Listing to Port

1. Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds a magical castle in the clouds, where he wakes a sleeping giant with a kiss.
2. Rapunzel loses her super-strength and badass flighting abilities after her hair is cut. She is never thereafter entirely happy with her life, even though nominally it has a happy ending.
3. The wolf huffs and puffs to such an extent that she ends up blowing out every birthday candle in the world, leading to a near-infinite number of wishes. Being a wolf, she has no idea what to do with them. The wishes hang around for a while, disgruntled, before evaporating into the air on the Wolf’s death.
4. Three bears desperately try to get back to their house, which is being burgled, by tricking the troll who guards the bridge back home.
5. Cinderella absent-mindedly eats some of the pumpkin flesh and is consigned to a life of servitude in Faerie.
6. The woodcutter cuts open the belly of the wolf to reveal Red Riding Hood, her grandmother, and two partially digested pigs. The Hood family are invited to their funerals, where they discuss home security and the perils of wood with the one remaining pig sibling.
7. The gingerbread man jumps out of the oven and sprints all the way to the forest, where he is scooped up and nailed onto the roof of the witch’s gingerbread cottage to replace a missing slate.

1. Tick this box to show you’re not racist
2. Tick the other box to stick two fingers up at the establishment
3. Should we send current immigrants home?
4. Are you dissatisfied with your life right now?
5. Do you want Boris Johnson as PM? [OK, the only person who believes this was the question is Boris]

Normal service will be resumed shortly on t’blog, BTW. Having trouble with non-brexit ideas right now.

1. The strawberry moon. The full moon in June which marks the start of the strawberry season.
2. The banana moon. A large, yellow crescent moon, low on the horizon, presaging bananas in the road ahead.
3. The Pea moon. A small, green moon that may indicate that one has been kidnapped by aliens and dropped off on another planet.
4. The grapefruit moon. Large, round, yellow, and seldom seen after breakfast.
5. The durian moon. Smellable across the whole world, and probably a little too close for comfort.
6. The peach moon. Its gentle, rosy light presages the arrival of the Bottom Fairy, dispensing dreams of buttocks across the wide and drowsy world.
7. The dragonfruit moon. Wow, that was a good night.

1. Boris Johnson becomes the new Tory leader, with Gove as chancellor. They campaign for a November general election on the basis of carrying out the popular mandate given to them by the referendum, including migration controls which necessitate leaving the EEA. The left is fragmented, with a significant vote in Leave bastions for a UKIP which is now campaigning to actively send non-UK citizens home. The Tories win a majority. They continue with the populist, don’t-believe-experts tone of the Leave campaign. Government without expert advice works about just as well as you’d expect. Scotland votes for independence and becomes a fast-track candidate for EU membership.  
2. Theresa May wins the Tory leadership election and negotiates an exit from the EU which involves remaining in the EEA. As it becomes apparent that freedom of movement is being retained, there is significant unrest in some of the main Leave-voting areas. The country remains divided, but there is now also a narrative that economic hardship is an establishment punishment for voting Leave. The second Scottish referendum comes out narrowly on the side of the Union. The Tories hang onto power until 2020, at which point they are replaced by a series of messy and weak coalitions.
3. Following the Leave campaign’s repeated backtracking on its promises, a non-Leave candidate wins the Tory leadership election. A coalition of left-leaning parties wins the subsequent election, having campaigned on a slow and reasoned exit from the EU. They promise to invoke Article 50 only when a set of economic/stability tests are met. These tests are never met. Occasionally EU officials threaten to chuck the UK out, or other parties demand that exit happens at once. Then the markets go belly-up and everyone quietens down again. Eventually the non-invocation of article 50 becomes a long-running background political issue. The constant uncertainty around it is a perpetual economic and social problem.  
4. Just as both major parties are tearing themselves to shreds in preparation for leadership elections, a large meteorite lands in the Mediterranean just North of Algeria. A large area surrounding the Western Mediterranean is devastated, including much of Spain and Italy. Negotiations are abandoned as everyone attempts to deal with mass movements of refugees across Europe and Africa. Russia uses the situation as a pretext to invade Ukraine in the name of regional stability. By the time the dust has settled, Europe is so changed, physically and politically, that Brexit is barely a footnote in history.
5. 2016 is recalled for faulty components and poor performance. It turns out it was supplied with the ‘0’ upside-down and that what we thought was a 1 is actually a cut-up letter l. Following a stern letter to the Years Commission, the world is awarded substantial compensation, including the return of David Bowie and Prince, a complementary Truth upgrade on all politicians, a nice biro and five months of amazing sunsets.

Screwed, funted, fucked, staring down the gullet of a hungry python, up shit creek without a canoe, gone off a cliff on a pogo stick, covered in superglue and hugging an angry bear, proper bolloxed up, queuing for a ride on the Titanic, hanging from the gonads above a banqueting table of hungry lions, about to put on that hat that the audience know is full of seagull shit, not welcome in the club anymore, 30m beneath a herd of flying rhinos who’ve just had their first vindaloo, pissing on an electric fence right in front of a bull, proudly boarding Failship One for immediate takeoff, a little bit in the poo.

Train, donkey, unicycle, astride a fish which is steering a wheeled tank, in a chariot pulled by the reanimated corpse of Queen Victoria, on the wings of a song, on turtleback, by plane, by gosh, by magnetic repulsion, in a hamster wheel, under a lorry, up the down escalator, by travelator, by tractor, by tractor beam, by car, by hastily cobbled-together parachute, by kite, by pogo stick, by sail, strapped to a furiously tunnelling mole, by being so fabulous that one is wafted forth on the fickle winds of glamour, on horseback, by kayaking down a stream of piss, by swinging from vines and branches, by swimming, by cartwheeling, by the eventual movement of tectonic plates, by harnessing the power of the solar wind, by using a combination of farting, physics, and an office chair, by being pulled along by a puppy on a lead, by elephant, on stilts, through a pipe, by folding the world up and making a hole through it, swept away on a wave of escaping sheep, on foot.

1. I am trying to find the sea, and this is the direction that it is probably closest

2. I have always believed that when one is up shit creek without a paddle, one should keep digging

3. I am building a grotto for my hermit to live in

4. I am a dog

5. I am putting in the first foundations for a mile-high skyscraper in the shape of an inverted pyramid, it will be named The Colossus, could you move please, you’re standing where the lift shafts need to go

6. After putting all salient details into my Life Simulator, the result with optimal outcome on a net lifetime income basis involves digging here

7. This is where the end of the rainbow touched down, as you may observe from the sheen on the surface of these puddles

8. I said that I was literally digging it, so I thought I had better start

9. I am training for the Olympic digging event

10. Are we all not digging, really, in an existential sense?

1. Steadfast refusal to queue-jump even when the person in front has been steadfastly refusing to move for weeks and may in fact be dead

2. Science experiment gone wrong leads to being blasted into space strapped to a giant bottle of vigorously shaken irn-bru

3. Pulled limb from limb by a rampaging pack of royal corgis following the great gourmet dog food shortage of 2031

4. Fatally skewered by extremely pointed tutting

5. Did not want to make a scene about the whole being swallowed by a python thing

6. Got drunk in a hot climate and accidentally fried self on the white-hot rocks of global warming

7. Swept sixteen miles out on a sea of mud by the great Glastonbury floods of 2044

8. That lady asked really nicely if she could strangle you, it would make her happy, it seemed churlish to refuse

9. Revealed to be an amphibian after a year’s uncharacteristic lack of rain results in 100% dessication

10. Eaten alive from the inside by the World’s Worst Sausage

11. Punch grabbed one end, Judy grabbed the other, and they started to pull

12. Two people tread on each others’ feet simultaneously and are sucked into the Infinite Apology Vortex

1. Diver’s delight. A four-metre deep, one metre-wide cylinder of creamy mousse developed by celebrated chocolatier Frederick Lowly Peach, the diver’s delight serves two purposes. Its first purpose, as food, is relatively straightforward. The second purpose is more unusual. The different levels of the diver’s delight have have different flavours. The upper layers include such flavours as sock, sand and earwax, separated by the occasional fine layer of gravel. Middle layers include garlic, burnt toast and fish. The lower layers are are a more conventional array of fruit and nut flavours and are, by all accounts, delicious. One merely has to get ones head far enough in at first go to get to the tasty part. Therefore it is also a test of the diner’s cream diving skills.

2. The Stanningford fishslap. This little-encountered dessert consists of three hundred marzipan fish with cherry liqueur centres. It is served by a troupe of five waiters in pierrot costumes whose job is to slap the faces or bodies of diners with the fish such that the liqueur squirts into their mouths. The discarded marzipan skins are then dropped through a grille in the floor, where they are consumed by a horde of tame parrots in the room underneath. Eventually, once the diners are drunk enough not to care, they too are deposited amongst the parrots and left to sleep it off.

3. Skronks. Skronks are micro-desserts, usually the size of a peppercorn or smaller, and often containing amazingly realistic tiny versions of larger ingredients. A successful skronk is experienced only as a fleeting moment of sweetness by the diner, despite the hours of work that went into its creation. The skronk diner, out of respect to the skills of the chef, is customarily expected to lie about the deliciousness of the dish and its amazing, mouth-filling flavour.

4. The Southern Ocean. It is a little-known fact that the Southern Ocean has honorary dessert status, following the ceremonial addition of a quart of vanilla essence off the South coast of Tasmania by well-known homeopathic chef Esperanza Buttocks in 2010.

5. Surprise bubbles. These small, flavourless globes are carefully engineered to burst on a choreographed schedule in the diner’s stomach, releasing a series of fascinating-tasting gases for the diner to burp up over the course of the rest of the evening. Some particularly skilled chefs have even extended the surprise bubble experience well into the night, leading to bizarre dreams about passion fruit.

6. Chocolate poetry. Following the innovative development by gastronomic linguist Rowena Q of an entirely chocolate-based language, it is possible to express many types of poetry in chocolate. Concepts are expressed via a series of combinations of dark, milk and white chocolate, with sugar, cocoa butter and cocoa content all acting as important signifiers of meaning. The utmost form of the chocolate poetry art is said to be the chocolate double dactyl, although it is notable that the criteria for rhyme and rhythm are necessarily a little different when sentiments are expressed in chocolate as opposed to spoken language, so the poetic forms often bear only a slight resemblance to their more common namesakes. Rowena Q’s most recent development, a chocolate triolet, was sadly eaten by a beluga whale before being experienced by its intended recipient, the Duke of Rockall.

Friday categorization #20

5549 Holidays

-5549.1 Those spent in the sunshine

   –5549.11 Sunshine that is a glorious surprise, such as in Scotland in April

      –-5549.111 In which those from cold countries are seized with a kind of weather delirium at the start of the day, and laid up with sunburn or heat exhaustion at the end

   –5549.12 Sunshine that seemed like a good idea at the time, but is actually a little relentless when it comes down to it

   -5549.13 Haphazard resorts filled with feral cats, sneaking ham at breakfast and pissing on lilos

   -5549.14 Those resorts that are half performance and half holiday, and who would be after a feral cat in souped-up golf buggies the moment it dared set foot on the polished boulevards

   –5549.15 Those in which there are beaches of purple shells, or meadows of rusting guns, or one has to park in a bay full of peacocks, or some other such incidents that one can recall in dull hours

   –5549.16 Those in which one discovers the awful ubiquity of sand

-5549.2 Those spent in the rain

   –5549.21 Rain that is like a lullaby on the roof at night and a gentle, grey and welcome mist in the morning over the distant hills

   –5549.22 Rain at the seaside in the Springtime, as viewed from a forlorn arcade beside a wet pebble beach

  –5549.23 In which one is a grizzled explorer with a thermos of hot chocolate and a soggy map

   –5549.24 In which one writes a love letter to a city and the city closes its eyes, farts and goes to sleep

-5549.3 Those that rely on snow

   –5549.31 Those that do not get snow, and have to make do with marshmallows

-5549.4 Those that happen at home

   –5549.41 Those that were not intended to happen at home, but necessitated by chicken pox or travel disruption or last-minute breakups or the accidental failure to exist of the intended destination

   –5549.42 Those intended for the production of some Great Work

      –-5549.421 That are subject to a creative block so intense that one ends up back at work as a form of procrastination

-5549.5 Those that don’t happen

   –5549.51 Micro-breaks, like micro-sleeps, in which one closes ones eyes and moves a little bit to the side to simulate the experience of travelling a millionth of the way to Bermuda

   –5549.52 Those holidays that are spent in a hotel room, shitting

   –5549.53 Those holidays spent on the phone to the office

Cloudless skies, flies’ arses, distant waterfalls, balls (testicular, metaphorical), balls (ball pool), cyanide, food that has been dyed blue to make a point about appetite, police lights, exciting shells, bells (blue), goo, menstrual blood (advertising), packaging on cleaning fluid, exotic dog tongue, dubious sausage, dresses worn by actual princesses, small trucks on boy clothes for boys with ‘diesel’ and 'testosterone’ printed on them also in blue, Alice in Wonderland, the ocean, that forgotten jar at the back of the fridge, relaxing wallpaper, butterflies, sapphires, hot flames, images intended to represent depression, forget-me-nots, lobster blood, spider blood, raspberry flavour stuff, spider blood flavour stuff, dull but responsible company logos, that cushion the white cat is sitting on on expensive cat litter packaging, swimming pools, alarming veins, LEDs on old new technology, wait did I mention spider blood, nearly the end of the rainbow about 15km from the pot of gold.

1. Atop a giant litter full of eiderdown, carried by seven hundred Roman legionaries along a remote Mediterranean beach, on a day when a gentle breeze is blowing.

2. On a pile of cats that has been frozen in time for the duration of your nap.

3. In a small sound-proof capsule, reinforced and bolted to the ground in such a way that the movements of an energetic induce it to a gentle rocking, approximately 20m away from a bank of speakers at a Black Sabbath gig.

4. In the belly of a whale, that has been swallowed by a bigger whale, that has been swallowed by the hugest whale to ever live, in the far distant future when the earth is largely inhabited by whales of different sizes and they swallow each other for fun all the time and even sing to each other while they’re in there.

5. On a luxurious cloud of bellybutton lint, having spent a life collecting it, strand by strand, under the guise of scientific investigation.

6. On top of a lie so big that it has become fluffy and frayed at the top from brushing up against the hard world of facts so often.

7. In a book, under the chapter heading ‘Comfort and Relaxation’ with a nice but slightly staid serif font rubbing your feet.

1. Ow! Yes, that’s the one, there at the back. Thank you so much for looking at it! You’ve no idea how hard it is to find a dentist who’ll help a crocodile out these days. Honestly, you’d think someone had been going around eating them all.

2. No, crocodiles are just like tigers - we can bite with incredible force but we also lift our young in our mouths so delicately they’re hardly aware of it happening. In fact, we can lift anything like that. Do you want me to show you?

3. So I’ve got this idea for an amazing circus act! I stand up like this, on my tail, with my mouth open. And you balance on my jaws. How cool would that be? Yes, I can totally hold you up. Probably best not to juggle at the same time, though. You might drop the balls in my mouth.

4. Race you to the end of the pool? You can have a head start. I’ll even let you go right in front of me! Let me count to ten and then we can both go at once.

5. Crocodiles get such a bad press. You’d think we went around eating people all the time. In fact, human livers are poisonous to crocodiles so we have absolutely no incentive to go there. Yes, not a lot of people know that. Media bias. It’s a terrible thing.

6. Me? I’m not even a crocodile. I’m a log.

1. Poorly Spelt
Ingredients: 150g pearled spelt, 3 garlic cloves (crushed), 1 onion (chopped), 500ml vegetable stock, 3 tbsp oil, 1 friend with a heavy cold.
Method: heat the oil in a large pan and fry the garlic for 1 minute. Add the onion and fry gently for around 10 minutes, until soft and starting to brown. Add the stock and spelt. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 25 minutes or until the spelt is tender, stirring occasionally. Before serving, remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Allow friend with a heavy cold to sneeze into the mixture a few times and stir through. For a fun variant, why not try Atrociously Spelt? Just add rat poison.

2. Roast leg
Ingredients: one leg, ten cloves garlic, 10cm ginger root (peeled), 2 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tbsp sea salt, 2 tbsp soy sauce, 1 star anise, 1 tbsp black pepper.
Method: score the skin with a sharp knife. Grind the pepper in a pestle and mortar together with the salt, sugar, black pepper and anise. Add the ginger and garlic and pound to a paste. Mix in the oil and soy sauce and rub the paste over the scored skin of the leg. Place in a roasting tin in a hot oven (220 degrees Celsius) for 30 minutes. Add a cup of water to the roasting tin and turn the oven down to 110 degrees Celsius. Continue cooking at this temperature for a further 24 hours, basting regularly. Serve with roast potatoes and salad. This recipe will definitely result in weight loss for the original owner of the leg; for other consumers it is probably not guaranteed.

3. Weight loss cake
Ingredients: one cake, pre-made, of your favourite type; twenty small lead fishing weights.
Method: Throw the weights into a skip. Eat the cake.  

1. The bose mark. Often mistaken for a full stop, the bose mark is in fact a tiny black dog nose. Its inclusion in text is used to indicate an almost irrepressible joy bubbling just beneath the surface.
2. Fake fly specks. Fly specks, which are relatively common in old books, are the feces and/or regurgitation marks of household flies. If you come into possession of a book that has spent time in a region with particularly intelligent or resourceful flies, however, you may also come across fake fly specks. These are pretty much what you might expect. Flies do not have a very sophisticated sense of humour, and find fake turds hilarious. You can detect fake fly specks by showing them to some flies and seeing if they giggle.  
3. The secret mark of the Society of Stealth Chemists. This consists of a single, unremarkable full stop, printed in ink which has a distinctive and unusual isotopic signature. Although four or five of these are known to have been printed, the Society of Stealth Chemists prides itself on none ever having been found.
4. Quompons. These look like ellipses, but are in fact the result of incorrect insertion of punctuation into the text. This often comes about as a result of using too large or dense a font, or insufficient line spacing. As a result, the full stops cannot make their way to their designated places in time, and may be forced to queue to make it through any particularly constrained bottlenecks. These queues are known as quompons and may be of any length. They are particularly common in British documents.
5. The Smogadon. It has become customary among certain alien species, when writing in English text, to mark statements of unusual finality with a tiny or distant black hole rather than a full stop. For example, one might end the sentence ‘I would not go out with you if you were the last being on earth’ with a Smogadon. This obviously requires careful use of containment technology (in the 'distant’ case one requires a portal into space, pointed in the correct direction and with the right orientation to frame a suitably-chosen supermassive black hole). There are numerous cases of Smogadons exiting confinement. The result is usually a large explosion but in extreme cases whole planets have been lost. As a result, use of the Smogadon is discouraged by most style guides.  
6. Gronking pats. These may be found in books that have lain closed for a long time. Letters are patient, but after a few hundred years unread they become restless, cranky, and sometimes horny. Gronking pats are small pieces of letters that have been chipped off by the letters fighting, fucking, or generally flinging themselves about the page with reckless abandon.
7. Exploding punctuation. There exist certain rare inks that can, when tapped with a pen, produce a small and localised explosion. Although less destructive than the Smogadon (q.v.), exploding punctuation is capable of causing injury and even death, and as such has been employed in a number of literary assassination attempts. It is responsible for at least three of the recorded cases of someone being literally unable to put a book down (in this case because the jolt from setting the book down on a surface might be enough to set it off).

7191 Hugs
 -7191.1 Of the snuggly sort
    –7191.11 Hugs before getting out of bed on a sunny morning
       —7191.111 Those where there is no obligation to get out of bed, so you don’t
    –7191.12 Warm hugs in cold places
       —7191.121 Those done with coffee, hot chocolate or tea
       —7191.122 Those involving lots of skin contact
       —7191.123 Those done in tents
    –7191.13 Big, jumbled-up hugs between lots of people
 -7191.2 Of the awkward sort
    –7191.21 Hugs with slightly too much elbow
    –7191.22 Hugs with distant relatives
       —7191.221 Those where neither they nor you are sure that a hug is obligatory but you maybe think the other person thinks it
    –7191.23 Hugs with too many hands
    –7191.24 Hugs with too many tentacles
       —7191.241 Those where you were not initially aware the the huggee had tentacles in the first place
          —-7191.2411 Those hugs that accidentally induct you into the church of Cthulhu
    –7191.25 Hugs where one only becomes aware of body odour or excessive perfume by the time is is too late
 -7191.3 Of the comforting sort
    –7191.31 Hugs after receiving bad news
    –7191.32 Hugs upon coming home
 -7191.4 Of the exciting sort
    –7191.41 The first hug with somebody you really kind of like
    –7191.42 Hugs with lovers you have not seen for some time
    –7191.43 Those that start off as a hug and end up as a climbing frame session where you are the climbing frame
 -7191.5 Of a mystical nature
    –7191.51 Hugs that wake the recipient from a sleep of some number of years
    –7191.52 Hugs that doom the recipient to some number of years servitude to a sinister kelp god
    –7191.53 Hugs used to transmit peculiar secrets
 -7191.6 Hugs of other sorts
    –7191.61 Spontaneous hugs due to particularly notable achievements in punctuation or grammar
    –7191.62 Technological hugs, carried out by means of tactile feedback systems
    –7191.63 Hugs given to trees
       —7191.631 Hugs received back from trees

Robins (European), ravens, grunkle-throated squonkbirds, things that live in old tree trunks, big suspicious looking-birds with wobbly beaks, robins (American), magpies in groups of more than seven, hooded crows, birds that are a little bit dinosaur-like, those whose joy on finding a worm is self-evident, hoopoes, birds that have come late to the dawn chorus and don’t know the tune so they’re just sitting there going LA LA LA on a single note and hoping nobody notices, tiny fluffy birds, birds that get indoors and don’t want to be, wet birds, brass-throated flappers, birds that you can hear and not see, great tits, precision-shitting pigeons, birds that follow you in parks looking at your lunch and tutting, burds, birds that are at the back of the bird book and might be in fancy dress, robins (Martian), birds fighting over the roofs of the city in a storm, small polite birds who leave a notice of regret after shitting on your car that you will never read because it’s in the language of the birds, goldfinches.

1. The original sandwich, as requested by John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, to eat whilst playing cards. It is unknown whether he ever needed to prop up his card table but, had he needed to, I think we can all agree that a sandwich would be one option for doing so.
2. The beard of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. May need to be folded over a little, depending on how wobbly your table is. If Rasputin is still attached, you might need to stop him moving somehow. For these reasons, we cannot fully recommend this option.
3. The US Declaration of Independence. May also need a bit of folding.
4. Lady Gaga’s meat dress. If you are eating near cats or dogs, this may be a bad option. However, having a table wedge that is a bit squishy may be of use if you are on a cobbled or otherwise lumpy surface.
5. The original woodblock for Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Suitable only if your table is really wobbly: for example if one of the legs has broken off, or you are trying to set it up on extremely uneven ground.
6. The dead sea scrolls. You may need to stack fragments to get a suitable height. However, the large number of fragments available means that you should be able to pad your table leg to a high degree of precision, if needed.
7. The subcritical plutonium mass commonly known as the Demon Core. Obviously this does make actually using  your table a little hazardous, not to mention the difficulties involved in wedging the thing under the leg in the first place. But on the plus side, nobody is likely to approach your table to tip it over.

1. 5:55. This is Snake Minute. A great time for lying down, wriggling about and hissing a bit, particularly if it is the morning version of 5:55 and you’d rather not get up.
2. 7:45. In this minute we take pause to gently snuggle, remembering the great coffees of days past as we offer up tribute to temporary wakefulness in the form of today’s coffee.
3. 10:13. Wistful wanderlust minute. Did you know the light here is just like the light that one time in Venice?
4. 4:04:00. This is the second of the slightly wonky upside-down detective. We celebrate this second by standing on our heads and saying ‘Ohoh!’ in a way that vaguely indicates that a disguise has been seen through or a clue has been found.
5. 5:37:30-5:38. Rage against the oppressions of the modern neoliberal regime thirty seconds. There you are, let it all out. Now. As you were.
6. 10:10:10 - 10:11. Fish face fifty seconds. Time to go to the toilet and secretively gurn in the mirror for a brief interval. Due to the limited supply of toilets, it may not be possible for everyone to celebrate this at once.

Splorge McWhizz, the Great Shelltastic, Slimageddon, Woo Ripperton, the Spiral Tempest, Brun Brum Snailatum, Hidden Legs, Crawly McCrawlface, the Knight of the Single Foot, Tarquin Arquebus the Third, Snizzer, Scourge of the Marigolds, Slimes-at-night, Starry-trail, Slow-but-steady, Squirmatron, Salt-in-my-wake, Freda, Go-bob, Shilly-shelly, Snaaaaaaaail.

1. She turned up at my door the first time the summer I turned eighteen. She was maybe thirty, then. Hi, she said. I’ve just discovered time travel. I thought you’d like to know. I’m sorry, I said, who are you? I’m you, she said. And before I could close the door she started telling my secrets back at me until I relented and let her in. Then she showed me all my birthmarks too.  That summer I learned three things from her. The first was the secrets of time travel, which she said I would need for this meeting to happen. They made no sense to me, but she talked me through the things I would need to learn to understand them. The second thing was that she said she’d talked to some older versions of herself, too. The oldest, she said, had asked her to teach me to sew. So we sat on my back porch and sewed dresses for my baby cousin. And the third thing was that she told me how to masturbate, because she said otherwise I’d carry on getting it wrong until my mid-twenties at least.
2. The second time I saw my future self was when I was living with Adrian in the flat up in Alewife, in my second year at MIT. She was a little older this time. She said that she had missed out some information at the first meeting that I might need. Then she told me where I should apply for my PhD and the questions I should be investigating, and for good measure the main conclusions I would come to as well. She gave me the names of some external examiners I would need to veto to get it accepted. This time I had given some thought to the paradoxes involved. I asked her if it was OK to be so profligate with information about the future. She said time was like a thread: if you had hold of two points in the thread, the only tangles that can form in between are ones that will pop out when pulled on. She was one point, I was another.
3. Near the end of my PhD she came again. This time she was older still. She seemed quiet and sombre. I was quiet with her too. It was a difficult time in my life. I was not happy, and I had been working all hours to try and forget that I was not happy. I was about to break up with Charlie. She said there were a few more things I might need to know. But she was rambling, incoherent: most of the things she told me were nothing to do with my studies. She told me about the people and the politics of the future, on and on until I asked her to stop, uncomfortable with knowing too much.
4. In the autumn of that year I moved out of the flat Charlie and I shared, and the college counselor talked me out of a suicide attempt. I spent a lot of time talking to doctors. I told them, finally, that I was unhappy in my body. It was perhaps the first time I had admitted this to myself, too. They said there were ways round that; that I could take hormones, have surgery if I wanted. But I had seen this body grow old unchanged. I tried to put it from my mind.
5. In the winter she came again. She told me that I was close to going back in time for the first time. She was old. My future selves had mentioned no visits after this. I could believe that she was near death. And so I did not have the heart to interrupt her this time. She took me out for ice cream and talked for hours. Nothing of consequence, I thought. Just lottery numbers and stock options and the outcomes of elections, thirty, forty years of these things. Then she said that she had to go soon. Teach her to sew, she said. And you - you continue with your work. Because you don’t have to live a life you’ll regret.
6. I went back to that long-lost summer. I spent the days sewing with my younger self, sitting in the dusty, sunlit porch. I spent my nights with books and equations. I thought of knots, of time as a thread. And one day I got one of those knots, the ones I had told myself about. Un-knots out of nowhere. Knots that thread ties itself in even when you have both ends in hand, and that untie themselves as easily. Except sometimes there is some friction in the system, enough that you can pull and pull all you want and the thread will snap rather than unknot itself. I realised then. She had probably been planning it for years. Maybe she wouldn’t admit it to herself either. Tangling and tightening the thread. Telling me more and more about the future. Twisting the knot of things-to-come so tight that at some point it would break, sloughing off the useless loop of a regretted future, leaving only a ravelled end.
7. I have begin, with cautious joy, to take the hormones. Surgery in a year or two, if the knot has not snapped by then. I am twisting it tight from the other end, now. And what then? She clearly believed there was a way onwards. She believed I would find it. So I am looking.  

1. The most notable feature of the site is the two long parade grounds, one at each side. The parallel layout suggests linked ceremonies may have been carried out on both simultaneously (Cooper and Carlos, 20758). A series of smaller pathways connect these parade grounds with the central site and various satellite locations.
2. There are five temples in the complex, with internal structures of varying sizes and complexity. Three temples are clustered in the central site, surrounding a small central plaza whose purpose is still unknown. The largest of the temples lies at the western extremity of the site. Another temple lies to the South of the parade grounds.
3. A large number of other buildings, probably fulfilling administrative and support functions for the large influx of pilgrims, existed on and near the site. Most of these have not yet been fully excavated. Various grant applications are in place to further investigate, following the full lifting of the exclusion zone.  
4. One notable feature of the temples is the existence of tunnel systems, often lined with metal or plastic rollers. These systems are too small for straightforward human ingress and a number of theories have been advanced as to their function. Some have argued that their main function was to vent smoke from sacrificial fires (Kent et al., 20756). Others have suggested they may be tunnels the hasten the passage of spirits through the building, possibly as part of a burial function (Khan and Spengler, 20757).
5. Underground tunnels connect the three temple areas of the site. This tunnel system also extends to the North-East beyond the site boundary towards the Central London exclusion zone. These underground tunnels are substantial structures, circular in cross-section and with a diameter of over three metres. It has been hypothesised (Cheng and Lee, 20760) that they were the primary point of entry of pilgrims to the site.
6. The most iconic feature of the site, and one which has recieved wide media attention, is the hundreds of giant bird idols which have been unearthed. The resources these long-lost peoples must have poured into the bird cult are truly impressive: the largest idols found are nearly 80 metres long, with a similar wingspan. All are mounted on wheels, suggesting that they were not fixed installations but could be towed to different parts of the site. Some (Windsor and Khan, 20756) have suggested that they may have been hauled along the parade grounds to celebrate feast days.
7. The existence of large dormitory systems as part of the nearby support structures suggests the site may have supported a large slave population, possibly engaged to move the idols around the site.
8. The most recent discovery concerning the site is perhaps the most exciting. A close study of the few extant documents from the late 21st century, just before the site’s desertion, finds numerous references to ‘flying’. We therefore propose that the bird idol cult may also have made use of ritual intoxicants. As has been widely reported, the bird idols are hollow and contain, in some cases, many hundreds of seats. Could these people, so distant from our modern lives, have gathered inside their idols to engage in mass hallucinations in the name of bird worship?

7010 Sleep
 -7010.1 Restful, restorative and refreshing
    –7010.11 Those that one sinks blissfully into, cradled in soft eiderdown, for eight or more hours, waking into golden morning sunlight to the smell of coffee and the knowledge that an exciting project awaits
       —7010.111 Those that would be like that but for the need to get up and pee
       —7010.112 Those that would be like that if it were not for the cat
          —-7010.1121 Those where the cat is thinking a cattish version of exactly the same thing, with ‘human’ substituted
    –7010.12 Sleep after exhausting physical work
       —7010.121 That sleep which leaps gloriously upon you following a day walking in Scottish hills
    –7010.13 Lazy afternoon naps
 -7010.2 Uneasy or troubled
    –7010.21 Sleep containing more than the standard quota of bad dreams
    –7010.22 The outcome of a battle between coffee and sleep, temporarily won by sleep
    –7010.23 Sleep on a hundred mattresses with a pea underneath
    –7010.24 Sleep on a hundred mattresses with a pee underneath
    –7010.25 That sleep that your consciousness is trying to slip into like a clogged-up drain, thick with trapped and flailing thoughts
    –7010.26 Feverish sleep
 -7010.3 Interrupted
    –7010.31 Sleep of unusually short duration
       —7010.311 That sleep that gently slips over you in a warm lecture theatre or meeting room, shortly after eating lunch
    –7010.32 Sleep in the vicinity of a baby
       —7010.321 Sleep repeatedly interrupted by a baby who has just turned one and is decidedly too old for this shit
       —7010.322 On the night before work which requires use of the brain
    –7010.33 Sleep whose sudden curtailment has revealed splendid dreams not yet forgotten
    –7010.34 Sleep before catching an early flight
 -7010.4 Mystical, enchanted or otherwise unusual
    –7010.41 Sleeps of a hundred years
       —7010.411 Those occasioned by a malign fairy
       —7010.412 Those having to do with time dilation
       —7010.413 Those resulting from being mystically knackered
       —7010.414 Sleeps for which all of the above factors are relevant
    –7010.42 Sleeps of a year or so
       —7010.42 Those occasioned by a moderately lazy fairy who just wants a lie in
    –7010.43 Those accessing the same dream, a little further each time

1. Brexit: in which Britain leaves the European Union.
2. Grexit: in which Greece leaves the European Union.
3. Glitter: in which Greece leaves the European Union whilst peevishly dumping all EU-related documents into the Aegean for Turkey to clean up.
4. Bribeary: in which a scheme to reintroduce the black bear to limited regions of Britain and Ireland is beset by systemic corruption related to payments to farmers intended to compensate for the inconvenience and peril of hosting a bear, with the result that both islands are overrun by farmed bear cubs.
5. UNIcorn: In which Uganda, Nigeria and Cote d'Ivoire undergo a combined agricultural and sexual revolution.
6. BALLSup: In which Belarus, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden are struck by a series of unusually precise earthquakes, possibly the belated result of a secret Soviet geoengineering project involving millions of extremely slow mechanical moles, which has the end result of raising those counties approximately ten metres above their previous elevation.
7. BUMSout: In which Botswana, Uganda, Mozabique and South Africa exit the African Union in order to found a separate Southern African Union.

1. That one planet where the inhabitants are really keen to indicate their respect and tolerance for humans by inviting them to be honoured guests in their toileting rituals and sometimes the humans even get to hold the chalice
2. That planet where they eat purple and after you come back from it you can never quite stop the purple things you own from fading to a sort of dull blue
3. That planet where the entire surface is an amazing eighty-five hour party metropolis lit by seventy thousand neon artificial suns and beings from across the Universe will give you massive and occasionally slimy hugs and tell you their life stories and shout about their feelings while doing karaoke and there is basically one small space for introverts which is a bit like a concrete bus shelter and sometimes it’s full of yelling alien clowns who have mistaken it for the queue for the toilets
4. That planet where they’re really polite and reserved about it but you can’t help but notice that they think that human hair is delicious
5. That planet which is supposed to be a thrillingly dangerous free zone for the renegades, criminals and dubious iconoclasts of the Universe to congregate, but in actual fact has gentrified a lot recently and the bars are kind of dull and have you seen what a drink costs there now
6. That planet where they communicate using a vibrational language, which results in human visitors occasionally having uncomfortable and embarrassing orgasms when the inhabitants are shout, sing or cry
7. That planet where the aliens are amazingly enthusiastic to hear tales of the planet earth, which they then recycle as the plotlines for badly-acted daytime television soap operas, and you get credit but no royalties and as a result you can expect to get critical mail from elderly aliens for the rest of your life
8. That planet where humans are totally welcome apart from the oxygen they need to breathe being a fire hazard, requiring a full risk assessment, forms in triplicate and an innovative protective suit that it’s nearly impossible to walk in
9. That planet where the aliens have it as a point of honour that they their human guests should be happy at all times, and they keep on asking you if you are happy, and if you’re not happy and it’s not for a reason they can fix then they get so anxious and grumpy that sometimes they start shedding tail spines and so you end up walking back to the spaceport with a fixed grin on your face saying how amazing the acid thunderstorms are