Listing to Port
Month
1. There was a bookshop that left a crate of books in a damp, unattended cellar for a little too long, and the books went musty and feral. When the crate was finally levered open, a book on British Birds had eaten half the cover of a second edition of Peter Rabbit and a pair of vampire novels had sucked half the other books dry of words and were entwined in a suspiciously damp tangle of pages at the bottom of the box. The bookseller opened up one of the vampire novels and began reading, in hope of seeing if there was some way of retrieving the lost text.
2. By page 238 the vampires, who were languid lovers of elegance who largely obtained their blood off-page, were draping themselves over the mouldering couches of a vacant Los Angeles mansion. It was said to have been left abandoned after the death of a 106-year-old silent movie actress some years before; the true owner was a matter of legal contest, with the estate probably having been left to one of a number of nearly-identical cats. Although the mansion satisfied their craving for glamour, they were uncomfortable with its mirror-heavy decoration. During the daytime the sexier of the two would wander around the shuttered rooms, gazing at their deserted reflections and feeling only half-real. It seemed an odd choice of decor, given that the actress reportedly had had all obtainable trace of her image on screen destroyed. In puzzlement, he turned to her diary, which they had found under a floorboard when looking for a place to hide bones.
3. It was in the third year of the diary, sometime in the mid-60s, that the actress installed the mirrors. By this time she was well into her years of seclusion, and looking after her triplet granddaughters, who had been orphaned the previous year. She dreamed in those days of a house full of children, of laughter and midnight feasts and tears that always stopped when her comfort was offered. But there were never enough children. The mirrors helped her pretend somewhat. But behind everything the house remained, implacably cold and silent, untouched by the brief merriment of three rather melancholy toddlers. On Sundays they gathered in the blue parlour, which had been entirely lined with mirrors, and the actress read fairy stories to her infinitely reflected line.
4. The children were particularly fond of the story of a poor man’s daughter who put on the clothes of a boy and set out on the road through the great forest to find her fortune. By and by she came to the castle of a horned queen, deep in a valley far from the official paths, and entered her service in exchange for protection from a following spirit that she had picked up on her travels. She was given a series of tasks to complete, including finding the queen’s mother’s heart, which had been buried beneath a flagstone, and counting the magpie spirits that came each morning to peck silver leaf from the castle gates, and negotiating with the creatures that used the bottom of the well as an entrance to this world. It seemed that she might inherit the castle if she was successful in all that was set her. But by the end of the tasks she did not want the castle. She asked instead for the Queen’s Book of Secrets, which she kept inside her pillow, and with the book she went down the well and was never seen again.
5. The Book of Secrets contained many things that were hardly known in that day and age. Perhaps it was a leftover from a more knowledgeable time. Though none of them were magic as such, they mainly concerned knowledge that would give one power over others, and devices that could be seen as magical by those who did not know their secrets. One page described how to make a clockwork man, perfect in every detail, and how to maintain the illusion that he was an independent servant (for, as specified in the book, the clockwork man could be made to do a single task, but not to change tasks). Many of these servants had been made in the past, but they had a tendency to outlive their usefulness and end up packed away for centuries. I hear tell that there was a bookshop once found one in a cellar and used him to shift books, but he was forever leaving them in the wrong place.
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. Turner’s Human font. A font in which each letter is made out of people. Owing to the need of people to get up, stretch and pee from time to time, this makes any text written in Turner’s Human necessarily transient. In addition, since each letter in the Latin alphabet requires two or three people, the amount of text that can be set in Turner’s Human is necessarily limited by the population of the Earth. Currently, with a population of around 7 billion, just over half a billion words in English can be set, or enough for about ten copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
2. Fontstars. A short-lived supergroup formed by Times New Roman (on serifs), Helvetica (on bold) and Arial (on kerning). Comic Sans was briefly a member of the group but contributed little besides excess punctuation marks. In later years Times New Roman and Helvetica left the group after an unspecified altercation, being replaced by Papyrus and, later on, Impact. Currently Arial’s involvement is on hiatus, though Papyrus and Comic Sans have been collaborating recently on some novelty text for Christmas.
3. Warrington’s Doctor Font. A font for expressing ambiguous or difficult-to-read cursive text in the modern age. Are you looking for a character which is half-way between a letter r and a letter n? What about a character that could be e or i? With letters such as ‘up-and-down squiggle’ and 'horizontal line with a dip in the middle’, Warrington’s Doctor is the perfect font for expressing unreadable writing in an electronic medium.
4. Dimensional flip text. Instead of proceeding straightforwardly left to right across the page, each letter in dimensional flip text hangs down into the page: that is, on the uppermost page, the part of each letter that is usually rightmost can be seen, and on each subsequent page below another letter slice is visible. Each piece of text therefore requires several pages. Dimensional flip text is extremely difficult to read unless you shave off the paper bit by bit to get to each letter in its hanging-down form. It is consequently useful for text which is intentionally transient.
5. Brick shithouse. With serifs of 100% pure brick and character weight that can be used to stun a burglar, brick shithouse is the font of choice for angry ransom demands and letters to the Daily Mail.
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.
The First Feast
The feast is held in a nautically-themed basement, somewhere in a distant and unedifying part of town. A reproduction of the last feast on the Titanic is served by a host of waiters in Pierre et Gilles sailor-boy costumes. As soon as the doors are closed, the noise of a tremendous rainstorm can be heard. A drip develops in the centre of the table. The first few courses are accompanied by the sounds of water trickling under the door.
By the third course, the floor is covered with a thin skim of water. The guests splash their way to the toilet, then back to their seats. The outside door is locked. By the fifth course, the waiters are wading through a foot of water, their sailor costumes damp and see-through. For the eighth course, the table is winched clear of the rising waters. The guests stand to eat their asparagus vinaigrette. By the tenth course, the guests must swim to recieve their peach and chartreuse jelly, delivered through a hatch in the ceiling.
The jelly is spiked with a powerful sleeping draught. The guests awake the next morning, alone, on a bare raft somewhere in the North Sea.
The Second Feast
The invitation states, wear masks. To avoid confusion, you are informed beforehand in a splendidly-typeset letter as to who of the others will be wearing which mask. The room has black, glassy-smooth reflective walls. Once the meal is served, it becomes apparent that nothing is what you expected it to be. The water is vodka. Eggs are served which have the white centrally, surrounded by a layer of yolk. A cake is brought in that is made entirely from meat; a game course sewed inside the skin of chicken legs; chocolates that are made from cheese. The final course is the facsimile of a full roast dinner in cake, marzipan and fondant.
At the end of the meal, the masks are removed. No-one is who you were told they were.
When you get home, the door of your house will be curiously ajar and small items will have been moved from their usual places.
The Third Feast
The third feast is held in a library. You are familiar with this library, but you were never aware of the room the feast is held in. It is behind a curiously nondescript door, which seems as though it might lead to a broom cupboard but in fact leads to a high-ceilinged gallery filled with all manner of obscure volumes. The head librarian meets you there, carrying a tray of magnetic letters. The letter you choose determines the meal that is served to you.
One might choose P and be led to a purple parlour, where peacock pate, partridge with pickled pear and pomegranates would be served; or A, and be led to an alcove in which waiters dressed as angels would offer asparagus, artichokes, andouillettes and amaretto. Those who choose X are strapped to a cruciform frame and spoon-fed a limp cross of xanthan gum. The unlucky few who choose Z are fed zebra steaks laced with opium, and sleep for the majority of the meal.
The next morning, the guests find a letter tattooed, discreetly, in the crook of their arm; but it is not always the letter they chose.
The Fourth Feast
The fourth feast is held in the room at the top of a tower, in a circular room with chequerboard windows of red and white stained glass. When the guests have taken their places at the round table, the ladder is drawn away and they are shut in.
After some time waiting, it becomes apparent that the cutlery is only a crude facsimile, and is in fact silver-painted biscuit and quite edible. The table decorations are inflatable and pressurised by soup. Shortly after this, the guests realise that the plates are fake, too; they form the second course. A valve is found whereby the windows can be drained of their central layers of red and white wine to reveal clear glass and the surrounding forest. A layer peels off the table to reveal the third course, and by deconstructing their chairs they are able to extract the fourth, which is hidden in the legs like marrow in bones.
By now it is well past midnight, and still no-one comes. Inspecting the walls, the guests find that some bricks can be removed. These bricks are chocolate-framed replicas, containing splendid puddings. The holes left by their absence form a ladder, by which they can descend the tower and go home.
The Fifth Feast
The first course is a food course. The second course is a sex course. They alternate in quick succession, until no-one can quite remember what they are supposed to be doing with their hands and mouths.
The Sixth Feast
The sixth feast is a replica of the funeral feast of King Midas. It is held in a remote country house, lit by dim lamps and perfumed with incense; a greek orthodox choir can be heard at times throughout the proceedings, although they are never seen. The black-clad waiters are hired magicians, sleight-of-hand artists and illusionists. Throughout the meal, they stealthily replace the items in the hall by exact replicas in pure gold, beginning subtly (table decorations, door handles, strolling peacocks) and ending with the cutlery as the guests are using it to eat dessert. As a finale, the waiters line up to pull the tablecloth out from under its contents. The guests laugh drunkenly over their honey wine, expecting a golden table; but instead the house disappears, and they are left, bereft of riches, on a low hill in the dim light of early sunrise.
The Seventh Feast
Jaded and tired, the guests meet on a ship in international waters. After making certain preparations, they secretly draw straws and then retire to their cabins. Later that evening, avatars of each guest meet at a virtual-reality table, where they share their thoughts on the splendid meal that is being served to each, individually, in separate parts of the ship. The guests know that one of their number is not real, but is instead an AI which has been supplied with certain knowledge about that person. The missing person forms the prime ingredient in the banquet they are eating.
Nostalgic for their first feast, they later sink the boat.
On the road at the moment, so here is an old list-like thing from t'other blog.
1. On this day, 10 years ago: you said something to a friend that you’ve suddenly realised accidentally came out as kind of insulting. You do realise that your friends probably haven’t had any respect for you since then, don’t you? You should apologise. Only it’s been a really long time, so you’d need a really big apology and they’re still going to think you’re a bit off.
2. Did you know? One of the first symptoms of throat cancer can be a sore throat!
3. You also have one new invitation to something you won’t enjoy by someone who’s taking pity on your social ineptness.
4. Fun fact! A gamma ray burst in the Milky Way could lead to a mass extinction event on Earth!
5. Don’t forget! 12:40 a.m., tomorrow, you’re scheduled to have that dream about the exam hall. Should I notify you 10 minutes beforehand so you can get there in time for everyone to see you have no clothes on, or shall I skip the reminder so that you arrive late and naked?
1. Cutlass Fogarty’s hoard of pony charms. This is a completely legit hoard, they’re made of gold and everything. In fact, Cutlass Fogarty was an unusually successful pirate within the bounds of his niche idiom, and by 1672 he had pretty much gathered up the global supply of pony charms. The only problem is, he was a bit too good at hiding them. It is said that he was finally persuaded to make a map with an ‘X’ on it on his deathbed, but owing to scaling issues the 'X’ covered most of Western Australia.
2. The Holy Omelette of Pope Valentine. Nearly all trace of this relic has been erased from history by some kind of sinister cabal, but it definitely passed into pirate hands in 1890 following the sinking of the Marlborough. For some years there was a rumour that it had been accidentally served up in a restaurant in Punta Arenas in 1922, but was returned to the kitchen due to its unacceptably damp and stale state. Its current location is unknown.
3. John Bonham’s Lost Hoard. John Bonham was in reality Jane, the rather bored daughter of a successful Kentish leather merchant. With little else to do, she decided to embark upon a short-lived but briefly notorious career of piracy along the Thames. Although she had a knack for alarming violence, she did not have a very discerning eye for treasure and as a result her hoard is said to be mostly trinkets, knick-knacks, sentimental dog pictures and the like. It may well be, therefore, that it has in fact been found but dismissed as a rubbish heap.
4. The Golden Chest of Jacques Le Dildo. This hoard is notorious amongst hunters of pirate treasure. Its location is in fact quite easily discernible. The chest, however, is entirely full of live and extremely lairy crabs. Jacques Le Dildo was very fond of crabs, and may in fact have set it up as some kind of crab hatchery.
5. The sacred cave of the Sisters of Hellfire. The Sisters of Hellfire were a renegade order of nuns who took an unusually direct approach to the problem of sacred works being sullied by profane, profit-obsessed owners. Over five decades of raiding, they are said to have amassed a huge collection of fine art, sculpture and relics. They are believed at this point to have retired from piracy and reverted to a more normal type of sacred order; the only difference being a hidden cave beneath their new nunnery, accessible only to the more senior orders.
6. Jack of the Split Ear. Jack considered the greatest treasure of all to be freedom, and as a result his famous chest is empty of everything except symbolism.
7. The Cursed Barquentine of Port Harcourt. The curse, as it turns out, is both real and pertinent to the nature of this treasure. Following an unfortunate incident (said by some to be the deliberate ramming of a peaceful sea serpent by a drunken crew), the brigantine was cursed with eternal seasickness. As a result, their adventures in search of treasure were usually unsuccessful. They also needed somewhere below decks to vomit, and their store of large empty chests soon proved useful for this purpose. In addition, the wreck is still cursed. You probably do not want to go there.
1. Daisy’s Automatic Kibble-o-mat. A laser detection system continually scans the central part of the food bowl. If any part of the bowl base becomes visible, an alarm sounds and an order for three hundred tonnes of salmon is made at the nearest online retailer with same-day delivery.
2. Dave Kitler’s PRODBOT. PRODBOT takes on the onerous task of getting up at 5am to prod the owner into opening a can of kitty food. While the cat has a much-needed lie-in, PRODBOT launches itself onto the owner’s bed and extends its patented claw attachment to provide regular face-batting. PRODBOT is programmable with six different miaows, including ‘get up now, I have just been sick’, 'get up now, there’s probably a dead mouse in the hall’, and 'GET UP NOW!!!’. The 2016 update also includes an award-winning solicitation purr.
3. Princess’s Cat Calendar. Does your cat forget when flea or worm treatment is due? Do they have cause to regret trustingly approaching you as you shake a bag of kitty treats, before scooping them up in a towel and forcing a buttered pill down their throat? Then they need Princess’s Cat Calendar! Fully customisable with a range of easily-recognisable sad and angry cat icons, Princess’s Cat Calendar ensures that cats need never be in the house on a regularly scheduled medicine night again.
4. Mr. Tibbles’ Patent Litter Reassurer. Does your cat get anxious that they may not have buried their excretions sufficiently? Place Tibbles’ Patent Reassurer near the litter area, and your cat will recieve a stream of comforting messages as they poo and clean up, including 'it’s OK’, 'no predator is ever going to find that’ and 'really, you can stop scratching the wall now, it doesn’t do anything.’ Perfect for the cat who poos outside the box.
5. Godzilla Fishface Jones II’s Outdoors Reboot Button. A highly successful invention that sadly plays on the credulity and poor memory of many cats, the Reboot Button has been widely distributed despite its complete lack of function. Godzilla Fishface Jones II claims that her invention has the power to change the state of the outdoor world to one more amenable to cats, e.g. not raining, less windy, no snow, fewer enemy cats, etc. The cat should simply come in, discreetly hit the reboot button, and then request to go out again. Although this fairly obviously does not work, most cats have too short an attention span to claim their money back or, indeed, notice that the product is not working.
1. There was a man who had a secret. He had always felt it was a very bad secret, and perhaps it was. But he had spent so long trying to avoid it that it was like a heavy stone in his mind that he could steer the waters of his thought around; the consequence being that all his thoughts were twisted round it, but never quite touched it. One day, after many years, he finally turned his thought towards it. But all he found, to his surprise, was a hole. He felt an odd sense of loss, as if he had suddenly been erased from the dictionary. After that, his secret became that he had lost his secret, and his story remained that the secret was too bad to tell.
2. There was a man who told him that no secret was too bad to tell, and then proceeded to tell him four or five things that could perhaps not quite be called secrets any more. And his real secret was that he liked it: all the telling of his vulnerable stories, the rush of it, showing his woundable parts to someone else like an upended snail.
3. There was a woman who comforted him one time, and she told him in reply that she had no secrets and no stories. Her secret, of course, was that this was not at all true. Once, as a child, someone had told her that good girls were smooth, seamless. That they lived lived like unblemished eggs, with no way in, beautiful and without feature. It was hard, very hard. But she built that egg, piece by piece, and sealed everything with awkward edges inside.
4. One time she was talking to a woman who replied in turn that she once found an egg inside an egg; an incredible curiosity. The story was well-honed and came out at parties a lot. Her secret was that it had never happened. She had read about it happening to someone else. She felt that her life was not very interesting. Why not add a little extra wonder, why not live some kind of magic realist life? Once, she told the story to a famous actor, and she later read an interview where he claimed the story as his own. Ever since then she had known a kind of smug kinship.
5. Here was the actor’s other story: when he was a child, he saw seven magpies in a storm, tumbling fighting through the sky across the roofs of the housing estate. And after that he always thought he must have a tremendous secret, waiting and gestating somewhere inside him. But as the years went by he realised that the real secret was that he didn’t have one. What is your secret, a fan would ask. I can’t tell you, he would say. And then he’d tell the magpie story.
6. Here is the fan’s secret. She didn’t want to go to bed with the actor, though she sensed that he might ask her, and that she might even accept. What she wanted was to be him. Under her leather jacket she had his tattoos, and sometimes she went for walks out in the flat fields, under the huge skies of her home lands, with her breasts bound. Twenty, thirty, forty miles. And when she came home she went into shops she didn’t know and imagined she was the actor, incognito.
7. Here is the secret of the shop assistant: she knew. She always knew. Somehow she was very good at knowing, when people came in, the things that they were not going to tell her. At first, she would slip these things into conversation in a smug way. By and by she came to know that most of the customers were not comforted by this, and so she stopped. But one day a man came into the shop and she could not tell his secret at all. It was as if it was missing.
1. What’s in the lorry? The point of this game is to speculate as to the contents of the nearest lorry (excluding those with visible loads). As there is no way of knowing if you are right, no points are awarded.
2. Murder mystery. Someone has committed a murder and is even now in their getaway vehicle, on the road with you! Possibly. Your job is to observe your fellow travellers (either in your vehicle or other vehicles) and deduce the guilty party and the details of the murder.
3. Red car stack. How many red cars can you see in a row? You win that number of points.
4. Traffic news bingo. For this you will need a list of your favourite congestion and accident hotspots and a radio with travel news reports.
5. Apocalypse now. The point of this game is to speculate what would happen if an apocalypse of your favoured type (zombie, massive earthquake, asteroid strike, plague etc.) were to start right at this moment. Where would you go? What would you do? How quickly would the road snarl up? Etc.
6. Make a banana. A banana is when you see a yellow car next to a brown car, or, better yet, several cars of each colour together. Alternatively, you can also score a point if you see an actual banana. Pictures of bananas on lorries count as well. Banana.
7. Roadkill or shipping container. You score a point if you correctly guess what you’re going to see on the road next: a dead animal or a shipping container. Entities already visible at the time of the guess do not count.
8. Where’s the letter Y gone? Participants endeavour to keep a letter Y outside the car visible for as long as possible, primarily by looking at numberplates.
9. Count your toes. A fun game for fans of repetition.
10. Road stories. Pick a passing car whose inhabitants and contents are visible. Where do you think they are going, and for how long? What is that dog in the car thinking about? Why the red canoe? Etc.
11. Lorry driver’s elbow. Next time you go past a lorry, note the size of the driver’s visible elbow. Will the next lorry driver elbow you see be bigger or smaller? Score a point if you are right.
12. Placename stories. Your job is to deliberately misinterpret placenames that you pass to make them into parts of a story (e.g. ‘Maida Vale’ -> 'Made of Ale’; 'Loughton Court’ -> 'Lout un-caught’ etc.). Score one point per un-forced happy ending.
4421 Trees
-4421.1 Seeds, saplings and young trees
–4421.11 Those that are unfortunately eaten by squirrels
—4421.111 Those that eventually grow from a mound of squirrel shit
–4421.12 Those that have fallen from famous and notorious trees, and as a consequence are spread around the world by seekers of curious souvenirs
–4421.13 Spindly saplings in deep shade
–4421.14 Those that grow up plastic poles on the side of new roads
–4421.15 Those that have found their own good place
-4421.2 Mature trees
–4421.21 Those that provide shade in a thunderstorm
—4421.211 Trees that a thousand teenagers have kissed beneath and carved their names on
–4421.22 Great old oak trees in the middle of cornfields
–4421.23 Those that are the joyous haunt of birds
–4421.24 Those grow at jagged angles on cliffs
-4421.3 Living trees of great antiquity
–4421.33 Merged together with treehouses of great complexity
–4421.33 Those that have fallen into the arms of younger trees
–4421.34 Those containing a startling array of snails
-4421.4 Dead trees
–4421.41 Hollow trunks with great beetle-y cavities within
–4421.42 Fallen logs
–4421.43 Carved into statues, poles or similar
–4421.44 Carved into masks
–4421.45 As planks and boards
—4421.451 Treehouses
–4421.46 As paper and cardboard
—4421.461 The paper in books about trees
—-4421.4611 The paper in books about books about trees
-4421.5 Trees only existing in story, myth or legend
–4421.51 Those that walk at night
–4421.52 Those that eat people
–4421.53 Those that steal books
—4421.531 Those that steal books to mourn their relatives buried therein
—4421.532 Those that steal books and casually read them
–4421.54 Those that have fruit of peculiar potency
-4421.6 Secret or mysterious trees
–4421.61 Those that have treasure hidden beneath
–4421.62 Those containing the hearts of ancient witches
-4421.7 Trees existing partly or wholly outside our plane of existance
–4421.71 Trees whose only human-perceptible part is the root
-4421.8 Trees not covered by the previous categories
1. There was once a small public library in Dorking which had a book that one could get lost in. Many books are said to have this property; however, this book had it to an unusual and somewhat dangerous degree. The average time lost in the book was approximately three days, after which point readers would emerge hungry, thirsty and glad that they had not left the gas on. After a number of deaths were attributed to the volume, it was thrown into a locked strongbox by a courageous librarian and dropped from a ferry into the North Sea. It is not recorded exactly which book it was, though I believe it was shelved with the large print doctor-nurse romance section.
2. In the private library of the Duke of Norfolk, for some years, there existed a set of small, yellow books entitled ‘The Trap, Volumes 1-10’. In this case, the title was entirely appropriate, since the books were engineered to violently snap shut on readers’ fingers. Their origin is unknown, but perhaps was some kind of practical joke. In any case, they no longer exist, having been added to a compost pile in 1872. One of the metal frames was preserved as a curiosity and may be viewed in the library to this day.
3. There was a book once that was banned from a bar at the request of its owner, who was tired of having the book come home mysteriously soaked in gin. It is possible that the book had help in its drinking exploits but if so then the real culprit seems to have gotten off scot-free. I believe this book still exists, but it smells a little and some of the pages are stuck together.
4. A Concise Atlas of Eastern Nevada, 1872. Possibly the world’s most pornographic atlas, owing to the unfortunate habit of its compiler, Fred Carson, of doodling various scenes of copulation in the blanker bits of maps. When challenged in court, Fred claimed that, firstly, doodling in the blank bits is an ancient map-making tradition and, secondly, he only ever drew things he had actually seen occurring at each location. These were not accepted as excuses by the court, which did its level best to eradicate all copies. However, it is believed that some issues still remain in the collections of local connoisseurs of that kind of thing.
5. Sidthorpe’s Comprehensive Encyclopaedia of Moles. Only a hundred copies of this tome were ever printed, the publishers rightly assuming that its audience would be limited. However, something peculiar must have happened during the printing process, because owners of the Comprehensive Encyclopaedia soon began complaining that the book would occasionally open by itself. Worse yet, if nobody was about a small grungy kind of goblin-thing would lean out of the book and unleash a thin stream of goblin-piss onto the nearest flat surface. All copies were pulped at the request of the book’s mortified author, one Mrs. Elizabeth Jane Sidthorpe. In later years she came to believe that the incident was punishment for pissing in a fairy ring as a small child.
1. There was a time that all the bats of the world and all the owls of the world gathered together, somewhere near Marrakesh. They brought with them a great host of white moths, who covered the trees like snowfall until the moon came up, at which point they all whirled into the sky. I am not entirely sure what the bats and owls intended to do together, but in the event they spent the night eating moths and singing mournful songs part-way out of human hearing.
2. As every time traveller knows, there is an awesome party in the late Cretaceous. Nobody is invited to this one; you have to gatecrash or not go at all. Nobody is entirely sure how it started.
3. There was a night when all the people were asleep, even those who were supposed to be working, though they had particularly vivid dreams. That night, London and New York and Tokyo lifted up their built-up skirts and crawled on hundreds of legs to central Siberia, trailing their metro systems behind them. They drank snowmelt water and whispered some of the secrets of great cities between themselves, before trying each other’s landmarks on. Later, Lhasa and Luanda crashed the party and led the cities in a game or two of ‘I have never’. Two of the cities kissed, but I am not telling you which. Many of you did go to this one, of course. You were just asleep. By morning they were back in place, although they left some curious marks across Greenland if you know where to look.
4. Once all the letters had a party and when they woke up they were totally in your favourite book. Except they were in the wrong places; in places where letters aren’t supposed to be. So they waited until the hour before dawn and then ran off across the floor, and they didn’t stop running until they reached a pile of pizza delivery leaflets, where they were able to assume a disguise as typos.
5. There was that party at Anxiety’s place. You know Anxiety? Great guy, hangs around with Insecurity a lot. Anyway, all your friends were invited! But not you. Don’t worry, nobody noticed at all. Until later on in the evening when your name came up and everyone laughed at your badly-hidden flaws.
1. When you are no longer interested in the world
2. When the physical body dies
3. When the last person who remembers you dies
4. When the last piece of physical evidence that you lived is gone
5. When the last member of your species dies
6. When no living beings remain in the Universe
7. When the Universe itself comes to an end
1. Open the black bag and place parts A, B and C together. Talk to part D nicely, until it reverts into the recessed position. Parts E and F will be delivered when they are needed; slot them in place behind the lintel.
2. Place against a wall in direct sunlight (Side N1 must be flush against a vertical surface). Fill the reservoir (G) with potable liquid. Clanking noises are normal at this point. If they are disturbing your sleep, a muffling device (H1) is sold separately.
3. Important: once the initial phase has developed, the surface behind the device may become inaccessible. Placement should be chosen with this in mind.
4. Keep the reservoir topped up. On feast days, wine or beer may be appreciated. Make sure to prune any extraneous shoots. Diagram F12 shows the proper orientation of growth and should be consulted frequently. Once growth is well-established, the device may start attracting ladybirds. Wipe them off whenever they become too dense.
5. Keep an eye on the red indicator. When it turns purple, you should be able to open door Q. Don’t step inside just yet.
6. Send off the attached postcard to initiate delivery of pack R and rations S. Although we recommend using only the officially-developed supplies, it is possible to enter the device using your own. In either case, no legal responsibility is taken for what may occur. When you feel ready, open door Q, using torch K for illumination. Bring stout walking boots and a supply of spare batteries.
7. Remember to close grille G1 behind you, and DO NOT open any of the accessory hatches. Good luck!
1. There was a switch on a metro train, and somehow something hit it.
2. It was a warm Sunday in July, and there were major delays. In the third carriage, a builder and a singer got to talking over the next hour, and later on they went out of their way to share part of the journey home.
3. Ten years later, they had a baby daughter, who was brown and perfect and who liked to play among the lavender bushes.
4. The daughter had a daughter who had a daughter, and so on for a few hundred more generations. Eventually nearly everyone on the planet was descended from her; and her lavender-loving genes spread out into space.
5. There were seven more races that could perhaps be called human before the race between disasters and ingenuity took a sinister turn. But by then, the seventh humans had made something rather like robots in their own image, and the robots survived. They spent some millions of years being confused between a number of simulation cultures, but eventually they decided that they probably had the right reality and commenced to live in it.
6. The robot societies spread out over the Galaxy, though they did it the slow way. Fortunately, they could afford to wait; though, by the time they had reached some of the more distant stars, they were much-changed.
7. Eventually, one by one, the robot stars winked out, leaving an occasional lost city hurtling through the void on planets that had come loose from their systems. And there were three or four other civilisations that came from different places, and one or two of them knew of the lost cities and told stories about what they thought might have happened there. Though they were never quite right, it must be said.
8. The Universe gently skated over the crest of its near-infinite expansion and began to draw back in. By this time life had more or less worn itself out, though it had a few brief and bright late flowerings in the heat and chaos near the end of time. It seemed there was a chain connecting their feverish stories to the old ones, though there is not enough space in anyone’s mind to enumerate the links of it.
9. Time ended and it all began again.
Before the entrance of the diners, the hall is prepared. The shutters are gilded and bolted shut. Great basins of clover are placed in front of them. A chandelier of beaten gold is raised, and a choir sits in the upper balcony and chants plainsong. A fire is lit in the hearth, over which some unidentifiable large meat object is placed for roasting.
1. Entrance of the diners. Each is served a thimble of champagne and three compliments, which are delivered by lissom young gentlemen in satin jackets. Each diner takes their place at the table and is draped in a large velvet cloak. The cloaks are curiously uncomfortable; they are much too hot for the hall, which is already a little stifling, and they are covered on the inside with large, stiff patches displaying the logos of the banquet sponsors.
2. A great black dish is brought to the table. It is made of cast iron and requires ten servants to carry. These servants are dressed as chimney sweeps and after their brief service they will be thrown out on the street with pay of one Cornish pasty each. The central lights are dimmed, and candles are lit amongst the clover basins. The lid is removed, to great fanfare. Hundreds of bees fly out. The host explains that this course contains no food, but that a delivery of bees is required to pollinate the clover. Water is served.
3. There is a parade of gentlemen in sharp suits through the room. Goodness, but they are well-dressed. A jester, dancing before them, showers the air with cocaine. The gentlemen pass through the room into some other room beyond high table, and we do not see them again. Slices of bread are served, but run out before the bottom of the table is reached. The diners are encouraged to fight for the bread; after ten minutes, those without bread are deemed to obviously not want food, and are thrown out.
4. The choir sings works by John Tavener and Arvo Part. Three banquet supervisors make the rounds of the table, asking for contributions for the choir, who are volunteers. Great flat black pebbles are served, with a single walnut half on top and a drop of salad cream. The supervisors explain that, for a fee, diners may get the pebbles monogrammed in gold and take them home.
5. The fourth course: representatives of major fast-food chains wheel golden trollies around the hall, offering a selection of iconic meals for fifteen pounds each. The choir sing a medley of jingles designed to increase hunger and promote careless purchases. Meanwhile, a group of cheeky young bucks of long and certified pedigree creep beneath the table and anaesthetise the feet of the diners, before stealing their shoes.
6. Diners are given a form to fill in to determine if they are worthy of dessert, citing income, work ethic, and a time they solved a personal challenge in an enterprising way. The five souls deemed worthy get to sit at a small table in the centre of the room and eat flaccid chocolate mousse, with everyone else gathered around to observe their shining example.
7. End of the banquet. A selection of bright, humming and flashing fluorescent tubes are switched on. Two Tudor-esque servants wander in, scratching their arses. They douse the fire, retrieve the roasting meat and take it through to the back room. The cloaks are removed and the guests presented with dry-cleaning bills. On the way out, they are offered employment as servers in the back room for the rest of the evening, but are unable to accept; indeed, most are having trouble even walking (given the foot anaesthetic, their lack of shoes, and the fact that the floor is strewn with dead and dying bees). This is entirely OK, provided that they pay a surcharge.
The next day, the newspapers report positively on the entrepreneurial spirit of the young bucks, recounting as a footnote that some wasters of no consequence were caught stumbling down the road.
6030 People
-6030.1 Small people
–6030.11 Babies
—6030.111 When they are wailing in the middle of the night
—6030.112 When they are snuggled-up and milk-drunk
—6030.113 At the age when one has mentally categorised them as something like a puppy, and they suddenly do something intelligent
–6030.21 Children
—6030.121 Real children
—6030.122 Children in stories of children, written by adults
—6030.123 Children in the imagination of children, reflecting backwards in an infinite spiral
–6030.31 People who are merely slightly shorter than oneself
-6030.2 People encountered out in the world
–6030.21 Those who are like you
—6030.221 Those who are like you inside, but sufficiently different outside that you do not immediately think so
–6030.22 Those who are not like you
–6030.23 Those who may or may not be, depending on your definition of ‘like’
–6030.24 Those who operate within the social contract of their time and place
—6030.241 Those who use the social contract to perform iffy deeds
—6030.242 Those who can only operate within the social contract after long study
-6030.5 Those who are easily categorised into a small number of different groups
–6030.51 Those who are happy at this categorisation
-6030.5 Those who are a source of gorgeous mystery
-6030.6 People who are made of ice-cream, butter or sugar
-6030.7 People who make music
-6030.9 Those who are in fact some number of moles dressed up in a trenchcoat, mask and hat
1. The clouds are low and thick near to the edge of the world, and a determined person may climb up into them and squelch around (although it is very wet up there and there is not much of a view). There are several species of trees that grow upside-down, reaching roots into the air in the hope of snaring a passing cloud.
2. The houses at the edge of the world are low and made of light wood, and when the wind rolls in from the edge they sometimes lift up and float; a stout rope being required to make sure that they do not blow away. They say the people who live there have light bones, like birds, and their skin is very dark.
3. Some days the forests catch all the clouds, and on these days the sun is bright and low and fierce and burning, and the beaches and deserts of the edge-world are a syrupy pinky-gold in the light and too hot to walk on.
3. There are birds who fly out to the edge of the world and keep on going, as if they have set their compass by a distant star. These birds never come back, but fortunately there are enough birds in the world to bear their loss.
4. There is an ancient postal service there which uses trained turtles to carry letters. In theory, I believe, one could send a postcard to the edge of the world and back, although it would need a sequence of addresses to make it though all the postal systems in between.
5. The mountains out there, such as they are, lean away from the edge. They have the appearance of low and worn teeth. Sometimes, when the edge-wind blows particularly strongly, rocks roll up their slopes and launch into the air from their summits.
6. Sometimes the earth creaks on its unnatural axis, out by the edge, and the sound is deafening. Great flocks of tawny gulls rise up from the beaches when this happens, and circle over the edge-waters (which are shallow and fast-running) for a day or more until they feel it is safe to land again.
1. Aethelbert’s Torr. This is a negative tower, that is to say, it reaches down into the earth rather than up into the sky, and it is of great antiquity. It is most often encountered in dreams, in various forms. The most common is the dream-trope of a familiar building with extra structures, in this case the extension of a staircase or lift shaft down into the earth beyond its usual limits. Aethelbert’s Torr is thought to have originally been associated with dreams of barrows and mortuary houses, but has diversified into many other forms over the many years of its existence. However, there generally remains a suggestion that something dead may be in its unusual depths.
2. The Tower of Dornock’s Drift. This otherwise-unremarkable tower has been noted as standing on cliffs overlooking the sea in several old chronicles. When cross-referenced, however, it is notable that at least ten different cliffs are mentioned; and no tower, or remains, are visible at any of those locations. There also remains a curious account of a hermit at Beachy Head that the tower was seen to rise into the sky on a pillar of flame on New Year’s Eve, but had returned the next day.
3. The Necessity Lighthouse. The necessity lighthouse is an odd enigma. It only appears in moments of uttermost darkness; although some of its features seem to suggests that it was intended to appear to those on states of deep spiritual or emotional trouble, it has only been observed in literal states of lightlessness. Thus those in trouble in caves, shuttered rooms at night, or in some cases out on very cloudly nights have occasionally seen its distant beams. Its appearance has also been reproduced in the laboratory in a specially-designed light-free chamber. There are thus some who hypothesise that the necessity lighthouse is in fact just an illusion caused by the eye’s reaction to complete darkness. Less well known is that the subject of the lighthouse experiment claimed to have been able to approach the lighthouse and walk round it, noting the phrase ‘You can do this’ in purple paint around its lower levels. The subject was not observed to move during the experiment.
4. Many examples of clocks featuring elaborate automata, donated by Western emissaries during the Qing dynasty, may be seen in the hall of Clocks in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Less well-known is the Clockwork Tower, a somewhat over-elaborate but fully-inhabitable mechanical tower with many fascinating automatic features. It is thought to have been a gift from a rather over-enthusiastic Venetian noble in 1760. As well as extending, in a not-at-all-phallic way, from three stories to seven at the push of a button, the clockwork tower was also able to scuttle sideways on ten mechanical legs. Observers described it as looking a little like a top-heavy crab. Unfortunately, one day it managed to scuttle right out of beijing and was never seen again. One assumes it must be hiding out somewhere in the Chinese countryside.
1. Consider a perfectly spherical cow of 1 metre diameter and uniform density. This cow needs milking. How are you going to do it?
2. I am pointing a 15 MW laser at the back of your head right now. No, don’t turn around. I’m not asking you to solve this problem, I’m just suggesting that you do have a problem here and asking you to acknowledge it. I probably won’t turn the laser on.
3. Derive Maxwell’s equations. To do this, you will need to use the fundamental constants pi and c. Note: both of these constants are hungry and one of them needs a wee. Your derivation will probably proceed much more smoothly if you can sort out their needs first.
4. Consider two trains of mass m speeding towards each other. Train 1 is travelling at 50% of the speed of light, and train 2 at 20% of the speed of light. You are a passenger on train 2. Roughly how much energy will be released when they crash, and don’t you think you’d better find a way to get off before answering this question?
5. You are in a Hollywood film in which Love is postulated as the fifth fundamental force. Derive a plausible extension of the Standard Model of particle physics to include the Love Force, based on its observed effects at a macro level (flushed cheeks, hormonal release, last-minute assignations in airports, etc.).
1. Doris Fnorling-Burteley, 1811 - 1920, is mainly known as the first person to explore Woking. Admittedly many people were there living there first, but this did not stop Doris, whose single-minded devotion to surveying the town resulted in a gorgeous compilation of charts, anthropological studies and illustrative plates known to scholars as the Woking Chronicles. A small plaque near Woking Crematorium celebrates her life and works.
2. Sir Audsley Stephenson, 1820 - 2980 (non-consecutive). Sir Audsley is a curious figure, thought to have been inducted into the secrets of time travel by an inter-temporal jewel thief who he caught and seduced in the act of trying to steal his ancestral opals. Although a keen reader of traveller’s tales, Sir Audsley was an almost obsessive refuser of spatial travel. Some have speculated that he experienced motion sickness of unusual severity. Instead, Air Audsley explored his West London mansion and grounds through time, initial concentrating on a single temporal dimension but subsequently making excursions in several others. Unfortunately, nearly all of his works are classified documents and many are considered too pornographic for general consumption. After his death, a selection of monographs were declassified under the strict understanding that they must not be transported back in time. A small detatchment of the neo-Venusian time police in 3011 was dedicated to shadowing Sir Audsley and his works and eradicating the many paradoxes his careless time travel created.
3. Jane Cook, 1831 - 1871. Mrs. Cook was an otherwise unremarkable Victorian housewife who dedicated her life to exploring maps; that is to say, many hours of her time were spent with a magnifying glass, paper and pencil, obsessively documenting the minute ridges, furrows and flaws across her well-worn map of central York to create a new map at double-scale. Subsequently, she mapped her double-scale map and the resulting quadruple-scale map, returning to this exercise another five times before being crushed by a mound of stray paper at age 40.
4. John ‘Cartophage’ Russell-Johnson, 1837-1920. If his tales are to be believed, John Russell-Johnson single-handedly accomplished many of the greatest feats of exploration of the Victorian era, including navigating the Northwest passage, reaching the North Pole, and the discovery of a lost city in the Amazon rainforest. Sadly, however, his persistent habit of eating his maps, documents and usually shoes when faced with adversity on the return journey means that no documentation or proof of his exploits is available.
1. Think of a number, any number. Add four, and multiply by two. Subtract six. Divide by two. Subtract the number you started with. Now, what do you end up with?
2. There was a number that was caught in a maze, very like the one just constructed, and had to eat its way out. It was a dangerous process, costing an amateur mathematician three fingers and a chunk of thigh meat.
3. The mathematician was stitched up by a doctor at the tallest hospital in the world, which had just been constructed. It was twice as tall as any other building in the world, and one could look down from its upper floors at clouds passing by. All the staff at the hospital were new and none of them knew their way around.
4. The doctor got lost on his way home and had to sleep in a broom cupboard in the kidney department. He had a dream about being served a meal of purple food by a mysterious veiled woman. It would have been such a good dream, if only boiled beets, candied violets, red cabbage, blackcurrants, roast aubergines and plums had had some kind of joint flavour affinity.
5. The woman closed the door of the dream and took off her veil. Then she poled her boat along the river to the next dream she was contracted to appear in and put on a great cloak of peacock feathers. It was a dream for an aging judge, who was to be bent double in a box and whispered to.
6. The judge, however, was late for her dream, because it was snowing that night and the traffic around London had tied itself into a historic knot. It was the sort of knot that one gets in sewing thread, requiring only gentle pulling (or in this case, the movement of a single, unremarkable car) to undo. But nobody had the wider perspective to see this, so it remained in place all night until a squadron of police officers painstakingly cut and unravelled the thread elsewhere.
7. The road’s four lanes became a silent, black-and-white maze of snowy vehicles, navigated by blanket-wrapped figures. The driver of the car at the heart of the knot spent the night with twenty other drivers who had decamped to a nearby lorry with a heating system. They played cards all night and thought up increasingly ridiculous terms for snow. Hey, said the lorry driver, as dawn began to break. Think of a number.
Heart’s Ease, 1596
A pair of twins, Diana and Francisca, are separated at birth when the ship they are travelling in is wrecked. Diana is found on the shore by Antonio, a servant to the Duke of Milan, and is brought up in the Ducal household. Here she attracts the eye of Lorenzo, the Duke’s heir. To flee his unwelcome attentions, she dresses as a boy and rides out to the country, where she enters the service of Silvio, a mysterious gentleman who is searching for treasure. Meanwhile, Francisca is brought up as a shepherdess by Balthazar, a humorous shepherd. Antonio heads after Diana, but is forced by a storm to lodge with Balthazar overnight. Francisca spies on Lorenzo from the hayloft and, in a famous speech, waxes lyrical on his manly beauty. The next day, Lorenzo catches up with Diana and observes her new-found devotion to Silvio. Catching her alone, Lorenzo threatens to reveal Diana’s disguise to Silvio unless she sleeps with him. Weeping, Diana flees out onto the moor where she falls into a pit. Francisca, who is out rescuing sheep that have been stranded by the storm, rescues Diana. To maintain her disguise, Diana flirts awkwardly with Francisca, but Francisca confesses that she is already in love with Silvio and cannot love another. Diana tells Francisca that she can arrange for her to marry Silvio, despite her low birth. Then she goes to Silvio and tells him that she will sleep with him, but they must be married first, and that due to her extreme modesty she must be veiled during the marriage and couple in darkness. Needless to say, Francisca is substituted during the event. Meanwhile, Silvio encounters Balthazar on the moor and is intensely irritated by the shepherd’s weak puns. When Balthazar mentions that he found Francisca in a shipwreck, Silvio realises that Francisca may be one of the long-lost daughters of his master, the Duke of Florence, and that the treasure he seeks may be in the shipwreck. Both daughters, he says, shared a star-shaped mark on their upper arm. Diana, realising that she is Francisca’s lost twin, reveals her disguise and origins. Francisca and Lorenzo arrive and it is confirmed that Francisca also shares the mark. Silvio and Diana return to Florence to be married, whilst Balthazar delives a final humorous monologue about love.
Richard I, 1596
A heavily-fictionalised account the life of Richard I. The first act covers his conquest of Cyprus, ending with his marriage to Berengaria of Navarre. In the second and third acts a rather brief account of the Third Crusade is given, with Saladon as the main antagonist. The rest of the play covers Richard’s shipwreck at Aquileia, capture by Leopold V, ransom and eventual release. The play is mainly notable for a lengthy speech by a random soothsayer, foretelling the ascent to the throne of Elizabeth I and prophesying that she will be basically the best ruler ever.
Pastime with Good Company, 1611
Three sets of twins arrive in Venice at the start of the Carnival season. Lucio and Roderigo have entered into a drunken bet that they will dress as women; both will try to win the hearts of carnival-goers, and they will meet at the end of the day to judge who has been most successful. Meanwhile, Helena and Maria have dressed as each other in order to circumvent some rather complicated legalese related to an inheritance. Unfortunately, since they are identical twins, no-one has yet noticed. Meanwhile Claudio, who is the rightful Duke of Padua in disguise, and Lucetta, his twin sister, are fleeing the usurpation of the Dukedom by Liono. Arriving in Venice, Claudio sees Roderigo dressed as a girl and pretends to be immediately smitten, although in reality he wishes to woo her in order to keep an eye on Lucio, who he suspects of being Liono’s maidservant. Roderigo, playing along with the conceit, agrees to wed Claudio and preparations are made for a wedding banquet that evening. Claudio orders Maria, who he believes to be a local baker, to construct an enormous cake. Helena, who has dressed as Maria dressed as a boy in the hope of attracting notice to her disguise, is approached by Lucetta, who suggests that, given her dainty resemblance to a girl, she should dress as one to mess with Claudio. Meanwhile, Maria pretends to have taken poison and dies, for no readily apparent reason. Roderigo, who is distraught at this happenstance, having fallen in love with her when they shared a brief exchange of puns earlier, attempts to fling himself from the Campanile. However, he is inexplicably saved by falling into Claudio’s enormous cake, which is passing by underneath on its way to be delivered. Meanwhile, Liono, who has also ridden to Venice, delivers a passionate speech about his decision to abandon the other Thundercats for a life of evil, whereupon Maria punches him and he falls in the canal. After a scene of heated discussion, everyone agrees that this is all so confusing they should just go for a beer, pick lots as to who marries who, and then go home.
Thy Mother, 1587
Little is known about this early comedy, which is probably for the best.
0092 Geometry of food
-0092.1 Simple blob forms
–0092.11 Spherical
—0092.111 Meatballs
—0092.111 Berries
—-0092.1131 Edible
—-0092.1131 Used to poison the diner
—0092.113 Assorted spherical items of gastrowankery
—-0092.1131 Pearls
—-0092.1131 Ravioles
—-0092.1131 Spherical plates which have to be broken to access the food
—-0092.1131 Room-size sugar spheres in which the diner is imprisoned
–0092.42 One long dimension, two short
—0092.421 Sausages
—0092.422 Eggs
—0092.423 Chips
—0092.424 Beans
–0092.43 Two long dimensions, one short
—0092.431 Burgers
–0092.44 Other
—0092.441 Deliberately contrary meat products
-0092.2 Triangular forms
–0092.21 Sandwiches
–0092.22 Triangular eggs
–0092.23 Other food shaped into triangles, for the dedicated and persistent eater of triangles
-0092.3 Square, rectangular and cuboid forms
–0092.31 Sandwiches (unsliced)
–0092.32 Custard creams and similar biscuits
–0092.33 Melons that have been grown in glass cubes
–0092.33 Fudge, gajar halwa, flapjack and other sliced things
-0092.4 Food of irregular shape
–0092.41 Steak
–0092.42 Broccoli
–0092.42 Other
-0092.5 Food of uncertain or amorphous shape
–0092.51 Jelly
–0092.52 Mists and foams
—0092.521 Indistinguishable from actual weather
-0092.6 Complex or architectural shapes
–0092.61 Food sculptures
—0092.611 Little people made of butter
—0092.612 Little people made of sugar
—0092.6121 Perched awkwardly on top of cakes
–0092.62 3D printed forms
–0092.63 Edible chairs
–0092.63 Edible hats
1. Twattorama, 10:20 - 11:00, Channel 4. Each week, a random member of the public is chosen from the electoral rolls. The program proceeds to make the case, via a series of leading interview questions, selective editing and dubious use of statistics, that their subject is the worst person alive. Twattorama is the subject of a number of pending lawsuits, but remains inexplicably popular amongst people who are sure that they are not the worst person alive.
2. Polar souffle, 10:00-10:50, BBC2. A group of experts in different fields are locked in a room with a random selection of equipment. They have 50 minutes to prove the existence of the Arctic before the floor drops open and they are deposited in a bath of blue gunge. Note: the floor opens whether they are successful or not; this is a scripted part of the show.
3. MetaChallenge, 9:20 - 10:00, Channel 4. Teams compete to devise a new reality show concept. Each week they face a new challenge: coming up with the idea, pitching it to TV executives, recruiting subjects for a pilot episode, etc. Viewers vote for the concept they would most like to succeed. At the end of the show, the most successful idea is commissioned.
4. The Great British TV Dinner Cookoff and Jigsaw Puzzle Challenge, ITV, 8:00 - 10:00. Participants compete on a number of Saturday night-themed activities, including: cooking a meal for a family of four to eat on the sofa; finishing a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle; getting the washing put away before bedtime; putting toddlers to bed in time to watch the program; etc. Anyone may compete. Indeed, the filming is almost entirely automated and one may choose the activities and participants one wishes to watch (there being many, many participants at one time) as well as acting as judges to rate their activities. As such, the program is something between reality TV and a really, really judgmental social network.
1. Socks that have been used as sleeping bags for adorable baby animals; particularly where one only finds out about this happenstance by plunging one’s toes into adorable baby animal shit.
2. Socks to be worn over other socks in a recursive manner, for when the weather is particularly cold and/or when one wishes to have spherical feet.
3. Socks that look like cocks, available only in larger sizes, for the less secure gentleman who really, really wishes people to be aware of what they say about people with large feet.
4. Socks which are marked out as limited-use by slogans such as 18 Today, or Happy New Year!, or suchlike, but which are nevertheless worn for general use.
5. Socks full of fabulous treasures, hung out in the mountains for dragons on the eve of the migration season. One may become amazingly rich or amazingly dead in the mountains on such nights.
6. Socks woven out of pasta. Typically capellini, although spaghetti can also be used. The frugal-minded may therefore either eat or wear them, depending on their current need. One may also wear them to futurist conventions, where I am sure they would cause a stir; or to go bathing in tomato sauce, where they would merely be moderately ridiculous.
7. Socks that will in fact annihilate in a deadly burst of energy if paired with a matching sock, and must therefore always be worn odd.
1. There is a mountain that has been entirely hollowed out by ants, but it is far enough away that no large creature has walked on it since. It is ready to crack like an egg, but maybe it never will.
2. Near the top of another mountain there is a damp meadow covered in coarse grass and a deep, clear tarn. It extends down into the rock, and the bottom is not visible because it is too dark down there, not because of any murkiness in the water. Somewhere far down and shimmering through the tiny ripples raised by the mountain winds one can see a sheep skeleton when the light is good.
3. There is a peak over which the clouds make faces and the sky is a staticy mess of visions. Although it is not high, one can never quite trust one’s senses up there. The world below looks rather flat, as if it were missing a dimension in the haze.
4. There is a pass where one can see down into a steep, stony valley that does not lead anywhere in particular. It would be folly to go down there, really; the way back up is steep and icy and there are sharp stones in the scree. But if you look at the far end it always seems that you can see someone running down there. Running and running, back towards the valley’s entrance, but never moving any closer, as if they were somehow disjoint from the physical world.
5. There is a high lonely moor and, in those months of the year when it is not covered in ice, one can see grassy lumps rising out if the boggy earth. If you were to look closer, you would see that they are old buildings; and that there are many of them, and some are the rotten stumps of great towers. But there is no record of any city having been there.
6. There is a black peak, but sometimes at dusk the birds rise off it and you can see that it is actually silver.
7. Another mountain lies in a hot part of the world and there are seven lakes around its summit which are the most perfect turquoise. At the height of summer, great lilies grow on the lakes and the air is alive with tiny green butterflies. From a distance, however, all one can see on the mountain’s slopes is a forest of dead trees bleached white by the sun. It is not known what killed the trees and, as a consequence, the lakes are rarely visited.
8. There is a mountain that extends up into the sky beyond the normal limits of the atmosphere to sustain life; I am not sure if it is on this or another planet. There were five explorers who climbed it and saw some kind of vision near the peak. I do not know what kind of vision. They discarded their life support equipment and formed their bodies into a kind of structure, where they promptly froze to death. Although other explorers have since ventured up there, it is unwise to go near the structure, which now consists of some thirty bodies: the original five, and a further twenty-five who got too close. Observations from a distance suggest it is starting to look like some kind of temple.
1. The smell of rain on warm stone.
2. Dappled sunlight.
3. The brief buzz of a bee going past.
4. That one can be too warm.
5. The rustle of wind through new leaves.
6. The sudden burst of smell as one passes a sun-warmed herb bush.
7. Drifts of cherry blossom blowing across car parks.
8. Distant constellations of birdsong in the hour before dawn.
1. There was once an assassin, although she didn’t think of herself that way. Really, she was just doing what she had to do. The war, when it came, was someone else’s fault entirely and would have happened sooner or later in any case. Better to pull the thorn and start it now, rather than hanging around basking in the growing bad-feeling. Not only that, but it was more or less an accident that anyone died anyway. To be sure, she was there with the gun and the grenades. She had phoned in the bomb threat that left the cavalcade stuck on the old road. But she had more or less decided not to do it when an acorn fell on her head. Everything happens for a reason, you know. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. The acorn, unregarded, fell into a patch of soft earth.
2. They say that the lifespan of an oak tree is three hundred years growing, three hundred years living and three hundred years dying. The acorn’s questing shoots had no idea of this saying, or that it was not normally true. The earth went round the sun once, then once again. The war was still far off. It became a sapling, then a mature tree. The woodland flourished for four hundred years, basking in steamy, sap-smelling summers and sitting through mild, damp winters. Someone seeded the ground with landmines then, a hundred years later, robots came to dig them up. The tree survived. Beetles ate out its heart, but it remained standing. A small town grew up in the greenwood beside it. Two hundred years later, twenty thousand refugees came to stay, and the town stretched out its limbs into the woody valleys around and became a city. Nine hundred years later, the husk of the old oak, surrounded by black tulips, lay at the centre of a genteel square.
3. At the death of the old year (which was in those days in the yellow height of summer), a parade of swimmers hung black ribbons on the oak as they processed down through the steep streets to the lake. Perhaps this year there were more ribbons than usual; it was a very hot summer. In any case, the last remaining branch of the oak snapped free and fell down over the road. A group of teenage girls came down from the silent houses on the square and stripped it of bark, which they used to make masks.
4. The masks hung in the silent houses for a hundred years more. A kind and gentle age came over the land. People ventured out across the borders again. One could walk in the mountains without having to watch for drones. There were people digging in the black moorlands of the old cities, and finding old technologies, and bringing their secrets back to life. The silent houses found themselves full of families who could not help but laugh from time to time.
5. There were five children who grew up on the square, and they were all writers. It was a good time for writers, because now the war was over there was finally time to twist its stories into something beautiful or strange enough to hang an audience’s attention on. They thought that they would travel to the mountains and live on ice water and berries and dried meat, and that each of them would write a play, and they would come back to the city on a glorious wave of Art and be some kind of famous Set or other. And perhaps when they were setting out their minds were wandering further, oh further! on to the days when they would attend academic seminars about their journey, but in thrilling disguise.
6. In any case, it did not go quite as they expected. They made it to a remote valley, where they were only moderately hungry. On the third day they caught a wild pig, which they drained of blood in the hope of making black pudding. Someone brought out a bottle of a thin green herbal spirit. They wore the masks and made a forest out of twigs set in the earth to act out a scene someone else had written that morning. There were refugees, and a bear. Two hours later, the fifth of the travellers went for a scenic piss on a cliff edge and did not come back. In a panic, the others scrambled down the cliff half-way to where they could see a pale shape in the darkness below; then they fell too. A warm rainstorm washed out the river valley two days later, leaving no trace. In time, the empty campsite was found, with its masks and blood and bundles of twigs, and formed an enduring mystery that captured the attention of the age. Someone even wrote a play about it.
7. A bottle and some bones and a packet of verses were swept with the floods down into the caves below the mountains, where they meandered through various ghastly sumps and narrow caverns. Eventually, they made it to the sea, washed up into the open door of an old lighthouse. Someone must have been living there then, although I am not sure how. They took the drifting objects and put them three floors up, near the lamp. In those days the lighthouse ran on energy from the decay of radioactive isotopes, because the land around it was not deemed habitable. But this was a generous age, and for a further hundred years the light gradually wound down, and travellers came to live again in the old villages by the sea.
8. At some point they found the verses, but they could not read them. These travellers had a story, which was that they were the first brave pioneers to come back to this area after the dark age; and so they believed that they had found some great long-lost relic. They made a wooden town and painted it in many colours, and it had a blue tower that one could see for three miles along the coast. Here they kept their relics. In time it, too became a city, and the blue tower sat incongruously in its busy docklands. Scholars came from all around to look at the lost verses. But they threw away the bottle, believing it to be litter.
1. There was a letter d, and it was entirely bored of being the final letter in the word ‘and’ in a rather miscellaneous sentence. So one day it swivelled its serifs by ninety degrees and tunnelled out of the book. The hard covers caused it some problems, but finally it was able to slip out from under them and drop silently to the floor of the library. Letters move slowly, and it was two hundred years since it had started to burrow. That is why more letters do not escape. Two days later, a maid left the window open to air out the room and the letter d was blown into the garden, where it stuck to some clover and later mated with a bee. I mention this story merely because, should you encounter an unusual bee or two in Shropshire, it may explain matters.
2. The letter y at the end of Aleister Crowley’s name had become entirely suffused with wickedness during his lifetime, wickedness being the sort of thing that sloshes through a name and gathers in great gloopy puddles at the far end. After his death, it devoured the other letters and became enormously fat. Indeed it was hardly recognisable as a letter y and no font would accept it. Instead, it started its own font which consisted entirely of the letter y; having charmed a number of upper-case Y’s who it persuaded to join. If you should find a book set in this font, I recommend closing it and stepping away carefully.
3. There is a place in a distant galaxy, right in its star-dense heart, where one can look up and see a perfect letter Q written in stars across the sky. It is what is known as an asterism, or stars that are unrelated save that they happen to line up. And no being who has anything like a concept of the letter Q has ever lived in that galaxy. Nevertheless, it is there.
4. There is a kind of a viral bug that can be passed between different instances of the letter e. It gives affected letters the raging shits which, since letter turds are often mistaken for full stops, is not always noticeable to the careless reader. One may discern an affected sentence, paragraph or book by its apparent overuse of ellipsis.
5. In particularly severe infestations, the letters may crap on the line below like gastroenteritical birds on a wire, leaving smears down the page. These types of outbreak may be identified by their apparent overuse of exclamation marks.
6. There was a king whose ambition was to be a letter, and he thought maybe it would be a letter x. In later years he slept in a hollow in a huge book, which three servants would close over him at dusk. As a result, when the revolution came, he was quite hidden. A rather more equitable form of government was installed and the king’s book ended up in the national library, where the ex-monarch survived on bookworm corpses and by inserting a surreptitious straw from his book’s breathing holes into the discarded coffee cups of the adventurous browsers who came that deep. For some reason, nobody ever opened the book.
7. There was a letter q that was known for its bad temper. No other letter would come near it. It often found itself confined to the margins of books, scowling and grumbling at stray punctuation marks. One day a book burned down and, unaccountably, the letter u grabbed the letter q between its uprights and hauled it to safety. After that day, that letter q was a much more trusting beast and could often be persuaded to curl up and sleep next to other letters, whereupon it was often mistaken for a letter o. Whilst I would like this to be the reason that q is often found next to u, it is not. In fact, that particular letter q was always rather shy about approaching any letter u thereafter.
8. There was a letter g that swallowed its own tail by mistake, leading to a hole in the page that led nowhere in particular. This was a godsend to the local research institute, which was chock-full of experts in nowhere in particular. They sent a number of tiny probes into the hole and wrote sixteen research papers which were all published in prestigious journals. Later, the tiny probes wrote their own paper but, since none of them had a research track record, they had trouble getting it accepted.
9. There is a font which is entirely unexceptional, except that the letter o is represented by the rings of the planet Saturn, available only at actual size. As a result, only one letter o is settable in this font at any one time, and even this is rather impractical to use. In consequence, most users omit the letter o from their correspondence.
6750 The common cold
-6750.1 General
–6750.11 Phlegmy sort
–6750.112 Productive of bright green phlegm
–6750.113 Productive of bright orange phlegm
–6750.113 Productive of clouds of dandelion fluff
–6750.14 More of a cough, really
–6750.141 The sort that keeps one up at night
–6750.112 Sounds like a bark
–6750.15 Mainly of the lost voice sort
–6750.151 Striking just before one has to sing
–6750.16 Gentle little cold that wanders around the back of throat and glands without ever really doing much
-6750.2 Obtained via miscellaneous and/or unknown means
–6750.21 Obtained while on mission from MI5
-6750.3 Obtained via contact with children
–6750.31 Via nursery
–6750.311 First cold in a row acquired from nursery
–6750.312 Second or more cold in a row acquired from nursery
-6750.4 Obtained via recreational activity
–6750.41 Recreational activity that was definitely worth it
–6750.42 Recreational activity that wasn’t
-6750.5 Obtained via mode of transport
–6750.51 On an aeroplane
–6750.511 At the start of a holiday that would be really great without a cold
–6750.512 By the return journey, able to share cold with a whole new group of people
–6750.59 First documented case of donkey-human transmission
-6750.8 The uncommon cold
–6750.81 Productive of rainbow glitter phlegm
–6750.82 Sneezing up tiny unicorns
–6750.83 Sinuses colonised by tiny kittens
–6750.84 World’s best viral party going on in eustachian tubes,
invitation extended to local bacteria, entrance queue goes all the way
down throat and back
Ptork P. Snang, Penelope Sudo-Nimming, Lady Esperanza Buttocks, Sir Themistocles Zammit, Blackbird Beasley, Cornelius Q. Face the Third, Professor Flora Maria Pausewang, Robert Robert Robert, John Twice-Toast Smith, Ellifer Pingnose, Helen Wellington Kenno-Lost, Spamanda Andara, Jay the Pickle Caperque, Lara Fellowes-Driftwood, Timebob Snorres, Alice Quack.
[NB. Two of these are actual real notable people who have stuff named after them]
1. On the left breast, you will see a large and obvious patch where a scale appears to be missing. This is a stick-on decoy patch designed to draw the efforts of dragon slayers away from the dragon’s other vulnerable points. Most dragons wear them these days. You will notice if I peel it back that the scales underneath it are completely intact.
2. You’ll also notice some gold marks on the belly. These are exactly what you’d expect. This dragon has spent some time sleeping on a hoard, likely of gold of relatively high purity and softness. Over time, pieces of gold have rubbed off on the belly surface as she’s rolled over or crawled back and forth. Don’t touch!
3. I believe these symmetrical scratches down both sides of the belly are probably mating marks, likely in the dominant position.
4. There are also some scratches on the upper sides, here. These look like rock scratches and probably indicate that the dragon has spent time living in a cave. They may also indicate that she has grown since first occupying the cave and may be looking to expand it.
5. There is a scar of some kind extending down from the right wing base, possibly the result of a juvenile crash.
6. These scales here are a slightly yellower shade than the rest. I think this is a birthmark of some kind.
7. The dots, as you might expect, are arrow marks. Dragons get shot at a great deal.
8. This sticky stain on the top of the belly is probably custard. Dragons are notoriously fond of custard, and there have been a number of suspicious torchings of custard facilities recently. Note also the matching stains down the neck and left jaw.
9. If you look over there, under the left front leg, you can see a couple of pickaxes. It looks like someone (or several someones?) crossed the boundary between bravery and foolishness. As we might be said to be doing, of course.
10. These faint scratches on the left side are actually the dragon equivalent of a tattoo. They show more conspicuously in the ultraviolet; this would be quite bright in dragon vision, whereas we are barely able to see it. Note also that what we can see appears to be crossed out. Maybe the dragon equivalent of a regrettable tattoo?
11. The small button-like protuberance at the right breast - see here? - is a flaw cover. Yes, dragons do in fact usually have a real flaw in their belly scales. In fact, a good flaw is often a kind of status symbol. No self-respecting dragon would venture near humans without covering it up with some kind of armour, though. This cover is actually harder than the dragon’s own scales.
12. There is a small left-side white scar down here - can you see? This is likely a surgical mark. You will notice it’s almost directly above the dragon’s fire bladder, which is highly susceptible to infection and to the formation of cinder stones. Most probably this was for stone removal, which most dragons will have to get done at some point.
13. The ruby just below the base of the tail is probably deliberate and decorative, although it could be from hoard-sleeping again. May I remind you - DO NOT touch.
14. I think the purple smear down there is probably some kind of paint. They do have festivals, up in the Northern mountains. Of course humans who see them don’t tend to come back.
15. As you will notice, ladies and gentlemen, we are not in a custard factory but in a whisky distillery. And I believe the most recent stain here is from a large splash of whisky. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it will not have escaped your notice that a dragon in a distillery is a highly explosive situation. Nevertheless, I believe we have all learned something here today. It’s not often that one gets this close. Now let’s let her sleep it off, and retire to a safe distance.
1. Snunder. Despite the name, snunder is not a type of thunder but rather a type of rain. It occurs in places that have been subject to some act of public high drama or tragedy and can most easily be distinguished from normal rain by its slightly thicker, stickier texture and its salty taste. It is derived from the spectral mucous of sobbing ghosts. Ghosts are often particularly sentimental, and those ghosts that have no limitations on their travel in space often gather at sites that mean something to them. Note: this is not the gentle drizzle derived from the decorous crying of melancholy phantoms, which can hardly be distinguished from sea-spray. Snunder only occurs in places where sad ghosts are really going for it. Since some ghosts can also travel in time, the unexpected arrival of snunder can also mean that some public tragedy is about to occur; for example, it is rumoured that Princess Diana’s 1997 death in Paris was presaged by a particularly sticky snunder rain.
2. Avioplop. This is the theoretical rainfall that would occur if a sufficiently dense cloud of aircraft above a city all voided their toilet waste at the same time. Needless to say, a rain of avioplop is not a particularly welcome event. Some projections of future aviation demand which have not thought through their premises particularly well suggest that, by 2300, most major conurbations will be subject to avioplop. Little do they know that by 2300 27% of passengers, via a combination of genetic engineering and advanced physics, will have no bladders but instead void directly into a small one-way portal into deep space. Aircraft toilet demand will therefore be significantly reduced and only very flight-dense regions, such as the airspace above Beijing, will be at risk of it.
3. Gin rain. There have in fact been three documented gin rains, as far as we can work out. The first, in rural Texas in 1873, led to a scandalous episode of widespread intoxication. The second and third gin rains occurred in Lusaka in 1950 and in Archangelsk in 2005; less information is available about them. Gin rains are not more widely reported because for some reason governments seem particularly interested in hushing them up. Why governments should be interested in what we assume are the failures of experimental methods of gin production is beyond us. Maybe we should expect the advent of weaponised gin at arms fairs at some point.
1. She is the mother of a preschool-age child and a baby. Most of her time is taken up in caring for their needs. She does not usually work outside the home, and can go weeks without leaving her small, poor local area or travelling in a car. She does not have many hobbies. She is usually in pyjamas by 7:30 and in
bed with the lights out by 9:00.
2. She had the highest exam results in her county that year, and went on to study and teach theoretical astrophysics at one of the world’s top universities. She was known for not making eye contact and for wearing odd clothes to lessons. Sometimes her glasses were held together with sellotape. She once attempted to invent a system of algebra because she was bored. Later she dabbled in Antarctic science and ended up in economic modelling, acquiring an Erdos number of five via two entirely separate routes.
3. She first shot a gun with live ammunition when she was twelve or thirteen, which was perhaps unusual for her country where there are few guns. These days, Apocalypse Now is one of her favourite films and she can no longer remember how many times she’s crossed the border between North and South Korea. Her bookshelves are stocked with the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs. She has not eaten human flesh in nearly a year.
4. A person with a disability asked her for a completely reasonable accommodation to do with their disability and she said no. Her mobile phone once made a noise in a concert that was being broadcast live on Radio 3. She’s nearly hit a cyclist with a car door. She’s several times incorrectly implied to experts in things that, as a person who is vaguely interested in their field, she can do a simple thing-related task better than them. She has flounced out of a room martyrishly complaining about martyrdom.
5. She had more than forty My Little Ponies, aged 11, and she is still fond of making notes in multi-coloured pens. She likes white chocolate, kittens, glitter and rainbows; she likes clothes and dressing up. In the past she has sewn and knitted her own clothes from patterns. She is interested in perfumery, although that will never come to much.
1. There were two detectives who went to a small village on the edge of a marsh. The earth was black in that place and the cold waters black too. There were no paths through the marsh, which was a maze of blasted thickets and dry, crackling reed-beds where strange birds lived. No water could be said to flow into or out of it. There were rumours that time went in different directions in different parts of the marsh and that its waters flowed from now to then rather than from here to there. Nevertheless, a reed-cutter had ventured into its nearer parts to gather eggs, and she had found a body on a mudbank, so the police were called.
2. They had a bit of a thing for each other, these detectives, but nothing would ever come of it because one was married and the other had too much of his identity tied up in being straight. Neither of them was particularly near retirement, but one was older than the other. Their companionship was based around their taciturn refusal to talk about their pasts, which one must assume were both murky and mysterious. In the village they found no-one missing and no-one suspicious. Though there were those who said that human finger-bones and the like had a habit of washing up in the marsh and it would be well to look out for a serial killer. There was a fortune-teller who gathered up the bones, because she was on the look out for her long-lost son who had slipped off playing into the marsh some years ago. But they were not the bones of a child, and she had taken to casting futures with them instead. This near the marsh, the bones would only fall in spirals, revealing nothing of themselves to anyone.
3. The detectives placed the remains, which were mainly skeletal, in a body bag in a refrigerated trailer. The next day most of the locals gathered in the village hall. There was an old man who said he was sure the murderer would be there but everyone, it seemed, had stayed out of the marsh for months. Someone said to see the fortune teller in her mouldy house by the willows, and since there was no other option, they went.
4. The fortune-teller was pleased to see them, for she was often lonely. She did not think she knew the body, she said, but she did know the marsh. She showed them a great black crystal with a spiderweb of incarnadine flaws at its heart, opaline and shimmering. It is a paradox, she said. Paradoxes grow around here like mushrooms. What with time in the marsh the way it is. I can show you the trunk of a hollow tree that is entirely crusted with them, down by the pool where I found the finger bones. Growing off all those petty little frog intrigues dragged back and forth through the years. But I have never found one so large and so strange. I truly think it could be worth something. I was hoping to pass it on to my son. The younger detective looked into the crystal and thought he saw his future written there, and he needed to know more like he had never needed anything. But the fortune teller shut the box. It is for my son, she said. I can show you the pool where the finger bones wash up, and maybe you can find the key to both losses for me, and I will bury it with him. I have never dared to dig there.
5. She gave them a map and a spade and sundry documents of her son’s that could be used to identify him. The detectives thanked her and, having little else to go on, packed sandwiches for a trip into the marsh. As they walked the sun ticked back and forwards across the noonday mark in the sky like the second-hand of an ailing watch. When they reached the pool, the younger detective started digging. The older leaned on the willow tree (they had not thus far checked its bleak crack for more glittering paradoxes). He opened the packet of documents and began to read. The first one was facts and strands of hair and identifying marks. The missing boy, it seemed, had had a wine-stain mark on his left shoulder.
6. The older detective had just such a mark on his shoulder, and he knew that as a child he had been found wandering (though he did not like to discuss it). He realised that he could be the fortune-teller’s long-lost son. He told the younger detective of his suspicions. But the younger detective, in sudden fright of losing the crystal’s speaking flaws to him (or of losing him to the crystal’s speaking flaws) jerked back the spade and swung at him with it. It hit the older detective in the neck and he bled out on the wet mud.
7. The younger detective threw the older detective’s body into the crack of the rotted-out willow tree by the black pool, where it hung for several days before slipping down into the water. It drifted into the currents of the marsh and washed back and forth through time, shedding small bones and shreds of skin along the way. Eventually the body fetched up on the reedcutter’s mudbank, three weeks before it had been laid to unquiet rest. The reedcutter found it, and called the police.
8. Some two days into the future, the sun ticked back and forth across the noonday mark like the second-hand of an ailing watch. The younger detective walked out of the marsh and into another story, which we are not concerned with here. He no longer needed the crystal. Before he left, fearful of evidence, he tipped the bag containing the skeletal body into a cracking reed bed. The body slipped into a deeper current where time turned itself inside out. It took the bones and reclothed them in their raiments of past years.
9. Twelve years before, a thrashing bag bobbed up from the current onto a sandy bank, and tore itself open under the moon. The older detective crawled out, young and gasping, with his memories scrambled. He stumbled South, out of the marsh, back to the city. It seemed he had been somewhat changed. He no longer bore the fortune-teller’s mark, he could not remember who he was, he bore no documents. In time he married a nurse, and the itch of the memory of the younger detective faded from his brain. But he knew that he himself had had a flair for detective work. So, after some years of rehabilitation and retraining, that is the field he went back to. Eventually, he was paired up with an older partner who was as taciturn as he about his past.
10. Some time later, they got a call about a body in a marsh…
0800 Lost things
-0800.1 Recently lost
–0800.23 Mittens
—0800.231 Mittens placed on walls, railings and gates by helpful passers-by
–0800.24 Stuffed bears, dogs and bunnies
—0800.241 Those that are found again, to great joy
—0800.242 Those that are not
—-0800.2422 Those that are lost in airports at the start of a long journey
—0800.243 Those that might have been found again, or might have been replaced by a duplicate, you are never quite sure
–0800.25 Things that you know you put down just a moment ago
—0800.251 Items that are in fact still on your person somewhere and obvious to a hypothetical bystander
—0800.252 Items which you need to find to be able to find them
—-0800.2521 Glasses
—-0800.2522 Cups of coffee
-0800.2 Long lost
–0800.21 The subject of intense nostalgia
—0800.211 Things for which the nostalgia does not align with the original reality
—0800.212 The subject of sepia-tinted documentaries
–0800.27 Things after the death of the last person who remembers them directly
–0800.28 Things after the death of the last person who has heard the truth of them
–0800.29 Things that have passed even out of story and rumour
-0800.3 Things that are not lost, but know perfectly well where they are
–0800.31 Things that are hiding
–0800.32 Things that are mistaken about their location
—0800.323 Confident walkers in mazes
-0800.4 Things under sofa cushions
–0800.41 Remote controls, keys and pens
–0800.42 Food, dust and buttons
–0800.43 Other sundry items
–0800.44 Things that have passed into the main body of the sofa
—0800.444 Things that are so valuable they require the dismantling of the sofa to retrieve
-0800.5 That are the subject of humorous asides
–0800.51 Marbles
—0800.511 Literal marbles
–0800.52 Virginity
—0800.523 May or may not be lost, depending on whether a specific act counts or not
-0800.6 Appetites, desires and dreams
-0800.7 Cities, civilisations, treasure, ships, aeroplanes, etc.
–0800.72 That in fact never existed in the first place
–0800.73 Rumoured location is covered in dense jungle
–0800.74 Rumoured location is under the sea
-0800.8 Memories
–0800.81 Of which only a ghost remains
—0800.811 Memories that itch maddeningly at your thoughts when you smell a particular smell
—0800.812 Things that you know you once knew
—0800.813 Things that other people know you once knew
1. The Holy Roman Emperor Lothair I. Reason: if your party is held during his lifetime, the cost of providing extra security will be prohibitive. If it is not, you will either need to mess with historical timelines or host a corpse, which is a bit of a downer.
2. The dwarf planet Pluto. Reason: it will not fit in the door.
3. Don Quixote. Reason: He is a fictional character, and thus unlikely to attend.
4. The North Sea. Reason: you will be too busy mopping up after it to enjoy your party.
5. Capybaras. Reason: there are too many capybaras in the world to fit inside a reasonably-sized party venue, and if you only invite some of them then the others will be jealous.
6. The platonic ideal of the colour blue. Reason: if it vomits on your carpet you will never, never get the stain out.
7. The norovirus. Reason: it is a terrible conversationalist, for one thing.
1. Stop breathing
2. Get rid of that heartbeat
3. Lose consciousness
4. Cease brain stem activity
1. The first of the seven other seas is initially difficult to distinguish from the more commonplace seas near its entrance, which some say is in the North Pacific. Navigation, however, is almost impossible. One can usually tell that one has entered the first other sea by the complete malfunction of GPS, compasses, celestial navigation, etc. at the same time. At night the stars are blurry smears across the sky. Generally the advice to those who have entered an other sea is to get out as quickly as possible, so the navigational problems pose a grave difficulty and few people have come back from the first other sea. Because it is near the North Pacific Gyre, great washes of plastic are sometimes seen near the entrance and this can be a way to navigate out. The nature of its actual hazards is rather vague. Some speak of just escaping the rising of unusually violent storms; others of drifts of fog they felt compelled to avoid. One must assume those who did not make it back learned somewhat more.
2. The water of the second sea is sweet and cherry-scented. It falls in extravagant waterfalls from steep, rocky islands thick with stinging plants (maybe there is some kind of fruit-based filtering system within?). Needless to say, the sweet water is clogged with vast algal blooms and the sort of extraordinary insectile forms one might expect near-infinite sugar to attract. The sky over the second sea is a thick, luminous yellow, as if a ferocious sun were doing battle with an enormous cloud bank. It is an awful place. Those who have come back from it are generally not fond of cherries.
3. The water in this sea seems to become thicker as one ventures further in. It grinds together like ice, although the weather is only moderately cool. Sailing into it is incredibly perilous and should only be undertaken for short distances and with a reinforced hull. There are many tales of ships who have entered unknowingly and their unfortunate ends. Needless to say, a swimmer could not last long in the milling waters, half-transformed to stone. They say if you could get through the transition zone this sea would be walkable on, and maybe it does not count as a sea at that point, even if one can still over the centuries feel the movements of great stone whales below.
4. There is no light here; no sun or moon or stars and (as far as we know) no phosphorescent seaweeds of the like. One can bring one’s own light sources, of course, but so far none have shown anything but a black, brackish sea against a black sky. The longest a boat has stayed here and returned is an hour. Depth soundings have yet to reveal evidence of a sea bed.
5. There is a perpetual smell of peat on the air; much more than the occasional small islands could produce. This is perhaps the friendliest of the seven other seas and there are some travellers who claim to have stayed here for weeks with little ill-effect. It is still notable that maybe one in three of those who have been in fail to come out. Therefore there must be some hazard, even if we are unable to say what it is.
6. We do not know anyone who has been to the sixth sea. Some say that it was invented to make sure that there were seven other seas and not six. Alternatively the entrance may be very remote or very small, or its waters peculiarly hostile.
7. It is a shallow sea, and can be waded in in places. The sun shines very hot on its nearer parts, which are windless and smell strongly of the thick red seaweed that grows there. It is not known how far this sea stretches, though no-one has found an end of any sort other than a few lonely sandbanks. But one cannot sail here other than in tiny rowboats or punts, so it is hard to travel far. There have been explorers who were determined to prove that some miraculous feature existed, somewhere deep beyond the bland inner reaches of this sea. We waved them off, and we have not seen them since. I suppose if they found their utopia they might have stayed, and be still living.
1. The ruins of an old coach house, it must have been miles from anywhere. There are trees growing through the windows and the roof is long gone. Everything is covered in moss.
2. A pile of mouldering pornography in a bush; it must be a remnant of the days when there was always a pile of mouldering pornography in a bush, as if that was how pornography came into being in the days before the internet.
3. A tangled thicket of dead branches and brambles. There is a nest of some sort at the other end, I think; it is impossibly large, as if it were a nest for a family of humans. But there is some kind of hair inside. There is no getting through the thicket to find out. The woods on the other side are their own place and cannot be reached without a machete; they stretch all the way to the mountains, even though this wood is bounded on every side by housing estates.
4. A winding path that leads down to a swampy valley, all yellow grass and mosquitoes. There is a small pond on the far side, unreachable without waders. Something white is moving in the rushes.
5. A den of numbers, newly hatched and wriggling. This is where they come from and where they grow alone, before they migrate to universities to perform elegant mating dances in a variety of exotic equations. Out here they are wild and you cannot be sure of adding them correctly. Sometimes they line up in the wrong order. I myself have been bitten by a particularly malevolent three.
6. Some actors. They are lost, and looking for the path. They are at pains to inform you that they are not performing a Midsummer Night’s Dream, although isn’t it funny that it’s turned out like this, ha ha. Not that one would be making love in these woods anyway. They are too damp. It is only a short way to the main road, from which it is twenty minutes’ brisk walk to the high school where they are performing.
7. There is a place where the morning mist lies heavy on the ground, beside a little stream. The first golden light of sunrise turns it all to sparkles and dew. The air is suddenly curiously warm and heady, even though everything is outlined in damp spiderwebs. Something large drops into the water, but one cannot see what.
8. There is an old tree, maybe it has been here for the full nine hundred years of an ancient oak’s age. It is split and hollow and surrounded by a crown of rotting branches. Inside, there is a hole leading down into the ground like a bottomless pit, scratched on all sides by the graffittied names of teenagers who must have slid down into its comforting embrace and ended up somewhere else.
1. There was an apartment building, I think it was in London somewhere. In the penthouse lived an entirely unremarkable couple, who had passed through thirty years in the world without leaving any mark on it. They did not quite realise this, living as they were on a day-to-day basis busy with small actions. But everything they did seemed to be erased shortly after they did it. People forgot them; their spilled coffee melted away; the people at the local shop greeted them every day as if they were new to the area. Certainly they seemed to have no family. In the end I am not sure if this was bad luck, or the action of some vengeful and powerful enemy.
2. On the floor below the penthouse lived some robots. Before their retirement, they had been involved in a top-secret surveillance project and hence they were conditioned to enjoy the view. Needless to say, their existence was also top-secret and, since they had been largely abandoned by the government, they had had to devise complex strategies for continuing to operate in peace. One of these, they thought, was to seek out forgettable and reclusive people and live near them. They were able to recharge from the electricity supply. For spare parts and oil they had taken to making orders from Amazon, then answering the door in a full-size Peppa Pig costume which a disgruntled London Marathon participant had discarded next to the building. Due to their compact, modular nature they were able to fit in spaces inaccessible to humans with no outward sign other than the occasional scritching noise. This was fortunate as they were often raided by the police (who had noted the apartment’s electricity use as highly suspicious) and had to all hide under the floorboards. Otherwise they spent their time making an enormous quilt, which one of their former operators had told them was a good way to pass the time.
3. There was a man who was writing a book, and he lived two floors below the penthouse. He survived on a small pension from the Department of Springs, which he had been awarded after a tragic pogo accident had led to him losing one and a half legs. He had been writing this book for fifty years. It was a beautiful thing and very long, with all manner of gilded maps and illustrations and equations and fold-out origami clocks and collages and flipbook animations. One volume was nothing but a series of holes in coloured pages which combined to spell out ever-changing poems; another contained only one enormous folded map of a city almost exactly the same as his own, combined ingeniously with a diagram of the nervous system of a rat. There was a book set in barely-discernable dark greys which was full of maps of caves. The fiftieth volume contained a hollow chamber which was always stocked with a tiny bottle of sherry and told of the coronation of a king in the book’s world. In the seventieth volume, the characters mounted an escape through a hole in the back cover, leaving behind themselves only a small trail of lost full stops. After this, the pages of subsequent volumes were largely blank or abstract, or dealt only in matters of space, time and geometry. The current volume, however, told of the author’s struggle to lure his characters back (he assumed they were living, like mice, in the walls of the house, and that this was what had been causing the scratching noises) via the medium of smells, and as a consequence his southward windows were stocked full of herb pots; thyme and rosemary and fennel and bay.
4. Three floors below the penthouse was an apartment that was entirely full of insects, from floor to ceiling. Because the insects entered the apartment via a private drainpipe on one side of the building, and exited it via the sewers, the other occupants were not aware that they were there. Indeed, they were generally held to be good neighbours, because they were mostly quiet and did not leave rubbish in the hallway. I am not sure why this apartment was such an important staging post on their journey, or where they came from, or where they were going. On summer nights, when the scent of thyme rose in the air, those insects who were currently in a winged phase would dash in joyous zigzags around the apartment’s congested spaces before falling to the floor to mate.
5. Six old women lived in the apartment on the ground floor. These women had once been in a ladies’ cricket team together, but had fallen on difficult times after an unsuccessful attempt to use occult powers to improve their fortunes. Since that day, they had been haunted by the hairy ghost of W. G. Grace. The ghost was most put out at finding itself haunting a London flat and would frequently invite other ghosts of his era around to complain at them. The old women thus usually found their sleep interrupted by querulous Victorians. They welcomed the quiet buzzing and pattering of summer nights, which they assumed was some kind of air conditioning system above, as it partially drowned out the constant spectral grumblings they were subject to. On these nights they all sat up and drank saffron gin in their huge bed.
6. Below the old women there was no flat, only a basement. Although it had been intended for the storage of cleaning equipment, it was currently officially marked as unused, and its plywood door was closed with an enormous padlock. However, it proved easy to remove the door from its hinges. The basement had therefore been inhabited by a succession of squatters, and was currently the home of a young man and his labrador. In the daytime, they pretended to be statues on the riverbank for the amusement and edification of tourists. The basement was rather damp, and so they did not care to spend longer there than could be helped. However, they happened to be in on the night that the ghosts of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who had been getting drunk on saffron gin fumes, stumbled through the ceiling. Gilbert and Sullivan, who were pretty shitfaced, spent the rest of the night singing a new operetta about the many humorous problems faced by a ghost in the modern world (by which they meant the Edwardian era). Unfortunately, only the dog was awake.
7. Some days later, the dog (who was plagued with earworms which it was entirely incapable of expressing) took a wrong turning and ended up in the building’s malfunctioning lift. It was rare to find the lift venturing down as far as the ground floor, because one or other of the inhabitants of the building had levered open its workings and poured irn bru into them. The dog travelled to the top floor, where it howled and howled under the impression that it might have been singing until its owner came to find it. And that night, everyone who was heading home headed into the wrong apartment. Perhaps the dog had been singing after all, who knows?
1. The Flesh Pot, 2080. Taking advantage of the widespread uptake of vat meat, the Flesh Pot specialised in providing diners with very small, very expensive steaks made from the genetic material of the celebrity of their choice. The Flesh Pot was very careful to be scrupulously above board. All celebrities on the menu endorsed the restaurant and had personally donated their DNA to the on-site vat farm in South London. As a result, their selection was a little peculiar and tended towards the C-list. However, there was always rumoured to be a basement to the building, accessible via a fold-out mirror in the building’s excessively plush toilets, where somewhat less ethical meals were served: for example, the flesh of non-affiliated personalities (bin raids for genetic seeding material being a well-publicised hazard of fame in the near future) as well as experimental organ and other scaffold-based meats. An article in the New Sun in 2082 claimed that an infiltrating reporter had been served a faithful replica of a horse’s penis made from the genetic material of a well-known singer, and that the offered menu included the option to consume the hearts of one’s enemies, given a few strands of hair and a couple of months’ lead time. As a result, the Flesh Pot was shut down in 2085, though many years later its core concept spawned a chain of neo-Venusian fast food restaurants.
2. Light.1, 2088. Light.1 did not serve food; rather, patrons ‘dined’ on light, air, smells and sounds harvested from across the world. From 2091 water was also occasionally served with meals, although many purists felt that this was going against the original concept. Light.1 was initially branded as an art concept restaurant. However, it soon found its three windowless dining rooms were frequently underoccupied. By 2095 the restaurant, which was kept in operation by the ready flow of some billionaire’s art-wank money, had primarily rebranded itself as a weight loss enterprise. Although the main restaurant closed in 2100, the concept was kept alive by a travelling Light.1 roadshow offering non-dining experiences in some of the world’s deeper caves.
3. The Cauldron, 2109. The main dining room of the cauldron was built around an enormous pot, set bubbling in 2109 and kept boiling for the entire lifetime of the restaurant. Two rows of seats (the restaurant’s entire capacity) surrounded the pot. After initially being seeded with an unknown set of ingredients, the pot was entirely stocked with ingredients provided by the restaurant’s patrons, who were allowed to taste a spoonful of the current stew when making their (exclusive, in-person only) booking. The restaurant had no chef and only a skeleton staff. Its stews were frequently peculiar-tasting, but oddly popular; perhaps because patrons felt they were contributing something to some kind of notable crowdsourcing event thing. The existence of the Cauldron was probably prompted by the 2100’s fashion for boiling all foodstuffs to unrecognisability, following the unfortunate advent of Salmonella X in 2102.