he said how surprised he was to meet a fellow Hughes-Fotherwell alumnus here, and did I need a better job?
2. So of course I said yes, and the next thing I know I’m up at the big house buffing the crockery. Serious crockery. I mean, I’d never used a butter dish before. And this guy has, like, a scallop turntable and I have to know how to get the sauce out. Polish the camembert crank. Pre-stretch the celery flange. Grease the cocktail slide. Then one day I put two fingers in his asparagus launcher. Bad idea. There was going to be a lawsuit, but word got out that International Crockery Magazine was sending a correspondent to smear both sides and nobody had the heart to continue after that.
3. Needless to say, I wasn’t sold on going back to domestic service. There was a bit of a payoff after the crockery incident, so I used it to set up a small business as an importer of banana ducks. Branched out into duck bananas after a while - confit duck in a crisp banana-shaped sugar shell, since you ask. Only my duck supplier was problematic. Eventually I got on the ferry to go and see what was up, and it turned out the ducks had revolted. Which obviously put a dent in my supply chain. Anyhow, the ducks tied me to an enormous slice of bread and floated me out on this lake full of ravenous gulls and geese and swans and emus and whatnot.
4. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing. Under the influence of sheer terror, I managed to paddle and hump that bread all the way to the Canal du Midi and thence out to sea. There I bumped into some pirates who had been shipwrecked. They were pretty glad to get bread, I can tell you, even if it was a bit soggy. Offered me a job straight away. But I couldn’t countenance a life of crime. After some discussion, we rebranded as providers of piracy experiences instead. You know the sort of thing - jump on board the yachts of the super-rich with your eyepatch on, sing a few Gilbert and Sullivan numbers and send a hat around. I made some fascinating contacts and nearly nobody tried to kill me. Started hiring myself out as a consultant in adventure, but it wasn’t really a secure profession. I remember telling this guy on this giant purple yacht about this and he said he could sort something.
5. It must have worked because the next thing I know I was being headhunted by a NASA subcontractor for a mission to Mars. Literally headhunted - they just wanted the head. They had this system, see, you plop the head in, tiny little rocket which doesn’t need much fuel, sleep until Mars and then pootle around in this little rover with spider legs. Obviously wouldn’t go down too well with the public so there was a cover story. The main camera was going to be broken. Helmetcam pictures only, head shots, all rockets filmed from long distance. They thought the camera thing might become a meme. They’d even invested in an app that did helmetcam-style pictures with a red filter: ‘Nancycam’. I was going to be called Nancy for this project, you see, after Nancy Reagan. Anyhow, they hadn’t quite got ethical approval yet but they were pretty sure about it. So there I was on the operating table, knife poised, when there was a power cut. Kind of lucky, because by the time the electric company got it sorted word had come down from on high that they wanted a nice white space dude with a little bit of stubble and could we see his hands too. So I was out of a job again.  
6. I was a bit off the idea of government agencies by then. Thought I’d go for academia instead. Obviously a bit challenging with my employment history but I put in a few speculative applications to see if I could wing it and lo and behold, I got an interview for the new Professorship of Bollocks at the University of West Wittering. Totally truthful at the interview and they didn’t believe a word of it. So of course they offered me the post straight away. Only thing was, someone had made a terrible mistake. It was actually a Professorship of real bollocks. Sponsored by a major dog company. They wanted to make a brand of treat biscuits with a testicle-licking sort of taste for the discerning canine bachelor. So I spent three months supervising students swabbing dog balls. Bit disappointing. I decided it was time to move on.  
7. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve tried all the other options, more or less, and they don’t work for me. You will not have a more loyal library assistant. Seriously. Also, I can get the library a great deal on banana ducks.

9077 Systems of Government
 -9077.1 Government by random people
    –9077.11 Those whose parents also did the governing
       —9077.111 Somehow the populace are on board with this
    –9077.12 Those who have been appointed by some mystical authority
    –9077.13 Those who just sort of wandered in and started governing
 -9077.2 Government by whoever is best at shooting people
 -9077.3 Government by people who were actually voted for
    –9077.31 People who were voted for once and have managed to turn this into a perpetual mandate
    –9077.32 People who were voted for under a one party official, ten thousand votes system
    –9077.33 People who were voted for entirely legitimately on the basis of policies aimed at making the next electoral term awesome at the expense of the entire rest of the future
    –9077.34 People who were voted for entirely legitimately on the basis of policies aimed at making life awesome for the small number of people who bothered or were able to vote, at the expense of everyone else
    –9077.35 Governments genuinely interested in optimising welfare
       —9077.351 Engaged in perpetual arguments about the definition of optimising and the components of welfare
 -9077.4 Government by perpetual crisis
    –9077.41 In which democracy will totally be resumed as soon as the crisis is over
    –9077.42 In which democracy is still in place, but who would trust a country in crisis to those other people?
    –9077.43 In which the timing and winner of elections is largely governed by who has been impeached most recently
 -9077.5 Government by those who did a revolution
    –9077.51 In which democracy will totally be resumed after we’ve finished renaming streets, airports and cocktails after the date, heroes and symbols of the revolution
 -9077.6 Government by those who have the most stuff
    –9077.61 Additionally optimised towards making sure that more stuff goes to people who already have a lot of stuff
 -9077.7 Evanescent government by the beautiful and doomed
 -9077.8 Government by cats

Down the back of the sofa, in the attic, behind the radiator, in your other trousers, should we get the cat x-rayed, it’s stuck to the ceiling, under the sofa, was it real to start with or just a concept, did you eat it, did I eat it, left it at the shops, it’s inside the big bag of other bags, disintegrated into dust, in the undergrowth, in the toilet, under your hat, it’s where you left it, you’ll find out when the postcard arrives, let’s retrace our route, in the fruit bowl, where the ransom note says it is, try your coat pocket, behind the bookcase, in your suitcase, in the baby, stolen, sold it, you’re holding it, in the freezer, behind the cheese, have you seen youtube it’s now in Greece, look in the first place you looked again, have you tried phoning it, it’s behind your ear.

1. Morning cup of coffee was slightly purple, wasted eleven minutes in futile investigation why.
2. Struck suddenly immobile by the beauty and wonder and terror of the world upon the first glimpse of spring trees in the sunlight, being only brought back to reality by distant birdsong some time later.
3. There was that closed door that you always walked past on the way here, the small black one, and today someone slipped out of it and you realised from the smoke and flames and the pitchfork that fell out that it was actually a door into hell, and you felt the need to inform the police that there was a door into hell on their local beat, and the nice gentleman on the phone did not seem to be taking the peril seriously so you had to argue for a while and that’s why you’re late.
4. Very realistic dream about getting here on time interrupted by alarm clock. Resulting false sense of security led to insufficient hurrying.
5. Delayed train.
6. After much study, you have determined that twelve minutes were mysteriously omitted from 1387, possibly the fault of the Cathars. Not many people know this. Have decided to stick to the correct calendar, i.e. with the twelve minutes added.
7. No excuse given, other than mysterious look.
8. Oh god, the fish!
9. Morning toast unexpectedly turned into a council of war with the Butter People, necessitating the making of more toast spread only with marmalade.
10. On the way here spotted a pair of capybaras having tea down a back alley. Had to investigate. Discovered a capybara cafe. Amazing! Here’s the address, you should try it.
11. Overslept.
12. Catastrophic dislocation in time leading to three frantic years attempting to get back to the present day while being chased throughout the ages by an irate crustacean named Jim. However, your sense of obligation to the current appointment was sufficiently strong that you managed to make it back here within twelve minutes of the scheduled time despite the personal and societal costs of doing so, including the impending consequences of selling your grandparents to mountain pirates in Laos, the introduction of a cocoa-destroying virus to Patagonia in 1200 likely leading to the elimination of chocolate from the world, and the notification of three alien species to the existence of Earth in the 21st century as a source of dental supplies. Nice to meet you, can I have a chocolate before they cease to exist?

Ranked in order of satisfactoriness
10. The crackly paper one finds filling the spaces within exceptionally large boxes which have been used to deliver much smaller items.
9. The scratchy, non-absorbent material, vaguely reminiscent of grease-proof paper, which was provided in British schools in the 1980’s for the wiping of the arse; to be stolen from a museum of historical bogroll, a vague and rambling ransom note being left in its place.
8. A page from any one of the ten billion sequential catalogues delivered to the door after the one-off purchase of a small item from the catalogue website; particularly if there is seemingly no way to cancel them.
7. An origami crane constructed from one of the many free newspapers remaining in the final carriage of a subway train in some major city, after it reaches the end of the line.
6. A slice of hand-slapped rye bread, served on a flat slab with some pate in a flowerpot.
5. The enormously expensive prototype version of a bendy, flexible and absorbent smartphone, to be launched in 2017 with great fanfare by some technology giant or other.
4. An artisanal, chemical-free, vitamin-enriched, nourishing washcloth, woven to an ancient pattern by Yorkshire peasants using flax and yak fluff from officially certified International Bathing Society sources, to be purchased from a high-end supermarket.
3. Rabelais’ list of things to wipe the arse with, printed on soft, absorbent paper by some online printing service or other.
2. A cloth woven from the fur of an outrageously cute kitten, the event itself being memorialised on the internet under the headline ‘This tiny kitten had all its fur cut off… what happened next will astonish you!’.
1. The silk sleeve of a billionaire’s slightly stained pyjamas, extracted from a London penthouse in the dead hours of the afternoon by a crack team of trained pigeons, said pigeons having also extracted a gold-plated bog-brush and a traumatised pug, leaving only a smattering of pieon-shit in their wake.

1. There was a Roman trading vessel that became gloriously, giddily lost; lost enough that it rounded Cape Bojador by accident and set off down the African coast in the vain hope of finding some sort of channel that would lead it home. Many of the crew jumped ship near what is now the border between Angola and Namibia. Those remaining, seized with a kind of wrong-headed fervour, sailed the ship on a direct course for Antarctica. Improbably, they made it; the ship froze tight in the Antarctic pack ice and, owing to the vagaries of the local currents, drifted until it was wedged between an ice flow coming down from the continent and a small island. In short order it was completely entombed in ice. The hold was full of clay jars of garum, which shattered by and by. A small, salty under-ice lake of garum formed, complete with its own garum ecosystem. Over time, things evolved there that had never been seen anywhere else. These days one may find the location by a small brown stain in the ice, if one knows where to look. Eventually the glacier will spit the ship out again into the unwelcoming sea, and the seals, all unknowing, will have a Roman banquet.  
2. There was a bus that began its service somewhere on the Atlantic coast of France; perhaps it was La Rochelle, I am not quite sure. Eventually it was sold a number of times, always to the East. It was if it had acquired a kind if travelling destiny. Purchasers began noticing and passing on this information, in initially flippant tones: you might want to keep this bus for a year and then sell it Eastwards, because that’s what all the other owners have done. It was seen in Vienna, then Bucharest, then Krasnodar; it spent a couple of years in the service of a private owner near Samarkand. Eventually the bus, which was increasingly decrepit, found itself operating a shuttle service between the small towns East of Vladivostok, right against Russia’s Pacific coast. Someone had painted the bus’s destiny in large cyrillic letters on the side: This Bus Goes East. But by this time no-one wanted to buy it, East or West. The owners, taking a kind of pity on the bus, drove it to a remote sea cliff, set their backs to the East, and pushed it off to finish its journey on its own. However, being a bus and not a living creature, it sank. I believe, however, that it has become a habitat for a number of fascinating sea stars.
3. There was an aeroplane that was bought by the lesser sort of billionaire, and he did not have any real use for it other than as a status symbol. Shortly after its purchase, indeed, he took his billions and retired to a small Caribbean island, where he mostly stayed inside and received massages. After a few years of this the billionaire developed extremely squidgy muscles and as a result became quite unhinged. Observing that massages are uncomfortable when one has sunburn, he set the aircraft to circling round the island with the hope of drumming up extra cloud cover, or at least a contrail or two. Eventually, he ordered the aircraft to stay up a little too long and it ran out of fuel and crashed. The records were falsified, of course; the paper trail leads to an empty spot in the Arizona desert. Some say that this has happened more than once, and that there is an island with a reef of dead aircraft around it, an island with a perpetual exhaust haze and the lingering smell of Jet A. These people are probably masseurs and you should give them an extra-large tip.
4. It is a little-known fact that there were dinosaurs who sent a probe into space; unfortunately, being a tiny nation obsessed with recycling, reusing and generally cleaning up after themselves, they left no fossils or anything else that could trouble the theories of palaeontologists. Indeed, the probe is all that remains. The cleanliness-obsessed dinosaurs invested its design with near-endless reusability. Eventually, after a good explore, it came to rest on Mars. From Mars, it watched the Earth convulse in the aftermath of a meteor strike; from Mars, it heard the last communication from its masters; and thereafter, from Mars, it sat and observed the silent Earth. Occasionally it slept for a few thousand years, or trundled about to find suitable minerals to mine to replace its aging components. I think at the moment it may be sleeping. Who knows what it will find when it wakes?

1. Gravity is a lie, a pernicious myth brought on by eating too many bad apples. The real reason the river flows to the sea is far more complex and more interesting. This is how it happens: there is a rumour among the dead that they can be set free by a Word. Perhaps the Word is the name of God, or a concept so large that all other concepts are knocked loose, perhaps only a sequence that undoes the lazy electricity of ghost-thoughts through the air. It is not a word that anyone knows as yet, but after all there are only so many words that can ever exist. The flow of water is a numerological experiment on a grand scale. If you could but see them! The billion ghosts of the world, hunched over the water with their fingers clicking out permutations, hastening the water down to its final end, where the long slow voice of the sea speaks the litany of discovered words out loud.  
2. In a way, it is odd that they do this. You see, mathematics is a lie, a lullaby of a clockwork cosmos sung to soothe our sleeping fears. The Knights Templar knew something of this in their mysteries, though it was never spoken aloud. Maybe it is just that ghosts have spent too long sleeping. In any case the ocean cannot speak. The tragedy of the ocean is that its thoughts cannot be expressed; and if it could it would have no equal to express them to. The only thing the ocean can do is a kind of wordless singing. But the songs of the ocean are outside human hearing. Sometimes, when the sun is bright, one may see them rising up like white wisps of mist from the water’s surface.
3. There is a great conspiracy that says that matter can change, and those who have this disease say that it is not songs at all, but water made into air. It is a rumour spread by physicists and fools. They say that clouds are water grown thick in the air. If they had but seen the clouds! As civilisations age, they become lighter, until they rise up from the earth. The clouds are the homes of the ones who came before us, but be sure that they will close the shutters when we come poking around in realms we are not supposed to be. The ones who came before them live in the moon, and it may be that they themselves have elders in the sun.
4. Biology too is full of lies, lies that slither though the ears and nestle, sated with the enormity of their deception, in the nether chambers of the heart. For be sure, there are beings that we cannot see. Beings that live at ninety degrees to humanity. Maybe we put them there with some accursed alchemy or other in the distant distant past. But being wedged at such an angle across reality, they cannot rise as the ones who came before have done; and that is why they cry when clouds pass over. There are those who can taste the bitterness of the rain, and perhaps they are the ones who come closest to knowing the plight of the displaced.
5. Alchemy is a lie, of course. It is a lie with stained fingers, which is both the best and worst kind. The ghosts of the world know this. And as time goes past and swells the ranks of the dead, the harder they work at shepherding the bitter waters down towards their great and futile engines of computation and the faster the rivers flow. The displaced watch them, and maybe they cry harder too. It is not hard to cry at the futility of the world and its great knit fabric, its mysteries and myths and conspiracies, and all of them lies.

1. Romeo and Juliet’s melancholy ghosts wandered blank-eyed and mystified through Verona until the twelfth day after their deaths, each believing themselves alone. Then a sudden shock of recognition flowed over the city as they passed through each other in the marketplace. For the next few days, the city lay sweating at night in spectral joy. The ghosts of Italy, swept up in a wave of theatrical passion, flocked to the city to fuck against the walls of their enemies and drift, sated, through their wine vats. Then Juliet’s ghost realised that Romeo’s ghost was not actually in love with her, but only with the idea of the ghost of the mystery of her; and Romeo’s ghost realised that Juliet’s ghost still picked her nose even though she was no longer capable of making snot, and was a little too fond of haunting the bedrooms of long-haired musicians; and each of them realised that the other was kind of annoying. Italy’s susceptible ghosts responded by initiating mystical punch-ups in the street and slapping dinner from tables in front of the mystified living. The season of spectral pugilism lasted for more than a month and made the city almost uninhabitable. Then Juliet’s ghost came to some agreement with the visiting phantoms of Rabelais and Chaucer, who had sensed that something literary was going on, and floated off in search of a different story. Romeo’s ghost subsequently took up with a succession of other deceased ladies. I believe that he currently haunts the toilet of a bar in Chievo, where he interrupts patrons mid-shit to grumble to them about women.
2. Chiron and Demetrius came to (in the spectral sense) in the remains of the pie that they had been baked in. Having gained some unusually intimate insights into pie and its construction, they became famed far and wide in the world of ghosts as pie experts. If one wished to haunt a pie, particularly if it was a large pie, they were the ghosts to consult.  If one wished to make a pie, they maintained a team of poltergeists to move ingredients around and light fires in the middle of the night. They are believed to be nearly entirely responsible for the season of hauntings in 1620 - 1670 which led to a sharp but temporary decline in the popularity of pie among the living. Subsequently, seeking new challenges, they moved on to haunting small pastries. These days they are often involved, when they can be raised (for they are rather old and sluggish ghosts by now) in making canapes of various sorts seem uncanny.
3. As is now well known, the ghost of Richard III ended up haunting a car park in Leicester. He was able to gain a small measure of satisfaction by manipulating susceptible drivers into clipping each other’s wing-mirrors and lying about it, but it is probably fair to say he was never truly happy about it.
4. The ghost of Othello stood pointedly in Iago’s cell, tapping his feet, until Iago was executed. Subsequently, Iago’s ghost woke to the sensation of being punched into the middle of next week. Thereafter Othello’s ghost and Iago’s ghost were separated by approximately half a week and so Othello was unable to complete his revenge. However, Iago’s ghost was plagued by nearly unendurable deja vu following his temporal dislocation and he ended up quite unable to plot any further villainy. Instead, he floats around Venice’s canals with only his nose above the water level, whimpering.
5. Hamlet’s ghost woke to find Fortinbras in charge. Having now been definitively usurped, he was not at all happy. He entered into a period of intensive vacillation, choosing a room in one of the castle towers for this purpose. The room became famous because one could not enter it without emerging, some hours later, with a vague sense that one had spent a lot of time overthinking something and failing to come to a conclusion. Several hundred years later, he emerged with a resolute look in his eye. His subsequent attempts to drop a sword on Fortinbras’s latest descendent all failed, however, as he was completely unable to interact with solid objects. In great frustration he hired Chiron and Demetrius to bake him into a pie which was served at the royal table, with the hope of thus investing the entire royal line of Denmark with extreme difficulty in making decisions. Unfortunately the pie was flipped out of the kitchen window by a careless poltergeist and eaten by dogs. The dogs of Elsinore are, to this day, unusually indecisive.

7099 Things beneath the surface of the Earth

-7099.1 Caves and their inhabitants

   –7099.11 The sandy-bottomed caves of containable peril and their gentle, bucolic tour guides

   –7099.12 Sea caves that are full of old stories washed smooth and round

   –7099.13 Those caves that have hidden depths

   –7099.14 Caves that draw you in with the siren song of one more crystalline chamber or cathedral arch or echoing shaft or treasure chest or sheaf of crumbling paper, the call of the ancient and unseen, and they never quite deliver but just enough to keep you going back and back and back and back again, and the cave sits at the back of your dreams, working your subconscious like a machine to find new ways to corkscrew round that final obstruction, and it whispers that you will die there and somehow this does not seem so bad

   –7099.15 Pale beings with wormlike fingers, counting up time with their heartbeats until they can come up

   –7099.16 It’s just a cave you guys of course we can sleep here tonight what’s the worst that could happen?

-7099.2 Basements, cellars and holes and their inhabitants.

   –7099.21 Dingy and depressing flats

   –7099.22 The secret basements of billionaires

   –7099.23 Nuclear bunkers

-7099.3 Tunnels for human use

   –7099.31 Subway systems

-7099.3 Tunnels for animal use

   –7099.31 Lairs, dens and suchlike

   –7099.32 Things that look like caves but are actually unusually large gullets

   –7099.33 Things that look like caves but are actually unusually large orifices (non-gullet)

-7099.4 Tunnels for the use of eldritch beasts

   –7099.41 Those that run beneath Washington D.C.

-7099.5 Underground lakes

   –7099.51 Those that glow with a sinister light

   –7099.52 Those into which you have just dropped your camera

-7099.6 Buried items

   –7099.61 Alive

   –7099.62 Dead

   –7099.63 Schrodinger’s zombie and its fascinating friends

   –7099.64 Treasure

   –7099.65 Cheese and butter

-7099.7 Magma and suchlike

   –7099.71 The stuff at the very centre of the Earth

1. Three mice who live in a postbox, eating postcards and scrawling ‘return to sender’ in blue biro on letters whose handwriting they dislike.

2. A mouse buzzing with conspiracy theories, lives in a distillery, puts on a tiny diving suit at night to delve into the vats where she believes some great secret is held. When the distillery office is closed she wriggles under the door and logs on to gmail to send long screeds in CAPITAL LETTERS to anyone with a likely e-mail address.

3. Some number of laboratory mice, perhaps fifty, who have, by dint of peering out of their cages at nearby computer screens, taught themselves a certain amount of biology and statistics. These mice have formed a small society, dedicated to gaming the results of mouse-based experiments; they send round tiny circulars full of instructions, such as 'turn LEFT then RIGHT then RIGHT again in the maze’, or 'wait TEN minutes, then press the button TWICE and look disappointed’. Everything is memorised and then eaten. They are believed to be the true architects beneath at least twenty peer-reviewed papers.

4. The mouse who ate Wales one night, but had fortunately left full instructions such that it could be reconstructed by the morning with most of the mountains in the right place.

5. The mouse that lived under the cat’s bowl for a giddy, perilous few weeks, emerging through a small hole at night to gorge on cat food whilst the cat slept on the bed.

6. Shakespeare’s pet mouse, name unknown. It is believed that this mouse was personally responsible for the majority of 'Two Gentlemen of Verona’. The effort required in committing pen to paper (primarily at night when the bard was asleep) so tired the mouse that he slept for more than three hundred years, before briefly waking to contribute three pages to 'Under Milk Wood’. I believe he is now asleep in a willow bower somewhere North of Wenlock Edge. He will probably not write for you, so don’t try it.

7. There was a mouse who got an exceptionally high score in Tetris, largely by wriggling under the blocks as they fell to flip them over at the last moment.

8. Twenty-nine mice who, by dint of forming a large pyramid, were able to operate a monster truck; this having been their dream for some time and their reason for becoming so proficient at mouse acrobatics. Sadly the truck was soon retrieved by the police. These mice have now moved on to a flight training school, where they peer myopically from loose simulator panels and formulate exotic dreams.

9. Two hundred and forty mice in the vicinity of Bangor, Maine, who meet on Thursdays to eat butter and refine their Theory of Everything. These mice have had exceptional trouble in keeping up with the scientific literature, but are occasionally able to get printouts of papers through the post from a rogue capybara in Peru. It is a frustrating life. Certain of their number tried travelling to Harvard to attempt to sneak into conferences, but after an incident in which three mice got overexcited and tried to punch a Professor who they felt had made inappropriate remarks about the cosmological constant, they have largely kept to their own little thicket in the woods.

1. The ability to actually herd actual cats.
2. The ability to know what other people are thinking, but only in the specific case that they are thinking about going for dessert.
3. The ability to take long road trips without needing a toilet break.
4. The ability to eat dubious and ancient leftovers from the back of the fridge without getting sick.
5. Can leap medium-size hurdles in a single bound.
6. The ability to fly and walk through walls, but only when asleep.
7. Amazing powers of detection in matters relating to euphemism, innuendo and puns.
8. Can shave yaks in record time.
9. The ability to tickle yourself.

1. Pair of (probably?) socks, approx 2m long, red wool. Found drifting in space by object cleanup.
2. Jar of long white worms, approx 80cm in height, in some kind of jelly. Strong odour. Have been informed these are a delicacy on New Titan.
3. Two pairs false teeth. First pair thirty teeth including eight of canine-type; second pair twelve teeth including four of canine-type. Seem to be matching: possibly belonging to a two-mouthed species or ceremonial parent-and-child set?
4. Small brown furry creature, approx 50cm long, with stripy tail. Very vocal. Unsure if lost property or lost property owner come to collect. Language (if it is language) unavailable in Universal Translator but have sent a picture of the creature to the developers with a request for inclusion in the next update.
5. Compete set of hypervenusian chess in four dimensions. Looks as if abandoned mid-game. Protrusion into third dimension mainly dominated by red and infrared pieces. Have requested assessment by chess expert as catastrophic dimensional energy release is possible if game left unfinished.  
6. Blue and yellow striped mitten, five fingers, probably belonging to human child. Left on wall in main lobby.
7. Basket of yellow eggs, slightly slimy. Believe these to be New Titan Crocodilian eggs, in which case leaving them in a public place is part of the life cycle and they have been incorrectly deposited here. New Titan authorities contacted for repatriation. Strong preference expressed for repatriation before hatching.
8. Portable nitrogen-sulphur atmosphere generator, approx 1m long, exterior chrome with art deco stylings. Currently sealed in isolation vault as faulty on switch is triggered by loud noises.
9. Small robotic exoskeleton, approx 90cm high, six limbs, probably belonging to one of the Kepler-442b species. Appears to be intelligent and is asking to claim asylum. Have sent request to hub legal centre regarding a) status as property or independent being, b) survivability of local conditions for likely owner without exoskeleton and c) our obligations under intergalactic quarantine law if owner is present in the shuttle hub.

1. Miss Helen Thirnwicket, London. Unlike the other librarians on this list, Miss Thirnwicket was not a natural adventurer. Rather, she was the unfortunate victim of a typo. Instead of signing on, as she thought,  as a librarian of Acton (West London) she found herself under contract to be a librarian of Action (no location specified). The local authority duly supplied her with a small mobile library and instructions to take it to perilous locations. Miss Thirnwicket dutifully hauled the library through a selection of mountains, caves, cliff faces and urban wastelands. Although she prided herself in introducing the works of the Bronte sisters to places they had not previously been, in practice very few withdrawals were made from the library, because many of her clients did not have the necessary ID on them to be issued with a library card. However her small store of Kendal Mint Cake and whisky soon became rightly famous among thrill-seekers.
2. Mr. Dalton Kingsbury, Charlotte. Mr. Kingsbury was unfortunate in inheriting a particularly rowdy library. The words would squeeze out of the books at night and gallop around the library floor, often leaving surfaces splattered with exclamation marks. Instead of wearily cleaning up the mess each morning, however, Mr. Kingsbury took a more confrontational approach. Each night he chased the wild words with a small net, often stuffing them back into the wrong books and locking them in. In later years he became famous as a word-tamer and wrote a number of extremely tightly-controlled books. He was never quite trusted by words, however. He died at age 45 after choking on a rogue ‘incarnadine’ that had somehow made it into his clam chowder.
3.  Omar of Alexandria, Egypt. That we do knot know more about Omar of Alexandria is testament to his unfortunate end. Omar was one of the last librarians to desert the Library of Alexandria before its destruction, and managed to save a number of books that had been thought lost. These included Berossus’ Babylonaica, the complete works of Hypatia, and a humorous book about cats thought to have been written by Sappho under a rather weak pseudonym. Having become obsessed with the idea that libraries were unsafe, Omar took to keeping these books under his pillow. As a result, he was unable to sleep well. Eventually he fell asleep on an elephant with the books under his arm, and both he and they fell into the Nile and were drowned.  
4. Mrs. Vera Hawthorne, Rye Central Library. Mrs. Hawthorne is famous for having gone to extraordinary lengths in chasing down a particularly obscure inter-library loan. As it turned out, the requested book’s entry in the British Library catalogue was in error, the book having been stolen by pirates in 1823. Undeterred, Mrs. Hawthorne joined a group of international literary vigilantes, tracked down the descendants of the pirates, and ascertained that the book had been abandoned when the pirates’ ship was beached on an obscure subantarctic island. After a brief course on sailing at the local marina, Mrs. Hawthorne set off to collect the book in a small dinghy, surviving due to her remarkable facility in making friends with dolphins. The book had been used as unconventional nesting material by a large colony of penguins but Mrs. Hawthorne devotedly reassembled it, before stowing away on an Antarctic Research vessel to bring the book home. Sadly, the original submitter of the loan request had passed away by this time, and the British Library declined to take the book back due to its strong odour of penguin guano. Instead, Mrs. Hawthorne took it home with the intention of reading it and possibly writing an autobiography. Nothing has been heard of her since. Interestingly, the original loan request is no longer available, so the identity of the book itself remains obscure.  
5. Dr. Loic Laplace, Paris. Dr. Laplace is the head librarian of the International Centre for Perilous Books in Paris, a combined library and safe house for books that have, through no fault of their own, been used as accesories to murder. The collection includes a number of curiousities that require particularly careful handling: books that have been treated witch contact poisons; those that are particularly large, heavy or spiky; books that have been hollowed-out to make space for weapons; and books that are highly radioactive. As a result, Dr. Laplace has been hospitalised sixteen times and is missing two fingers and half the hair on his head. It is a testament to his great love of difficult books that he perseveres. The Centre is entirely funded by donations; ten thousand euros is believed to be enough to obtain a no-questions-asked library card and certain specialised instructions from the staff.

1. For more than a hundred years, there was only one subway system on Mars. It was one of those things that the colonists complained about, along with the red dust that got on everything and the air company ice-cream machines, which were broken more often than not. The subway was at Lycus Sulci, in the administrative centre, and it only had five stops. In its third year of operation there was a dust avalanche at Crater Wall Station and, when everything had been cleaned out, the tracks were slightly buckled. Ever since that time, commuters to the colonial headquarters could hear a faint tune behind the electric hum of the railway as the trains reached the end of the line. There was a rumour that it was the same tune that had been heard in the Great Pyramid at Giza, five days before its destruction.
2. In time, the air company removed the ice-cream machines and moved its workers from pay in cash to pay in company store tokens, citing increased costs for solar panel components. The colonial court upheld the legality of this decision. One morning, fifty air-company workers were trapped on a malfunctioning train carriage, shuttling back and forth between imaginary stops at the end of the line. When they were finally rescued, they marched on the company’s headquarters, singing the railway song to some words of their own invention. There were riots, and the garrison at Gordii Dorsum was called in.
3. Later on, after the Battle of Abus Vallis and the Breathless Days, after the Easter Ceasefire and the Great Turning-out, the song became the anthem of the Republic of Olympus Mons. It was said to have been an ancient African song, sung by slaves rebelling against unjust kings. They had always intended to send an ambassador back to the Court at Kigali to investigate further, but somehow they were always too busy with Mars matters.
4. Eventually, something went wrong with the colony’s genetic improvement program. An age of perpetual embarrassment began. It is very difficult to decipher any of the writings from that time, because they could perform prodigious acts of euphemism; their medical notes were like epic poems. They are known to have invented a new kind of excretion, referred to on occasion as ‘Number three’. They became known as a people who could fill a conversation entirely with the minutiae of dust and who lived out their lives in private rooms.
5. On the other side of Mars, where there were five more baby republics and an emperor with maybe fifty subjects, they sung a mocking version of the song and it was about people who cannot say what they mean. They were still singing the song after the end of the Republic of Olympus Mons, which was overrun by genetically-modified attack pandas from the Air Company who sneaked in whilst all the Republic’s Sentries happened to all be enjoying a leisurely Number Three at the same time.  
6. The baby republics had ice-cream machines, and they were all planning to build subway systems, and they had engineered a kind of ivy that grew in the thin air of the plains and produced a reasonable facsimile of vanilla pods. It was their efforts that eventually made Southern Mars the dessert capital of the Solar System. Visitors came from all over. The shuttle company calculated fuel requirements under the assumption that they would leave a kilogram or two heavier than when they had arrived. In those days, the song was sung in custard parlours; it was said to be a lament for the great library at Alexandria.
7. Inspired by the song, the baby republics ploughed the custard-parlour profits into a great university, which survived and grew beyond the days when custard-parlours were considered hopelessly old-fashioned. In time, seven of the drowned Oxford colleges relocated there, and two from Cambridge. In those days the streets were dug into canals, and the university, which was in itself also a city, resembled a Venice that had never been dusted.
8. The university had a hundred years in which it was obsessed with time. During those years, a child grew up who had been sung the song in her cradle, and whenever she was uncomfortable thereafter she would hum it to herself. Eventually, she inherited an office in the Faculty of Time and discovered three of the seven secrets of time travel, which she refused to share with her collaborators. Instead, she determined to travel back to the destruction of the library at Alexandria. Lacking the Fourth Secret, however, she could travel only back as far as the destruction of the pyramids; and without the fifth secret, she was not able to travel to public places; and without the sixth secret she could not quite control her final location. Thus it was that she found herself in a secret chamber of the Great Pyramid, and her equipment to get home in another secret chamber, and no way of knowing quite when she was. Undeterred, she chipped away at the separating wall, singing the song to herself the while. After five days, her return equipment self-destructed, destroying the pyramid. As it happened, one of the local warring parties had been setting explosives in the pyramid the whole while in any case, so they were only too happy to take responsibility. But the soldiers never forgot that the pyramid had serenaded them with its death song, before it finally crumbled into dust.

1. Do not stray from the path.
2. When you stray from the path, know that you can never quite go back to the same one. But there is always still be a way out.
3. There will be side streets down which you may see a lone bagpiper, or the embassy of a nation you have never heard of, or an ancient wooden door that stands a crack open, or a shop that sells sweets from the exact other side of the world.
4. There will come a time when it rains, and you will be near those buildings. Those buildings with their great metal-and-stone lobbies and their glass and their plants in pots and lifts and escalators in perpetual silent motion behind the security gates. Know that there are beings within who will chip out your soul from your body’s stone slab, and worse: they will teach you that this is what everyone does. Know too that sheltering from the rain is a thing that is protected, for a short while.
5. Those beings have loves and lives and difficulties of their own, too. You may find yourself at dinner with them. Or you may see them at dinner through the plate glass of the night city. Sometimes they have secrets like splinters of diamond wedged into their busy hearts. If you can pull these splinters loose, you may be allowed beyond the silent security gates.
6. Do not do this. Never do this. If you look up as the moon rises and find yourself on the wet streets with a handful of diamond splinters, drop them in a drain. You will be a long way from the path, but there is still time.
7. In any case, if you find yourself at dinner, do try the duck.
8. There will be a river to cross, but you may do so by any of a hundred bridges. Do not fret: this choice is not important.
9. There will be a door in a wall. There will be a forest, but it will have people instead of trees, and the wolves will be beautiful. There will be a castle, and you can enter it with coins. There will be a cottage by the water where an old lady will sell you tea. You will know all these things when you see them.
10. If you stray until nightfall, the forest will be lit with neon and rippling with music. It will be wine and sweat and breath and skin. It may not be resistable. And you may find yourself in a cold morning, overgrown with all the forest’s ivy, as if a hundred years have passed. Know then that you are not rooted in place. You are a long way from the path, but there is still time.
11. The other side lies over the mountains. They say that in the mountains there are beings who must be paid in blood. Ignore this message. When you come to have tea with them, remember that they have lives and loves and difficulties of their own. If you can pay them in stories, they will give you safe passage up the concrete stairs.
12. Out past the concrete stairs, the city ends.
13. Know that there are many ways to be unscathed, and not all desirable; and many ways to leave, and not all desirable. Know that you have loves and a life and difficulties of your own, too. Know that there is no shame in staying. This is how we came to the city for the first time, too.

4988 Bears
 -4988.1 Real bears
    –4988.11 Polar
       —4988.111 Grolar
    –4988.12 Grizzly
       —4988.121 Both grumpy and grizzly
    –4988.13 Black
    –4988.14 Panda
       —4988.141 Adorable baby international-diplomacy pandas
    –4988.14 Other
       —4988.141 Bear stars of Youtube
 -4988.2 Things that look like bears
    –4988.21 Beards that look like the owner is eating a bear
    –4988.22 Mounds of fluff that look like hibernating bears
 -4988.3 Bears of myth and story
 -4988.4 International bears of mystery
    –4988.41 Those bears that are found on subway systems around the world
    –4988.42 Bears in ill-fitting coats and sunglasses, eating meat
    –4988.43 Bears lurking under manhole covers and between the cracks of the pavement
    –4988.44 Bears that sit in the rain and tell melancholy stories
    –4988.45 Those bears that lie upside-down in your favourite chair and refuse to move
 -4988.5 Bears in rhyming situations
    –4988.51 In their lairs
    –4988.52 On the stairs
    –4988.53 Doing a stage routine that once was Fred Astaire’s
 -4988.6 Toy bears

1. The Recursive Garden, West Wittering. The Recursive Garden appears at first glance to be a rather plain, circular garden containing only plantings of unusually large size. At its centre, however, a circular hedge conceals an exact replica of the outer garden at half the scale (with more standard-size plantings), which in turn contains a further replica at half the scale again (with dinky little alpine plants). A number of further recursions can be found at the centre of the garden, but the plants in these (other than a few well-selected bonsai trees) are artificial replicas.

2. The Perfumed Gardens of Carnal Pleasure, Tunbridge Wells. A rather lascivious formal garden, said to have been laid out to the suggestions of the Earl of Rochester. The Perfumed Gardens are designed to provide an ideal arena for outdoor frolics: soft beds of moss, inventive nooks and crannies, plants with shady reputations and more suggestive swings than one can shake a stick at. A large and active rabbit population is maintained to provide further inspiration, though the original troupe of imported monkeys sadly succumbed to one English Winter too many. The gardener’s shed, which is full of fascinating implements, can be visited for a small extra fee.

3. Talbot’s Travelling Garden, location unknown. Talbot’s travelling garden is a small but perfectly-formed formal garden located on the back of a flat-bed truck. It may well have passed you on the road at some point, although the sides are typically raised when on the move to protect the plants from wind damage. Talbot’s Garden can be visited, but you have to find it first. Its location and opening hours are never advertised. It tends to travel to places that the proprietor thinks could do with a bit more greenery, spend a day or two opened out in a sunny spot, and then move onwards. Some Garden-seekers have had luck asking after the Garden’s resident cat, which is enormous, three-legged and ginger.

4. The Carnivorous Garden, Brighton. A recent opening. Sadly not much more information is available about the Carnivorous Garden other than its name and the exhortation at the gate that travellers enter entirely at their own risk. We have singularly failed to track down anyone who has visited it.

Puce, violet, purple purple, goth purple, bruise, silly purple, impending thunderstorm, school play Roman, this toy is supposed to be for girls purple, distant mountains, railway buddleia, heather, purple leather, angry face, prose purple, candied violets, plum, eccentric letter-writer purple, alarming curtains, resurrected bat-plant, shiny beetle purple, aubergine, arguably blue purple, old lady hat, purple lightsaber, glitter purple.

1. World’s largest ball of water, Pacific Ocean (somewhere). Not easily delimited from the rest of the ocean, but technically present. The location of the world’s largest ball of water without fish and stuff in is currently unknown.
2. World’s largest ball of beetle-rolled dung, Hyderabad. Unfortunately this was eaten shortly afterwards without formal confirmation. But even now there is a lingering air of beetle amazement in the city that you can sense if you have your head close to the ground.
3. World’s smallest record-breakingly large ball of something, Kansas. Last seen falling down the back of a chest of drawers.
4. World’s largest ball of elephants, Nairobi. More technically referred to as an enormous snuggle.
5. World’s largest ball for balls of things, Bali. The organisers are held to have hired a large venue to play giant-ball marbles. Sadly we were not allowed in, not being spherical, and so have no further information.

1. Norton vs. Happy Stay Hotels, 2013. Concerning a) the rights of bedbugs to book hotel rooms in the State of New York, and b) the right of remain of any children resulting from undiscovered eggs left in the hotel room. The court found for Norton in regard to room booking, but dismissed the right of remain issue.
2. Mr. Tiddles vs. Jasper, 1965. Concerning the party responsible for paying for Mr. Tiddles’ reconstructive surgery following extensive injuries sustained as a result of running into various kitchen objects wielded by mice in his home. The court ruled that, as he was trying to catch and eat the mice at the time, their actions could legitimately be ruled self-defence.
3. Ursula vs. the State of Connecticut, 1987. Concerning the employment rights of bears who hibernate for some or all of the winter. The court ruled that hibernation rights should fall under illness and disability law.
4. Eudryas Grata vs. Lighting Warehouse, 2009. Concerning the rights of moths who wish to throw themselves against light bulbs, and to whom any clean-up costs accrue. The court ruled, after a persuasive speech from the Moth Nation, that Moth light bulb rituals are a legitimate act of religion and that in general moths of sound mind who fly at light bulbs should have the right to do so.

1. The dead are turned into diamonds; or at least, their carbon is, the other elements falling away as steam or ash, apart from those that are saved to form a small and individual flaw. There is a great dark vault under the city and in it a warren of dark rooms. This is an old society. Each dark room is something like a family tomb, decked with the diamonds of hundreds of generations past. You may enter one at a time, with a candle, to spend time with the glittering dead.
2. Each year after coming of age, on their birthday, they write a little more of the stories of their lives on their skin. The yearly tattoos can be anywhere and may be of any length, though the wise and old leave space for many years to come, because this is a country just growing into a confident medical maturity. When they die, their skin is their biography. Usually, the grieving family adhere to the request of the deceased: burn it, or save it. In the older families, inclusion in the family book or books is held to be of great importance; their libraries have rooms for the dead.
3. They are at ease with the presence of the dead. It is customary to bury in gardens, deep beneath the vegetable patch. Though there is little ceremony, the consumption of the first crop of vegetables after the burial is as close to a wake as they come.
4. All bodies are scanned and digitised as soon as possible after death. It is an intensive process which does not leave much by way of physical remains. Instead, the relatives take home information: composition, measurements, networks, probabilities of the dead. They do this not because there is a chance that they could be reconstructed, but because data is sacred. Information is power and by consuming the information of others one becomes more powerful.
5. There is a legend that the dead will rise up as an army to save their people in a time of peril. But the people are in a time of peril already, and have been for some centuries. The dead seem not to be taking the hint. Now there are great ships that take their dead to the coldest parts of the world. Their funeral garb is body armour and the coins on their eyes night-vision goggles. They stand, at ease, frozen in great ready ranks, waiting for the call of the dead’s new generals.
6. Death is a matter for great public shame. The official line is that the forward march of medicine has conquered it. If only humans would be careful with their fragile bodies, if only they would eat and sleep and fuck as they were told, if only they would avoid all risks, if only they would not be the sort of people who have bad luck. The official line is that the dead have squandered their lives. It is often very hard to find out if someone has died, because the mark of utmost respect is to hush up a death. There is a service to discreetly take away bodies. One may hire actors to portray occasional reappearances, or write letters from distant lands. The censuses of the age are filled with fictitious centenarians. But I believe the average lifespan of that time is not much more than in our own.
7. They take the dead into space. Some choose, from this point, to be a shooting star and burn up in the atmosphere. There are set nights for these artificial meteor showers and the population of the world comes out to watch. Others choose the other way: to be taken out to deep space and launched on a trajectory that will, some millions of millions of years hence, touch down gently over the event horizon of a black hole.

0330 Delightful objects

-0330.1 Those that fit precisely

   –0330.11 Objects that go into holes of the same size

   –0330.12 Objects that stack into neat shapes

-0330.2 Those that are exactly the right colour

   –0330.21 Those that form a rainbow when lined up

   –0330.22 Those that are a particularly good shade of a good colour

-0330.3 Those that are of great usefulness or value

   –0330.31 Things that are both useful and beautiful

   –0330.32 Things that do not delight in themselves, but are of high enough worth that one may sell them and purchase something delightful

   –0330.33 Things that may be used in the making of art

   –0330.34 Those that awaken within you a pleasant memory of the past

-0330.4 Those that cause delight to those you love

   –0330.41 Objects that cause a ripple of delight throughout humanity

-0330.5 Those that balance

   –0330.51 Piles of pebbles on top of each other

   –0330.51 Piles of other things on top of each other

-0330.6 Those that can be made to do a complex mechanical dance

-0330.7 Those that are artful tricks

   –0330.71 Those that trick the eye

   –0330.72 Those that are puzzles in which the mind can wander, caught up, for hours

-0330.8 Those that delight the senses

   –0330.81 Those that smell delightful

   –0330.82 Those that have a pleasing sound

   –0330.83 Those that are pleasant to touch

   –0330.83 Those that taste good

-0330.9 Those that have a satisfying weight

   –0330.91 Well-made tools

1. Some fragments of faded orange netting, now unravelling in a drift of pebbles and curious anemones. It is apparently an import from the human world.
2. A small patch of golden sand. On closer inspection, it is not sand at all but a mass of tiny machine parts in bright metal, as if a host of tiny clockwork things had been crushed down to their constituents.
3. A great tangle of purple seaweed. It has either grown into elaborate knots or been tied in them. Draped down the beach, it gives the sand the look of an illuminated manuscript grown from the wild and ready to strangle the careless reader.
4. A whole split oak trunk, sea-bleached and sanded smooth apart from a dark ashy flaw at its heart.
5. A triangle, half a metre across, rigid and almost insubstantial; it can scarcely be gripped, seen or smelt. It is more like a disturbance in reality than an object, and is uncomfortable to remain beside for any length of time.
6. Six large coins of a silvery metal, worn almost flat by years of handling. On some of them the smudged outline of a horned face in profile can be seen.
7. A starfish with the vestiges of a human face on its underside. It cannot talk, of course; but there is some sort of light in the eyes. The mouth under the starfish moves constantly, and maybe a talented lip-reader could tell if there is a message there.
8. The stinking, dried-out carcass of something with too many legs. In its open stomach a small pile of rings, trinkets and loose gems lie unclaimed.
9. A great drift of pre-World War I era shell casings, stretching down the beach and into the water. In fact, there is no end in sight of them, and other similar drifts can be seen at intervals further down the shore. When the waves are still and the water is clear, one can see them extending out over the seabed as far as one wishes to sail out, though there cannot have been so many bullets in the whole world. It may be that they are the residue of some distant, endlessly recursive act of violence somewhere in the Perilous Realm.

1. 10. A true classic, ten in base ten is so widespread that it cannot but help be at the top of our list.
2. 101. Ten in ternary. Because you love radix economy, and ternary has radix economy.
3. 14. Because you are interesting and a bit obscure, just like ten in senary.
4. 1010. Where would this list be without ten in binary? Short, that’s where.
5. Fish. The ten of choice for the lazy surrealist.
6. A. Do you like computing? Are you bored of binary? Then ten in hexadecimal may be for you.
7. 12. Ten in octal, perfect for slightly more obscure computing fans.
8. X. For history buffs, Roman numeral ten may be the way to go.
9. 11. The ten of choice for the chronically late.
10. < (well, approximately). For history-buff one-upmanship, why not try ten in Babylonian sexagesimal?

1. Ocelot and vanilla. A time-honoured classic, enlivened by real Norwegian cream and ocelots.
2. Saucylot. Ocelot, ketchup and forty cloves of garlic, lovingly mixed by our mixologists before being gently chilled in the vacuum of deep space.  
3. Notalotofocelot. From our new homeopathic range, zero-calorie Notalotofocelot contains one or two molecules of pure ocelot ice cream, lovingly mixed with pure Cornish air.
4. Chocolate fudge ocelot. All the fudge in this gently fluffy chocolate icecream has been personally passed through a certified ocelot before packing.
5. Cosmic Ocelot. A truly out-of-this world flavour combination, Cosmic Ocelot contains the lightly spiced essence of one whole ocelot in our super-creamy dark cherry base, seasoned with popping candy and only the finest selection of nano-scale black holes.
6. Oscillateitstitalot. A cheeky combination for a romantic evening in with the icecream spoon: ocelot tongue, wasabi and sun-warmed gravel.
7. Strawberry surprise. The surprise is an ocelot.
8. Chocelot sundae. One freshly strangled ocelot, gently enrobed in a real Belgian. With a cherry on top (optional).

1. There was a creature called an Offaphoffilus, which had fifteen legs and the face of a grumpy sloth. It had never quite found a comfortable home, because these were usually built for creatures with fewer legs. But one day it met an elderly leg collector and managed to negotiate a custom-made beachfront villa in exchange for the bequest of seven legs on the occasion of its death.

2. In later years, the villa served as a guesthouse for the nearby leg museum. It was famous for its cakes, which visitors were best advised to avoid because they always had an aftertaste of chicken and petrol. The cakes arrived every day on a small cart and no-one knew where they came from.

3. The arrival of the cakes was not in fact a mystery but an official classified Secret. As part of a project to bioengineer the ultimate soldier, a secretive Russian laboratory had developed a donkey who shat cake. It eventually graduated from the programme with a D grade and become the lab pet.  However, since it also turned out to have an enormous appetite, they needed an outlet for excess cake. This the guesthouse fortunately provided.

4. For companionship, the lab purchased the Donkey a horse. As it turned out, this horse used to belong to the Queen of Bonk, but was demoted for unhorselike behaviour. It had once eaten a whole grocer and the local fruit community lived in terror of it going back for seconds. Interestingly, it was also the first horse in the world to work in web development, and had once licked Caligula.

5. There was an orchard nearby which felt in need of protection, so they called in an alchemist (all the nearby bouncers being busy). The alchemist did not succeed in keeping out the horse, but he did accidentally grow a tree on which each apple was made of a different element. Sadly, the gold apple was followed in relatively short order by the plutonium apple, and the orchard was evacuated. The irate fruit-growers put the alchemist in a pair of lead boots and dropped him into the Seine.

6. Three years later, a pair of golden boots came up at auction in North Carolina, but failed to sell due to their unattractive design. Eventually, they were melted down and turned into a small gold bar, which served gin to inebriated mice.

7. Seven mice who had escaped from a rather dull zoo fell asleep on a wandering cloud of gin fumes and had a dream. In it, there was a creature called an offaphoffilus, which had fifteen legs and the face of a grumpy warthog. The mice were fired from the story for refusing to behave. Since the story could not hire anyone else at such short notice, it had to stop.

1. On the occasion of the vaporization of Glasgow by the Titanian New Urumqi Front in 3560, following a 24-hour warning: wet stone, ozone, whisky, bins and burning peat.

2. On the slow mummification of the last inhabitant of Rome on the sunlit and cypress-covered ruins of the Palatine Hill in 10251, and the crumbling of her ancient library into warm dust: sun-warmed tree resins, old books, wild thyme and wolf shit.

3. On the unexpected reclaimation of Lagos by the sea in 2520, following a meteor strike aimed so precisely at the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator that for many years it was taken as evidence that humanity was living in a buggy simulation: Petrol, sweat, mud and the overwhelming sea.

4. On the final desertion of Isfahan in 6640 at the start of autumn, in response to the fourth wave of the Maltese Plague: over-ripe pomegranates, black pepper, and the lurking hint of something dead.

5. On the death of the last human in Hyderabad in 55801, and the sealing of the city into a tomb by the Followers before their great journey: A thousand marigolds blooming in the dust, ewers of clear water, and something like metal and pears.

6. On the destruction of Nova Cuzco by the eruption of Maat Mons in Venusian year 20881: burning wood, tomato vines, green mango, butter and sulphur.

7. On the occasion of the last unlocking of London’s new gates, some time after the arrival of the ice, but before the long dark: grease, ambergris, leather and sharp cold air with the promise of snow.

8. On the last stand at Archangelsk, 19555: Seaweed, dirt, sewage, king crabs, vodka and fear.

9. On the night that the remaining survivors realised that there was no longer any way out of Los Angeles, 3994: fine wine, cherry syrup, spilt blood, weed, tar and gunpowder.