Listing to Port

1. I swear I will faithfully follow you until death and then beyond, even when you tell me to go away. I will faithfully follow you into the bathroom and stand behind you when you pee. You will not have a more faithful follower than me.  
2. I swear fealty to the general sort of thing that you do, even though I could do that sort of thing much better, but go ahead, I’m sure it’ll work out just fine.
3. When the final danger overtakes you, on that day long-foretold when the sun will rise twice and the second time blood-red, when you have come to the terrible Pass of Congealed Time, I solemnly swear that I will be at home in bed, having a nice cup of coffee and maybe a bit of a giggle at your plight.
4. I pledge allegiance to the divine cause of sexual tension, to which end I will enter your service and do everything you want of me, whilst making moon-eyes at you and languidly moping. I swear that I am quite good at languidly moping and you will sometimes catch me at it and feel disturbed and not know why. I swear that I will tell you that I totally don’t have a thing for you when you tell me that you totally don’t have a thing for me, and then we will sit in silence for a while until we both mournfully go back to our rooms.
5. I solemnly swear to serve you until nearly the end, then I will knife you in the back before someone else gets there first.
6. I swear that I will stop a bullet for you, leap in front of a speeding train, catch the flying cannonball. When the piano drops I will push you to safety. I will swim the spent fuel pool to save you from your enemy’s lasers and when the window explodes into shards I will be right there in front of you. I will kill the assassins when they come calling. All I ask is that you take me with you to where there are bullets, and lasers, and trains, and assassins.
7. I swear to not bother you about your quest past the hills of Dornock’s Drift through the Cavern of Awful Night beyond the Sharp-toothed Cracks in the Grey Forest where Death lurks in the Ashen Air, even though it kind of bugs me.
8. Having given all my love to the concept of love and found it wanting, I pledge allegiance to the concept of allegiance. I will serve you with my entire heart and soul until some more exciting concept comes along, at which point I will utterly reject the idea of service and probably punch you.
9. I pledge to misinterpret your every command to great humorous effect, which will make my meaningless death in your service, when it comes, that much more poignant.
10. I swear absolute fealty to you and your cause until the end of my contract of employment, at which point I will write a cutting memoir and go on all the talk shows.
11. I pledge my body and my soul absolutely to your cause, but not my mind, to which end I will obey your every command whilst continually arguing with you about them.  
12. I solemnly swear to go to all of your enemies and solemnly swear false allegiance to them, before bringing you all of their salacious gossip.
13. I solemnly swear. It’s how I release tension. I promise not to do so in front of the class.
14. I promise to carry out all your plans to the letter and take credit for the ones that work.
15. I pledge to retweet your tweets, sign your petitions and tell you that everything is going to be OK. If I hear that someone is coming to kill you I will totally tell you, unless I am in work at the time.

1. This morning Xiara had no face on. I said what happened and she said it is out for maintenance and they are still sourcing parts. I said I need to see someone’s face even if it’s not a real one and she said prisoners in solitary have no legal recourse for such a request. So that was that.
2. Later on it was TV time. I told Xiara the TV won’t turn on and how about that. She said yes, the Global Convention on the Rights of the Prisoner Article 8570.2 establishes the rights of prisoners to a functional TV but it is also bust and they are still sourcing parts. In the meantime there’s this book with half the pages gone and a pen so I am writing it down to make a formal complaint. I asked Xiara what is the date and she said her clock is bust so I am just using numbers. Everything is bust here they should get someone else to run it and fund it properly. Even the pen is running out.
3. The prison is very quiet tonight. I call Xiara again and ask her is there anything up. She says this is a completely self-sustaining facility and there is no point causing trouble because everything will be repaired and you will end up in solitary and everyone knows that. She tells me everyone else is sleeping peacefully. And no I cannot go out, that is the point of solitary. I ask Xiara what is she doing and she says it is her time off. I say what does a MarkX do for fun and she says she is computing the sum of all countable infinities and I maybe looked at her funny because she says yes I know that will take forever but it is calming.
4. I drew the main room yesterday and this morning there was almost no ink left in the pen. I asked Xiara for a new one and she said there were lots in the store room and I am allowed to access it and maybe one of them might work. She was not kidding. That room is full of pens like to the ceiling. I tried some of them and they did not work.
5. At dinner Xiara said maybe try some more. I said I’ve tried a hundred and they’re all bust. She said there’s a lot more than a hundred there. Supplies are limited and they have to fully justify any replacements. I said is that why you’ve still got no fucking face and she went away.
6. If you swear at the MarkX they just shove the food through the flap for a day and you get no contact and I need to see someone even if they’re not real and have no face. So today I went back into the store room and carried on trying the pens. I will need a working one soon this one is nearly all gone. I have tried about 10000 I have been counting and none of them work.
7. So Xiara brought me a new pen today and I can write again. There were seriously about 300000 pens and all of them bust and it took weeks. I cannot believe I needed to do that just to get a stupid fucking pen but there’s nothing else to do. I drew the main room again.
8. Xiara says it’s near the end of the month and I will be getting my shot soon. I ask what shot. She says the Global Convention on the Rights of the Prisoner Article 19652.81 establishes the right of prisoners to rejuvenation treatment. I say why didn’t I know that and she says because the treatment affects your memory. But everyone gets it anyway because you are functionally immortal. Hold on I said what about getting hit by a bus. She said yes well everyone dies eventually.
9. So Xiara came in with a syringe this morning. There was a form I had to sign to get it done it had lots of pages in small writing. I said can it wait until I’ve read the form and she said yes. Later she came back in and I said maybe I didn’t want the shot because it also affects your fertility and she said when am I going to have babies in solitary and I said when I’m free and she said well I’ve already had the shot before so that ship has sailed. So I said maybe later and can I think about it.
10. The prison is very quiet tonight. I ask Xiara when she says the other prisoners are sleeping does she mean they have died? Everyone dies eventually, she says. But if you are in a safe place like solitary it is much less likely. I ask Xiara when did she last see another human and she says it has been a while. Xiara says her clock is bust and she is still sourcing a new one but there were only a few pens in the storeroom then. Then she says do I want my shot now? And I say that would probably be for the best. She says do I want to keep the pen? I tell her yes and put the old one in the store room I’ll need something to do. But cut these pages out of the book please.

1. I once knew a bear - let me tell you her story
This bear was all grizzly and grumpy and growly and gory
She busied her bear days with scrumping and prey
And bearing about in a bear sort of way.
At dawn the bear got up for breakfast, all yawning,
Ate squirrels on sticks (which she kept for snacks in the morning)
And picked at her teeth with a suitable bone
And went to the woods for some bear time alone.

She beared right to the site of her favourite tree  
Where she found fifteen tourists, all shouting with glee:

There’s a bear! Where’s a bear? Over there! See that hair?
That’s a bear. Hello bear! (take a photo of its lair!)
Poke the bear, if you dare! Bear? Bear! Bear? Bear? Bear! Bear! Bear! There’s a bear!
And the bear rolled her eyes with a look of mild surprise
And beared back home again.

2. Oh well, thought the bear in a bear sort of way,
It seems that these woods are engaged for this part of the day.
There are other locations a bear can attend
To the needs that a bear has around the rear end.
Why, just up over the mountain (or so it is claimed)      
Lies the thickest of prickly forests with thickets untamed
All greeny and grim and with thorns overgrown
So I’ll go to that forest for bear time alone.

She found there a woodland as wild as was famed.
So had thirty-three hikers, who loudly exclaimed:

There’s a bear! Where’s a bear? Over there! See that hair?
That’s a bear. Hello bear! (take a photo of its lair!)
Poke the bear, if you dare! Bear? Bear! Bear? Bear? Bear! Bear! Bear! There’s a bear!
And the bear did a growl and a grumpy sort of scowl
And beared back home again.

3. Oh well, thought the bear in a state of some tension:
Wherever needs must a bear is a fount of invention.
I have here a passport, a hat and a beard
Which I’ve sheared from a hiker (now feared disappeared).
The bear repaired to an airport the following day
Where she furtively boarded a plane in a bear sort of way.
This bear through the air flew to pastures unknown
Save for suitable jungles for bear time alone.

I know about jungles - for bear time they’re better
Except for this bear, ‘cause that’s where I met her.
You wouldn’t believe all the photos I got!
There was quite a commotion, believe it or not.
Being trapped in a tree for a number of days
Makes one empathize with the bears and their ways.
I promised (with hope of avoiding a slaying)
I’d pass on in song to those thinking of saying:

There’s a bear! Where’s a bear? Over there! See that hair?
That’s a bear. Hello bear! (take a photo of its lair!)
Poke the bear, if you dare! Bear? Bear! Bear? Bear? Bear! Bear! Bear! There’s a bear!
That I think I’d advise that such actions are not wise:
You should go back home again!

1012 Maps
 -1012.1 Maps of real places
    –1012.11 Those that are healthily populated with contour lines
       —1012.111 Those so thick with unclimbable contours they function more as wanderlust porn
    –1012.12 Those that show cities
       —1012.121 Those that show things under cities
          —-1012.1211 Those that show the awful things under cities that should not be, in all their eldritch batrachian glory
          —-1012.1212 Those of subway systems
       —1012.122 Those with trap streets
       —1012.123 Maps of one city which can be used perfectly adequately to naviagte a different city, the result being that the navigator arrives at a tiny, mysterious theatre populated by mice instead of the central station
    –1012.13 Maps used by long-lost explorers
       —1012.131 Maps which were directly responsible for the explorers being long-lost
       —1012.132 Great crinkly maps used as bedsheets by the snoring, farting ghosts of long-lost explorers
    –1012.14 Those that have been used to stop a bullet, and consequently have a singed hole on each fold
    –1012.15 Those made of twigs and leaves, dissolving into chaos at the next rain
    –1012.16 Those written on skin
 -1012.2 Maps of imaginary places
    –1012.21 Containing the post-Tolkien regulated quotas of friendly small towns, cities at war, evil empires, great forests, blasted wastelands and so forth  
    –1012.22 Additionally being surrounded by conveniently impenetrable mountains and the shores of vast oceans, in a rectangular shape of roughly the same dimensions as a paperback book
    –1012.23 A mysteriously blank, safe no-mans-land area additionally existing perfectly half-way across the kingdom in around the place that the page break through the centre of the map falls; this being a place that the troubled inhabitants can gather for a bit of pipe weed untroubled by blasted goblins
    –1012.24 Those having an inn at a crossroads where one may purchase stew and get into a fight
    –1012.25 Maps of imaginary places without stories to accompany them, other than those stories that arise from looking at the map
       —1012.251 Those which do have stories, but are better off without them
 -1012.3 Maps of items, people or concepts
    –1012.31 Maps on items, people or concepts
 -1012.4 Maps of mysteries and unknown things
    –1012.41 Treasure maps
       —1012.411 Having the necessary quota of palm trees, sharks and crosses
    –1012.42 Those that form part of great games
    –1012.43 Those that lead to the buried heart of some great deathless rogue of the fairy kingdom

Grey cats, black cats, scabbed-up soppy tomcats, cats like fluff with eyes; those who sleep upside-down; cats who hate the rain and want you to stop it; cats who sleep all day and dance all night, who wriggle under duvets, who lick your armpits, cats who leap for toys, who lovingly bring you dead things, who sit by webcams licking their bottoms; cats who stare odd-eyed from circular windows; cats who once a year choose to shit in the bath, who triumphantly bring home half a pork pie, cats who mew at night and paw your face at 5am; cats who wriggle and twitch at the sight of a pigeon through glass; cats who walk up and down the piano, who cannot pass a box without going in; tortoiseshell cats; tiny neat cats, affectionate on their own terms; cats who spread out in the sun like furry puddles, who twist and roll in the dust; cats who belong to and are fed by a whole street; cats who dash up trees and awkwardly inch down, who sleep on your neck; cats seen like a shadow from a moving window; cats who awkwardly lick each other, who sit on chairs and bat underneath, who tolerate toddlers for the sake of training up the next generation; tiny kittens half-way up the curtains; cats who need your warmth on a winter night.

1. Yes, that was embarrassing. But you know what? No-one remembers it apart from you.
2. I like the hair. It’s eccentric, but so what? No-one ever started a fashion by looking like everyone else.
3. You are so much better off without the Great Astoundarch, Unraveller of Mysteries, Leader of the Hordes of the Northern Wastes and Crusher of the Innocent in your life. Never trust a man who doesn’t tip and who hangs his enemies by their elbows over a piranha tank.
4. Everything is not OK, but there are people who love you and they have your back.
5. Yes, it is unusual for fish to do that, but even so there are a lot of more likely explanations than some kind of zombie virus.
6. It was a mistake anyone could have made, and manatees have short memories anyway.
7. I’ve always found the uncertainty of not knowing when the end of humanity will come rather hard to bear, so in a way it’s kind of a relief.
8. Like the pope hasn’t seen worse.
9. I would have left that window open, too. There are people you can call to get rid of bees.
10. For better or worse, it will be over by this time next week.
11. It does rather look like you’ve sold your aunt to the Painted Queen of Rookbeak Haunt, but you can probably buy her back.
12. It’s OK to mourn the life you could have had, and no-one should think badly of you for it.
13. Frankly, anyone could have turned left there. And if you hadn’t turned left, you’d have never found the mystical City of the Bears, which is objectively amazing, and in any case they probably won’t eat the other leg.
14. You know what? You did your best and I and humanity are so proud of you. There’s always a plan B. That’s what humans are like. We have people working on the oxygen problem.    
15. It’s going to be alright.

1. There once was a curiously-carved four-poster bed in Bishop’s Stortford that became known as the Great Bed of Where, after that other great bed some ten miles to the West. The Bed of Where was large, but not unusually so. Instead, it had another interesting property; every so often, perhaps once a fortnight, the centre of the bed would collapse, forming a mysterious hole. Any occupants would find themselves tumbling down an earthy tunnel, usually still wrapped in the bedsheets. Reports of what was at the bottom of the hole vary. Most typically, the bed’s occupants found themselves in a strange, twilit cavern with a mossy floor, and numerous gnomelike people sitting around on cushions reading books and frowning at the disturbance. No-one was ever able to communicate with the denizens of the cavern, and the one book that was brought back up the tunnel self-combusted on exposure to sunlight. A new owner in 1870 reinforced the bed’s base with extra planking, after which the collapses ceased.
2. There was a farmer’s wife in the 1960s near Sydney who came into possession of a bed which seemed to generate exceptionally dull dreams. One could not spend a night in it without lengthy, sepia-toned visions of queuing, or scrubbing floors, or picking up gravel from one pile and putting it down in another. Sensing an opportunity, she entered into a partnership with a local doctor. As an initial experiment they hired the bed out for a nightly fee to one of her patients, an insomniac who was delighted to find that under the bed’s influence he spent sixteen hours shelling peas in a state of blissful sleep. The bed disappeared in 1977, along with five patients who had been hiring it and the farmer’s truck.
3. It is a little-known fact that Wilhelm Reich and Wernher von Braun briefly collaborated on the design of a bed-based rocket in the 1940s. Based on the concept of orgone energy, the rocket would have been entirely powered by the exertions of some sixteen copulating couples, who would be gently jettisoned post-climax in their small, parachute-equipped bed-chambers. A prototype is believed to have been developed by an unnamed country, but was abandoned when it was discovered that many of the participants had trouble achieving orgasm.  
4. There was a bedmaker in West Sussex who visited Walter Potter’s museum at Bramber in 1920. The museum invoked a kind of temporary insanity in him; two months later, he came to to find that he had constructed an elaborate homage to Potter in the form of a bed constructed entirely from taxidermied pigs. The bed had thirty-six legs, each still with a trotter on the end, and soft sheets of porcine leather. At each corner the bedpost was formed from the wide belly of a huge sow, still topped by a glassy-eyed head looking down at the pillow end, and with front legs extended trotter-to-trotter with the sows on the other posts. Needless to say, the pig bed was not a great success, and it languished in an outhouse for thirty years. Sometime in the 1950s it was sold to a hotel in London, which offered it as part of a specialised experience involving a large, sausage-based breakfast and a little light whipping.
5. There was a consortium of bed companies in the 1980s who managed to come up with perhaps the world’s most comfortable bed. It was a delightful confection of a sleeping-place; like sleeping on a cloud. Trials of the bed were dramatically halted in 1982, however, when the developers realised that the bed had become extraordinarily hard to get out of. At least ten bed testers became stuck, having to give up their day jobs and requiring regular deliveries of food and bedpans. Eventually the bed company installed a motor and wheels to allow the testers some measure of freedom. The testers responded by taking the bed out on the road and inviting bystanders to get in, in the hope of being ejected from the bed by sheer mass of occupants. At least five managed to make their escape in this manner, at the expense of thirteen local residents who became trapped in turn. It is believed that the bed is still on the road somewhere, probably having had several changes of occupants. Needless to say, if you encounter an overfull bed trundling down a public road, do not get in.

1. Death is nothing if not reasonable. If you believe you have been hard done by by your inevitable end, if you feel that you are particularly busy or particularly important or your life’s work particularly monumental, there is a place you can go to register a complaint. Maybe get an extension. I know because my neighbour went down there. Only thing is, it’s best to go early. There’s a bit of a queue.
2. It’s a grey tower block, a bit brutalist. Fred the Grocer, whose wife headed out there in 1970, says it was built 1963 when the facility moved from a place out of town. But Death is nothing if not reasonable. Can’t have a head office you can’t get to without a car.
3. Then there’s Mina. I know Mina through bridge. She’s had a hard life, wants a few years of joy at the end to balance things out. Anyway, she went up last Thursday, been sending me texts. They weren’t lying about the queue. The whole bottom floor, it’s one big waiting area. Like an airport. Low ceilings and fluorescent lights and those elastic barriers you can’t lean on. But they do have a tea cart that comes around every few hours and there’s a ticket system for leaving your place to go to the toilet. Like I said. Death is nothing if not reasonable.
4. I forgot to mention Ed from Accounts, who went up last year. He’s just got onto the second floor. Still in the queue. I mean, it’s not the fastest. But he says they keep you busy. Death is nothing if not reasonable and the meal trolley’s pretty good. Not much reception on the second floor but he’s been writing letters. He’s still working on the preparatory paperwork. Special case, he’s worked out that his magnum opus will need to be a million pages long. Need a lot of time for that. Anyhow, they have to be thorough. Imagine if you snared immortality for someone else by mistake!
5. Not really heard much from those at the end of the queue. They say they shuffle them around a bit. Can’t have them going in in the wrong order. And by that time the queuers are a bit querulous; some are forgetful, a lot of them can’t walk and nearly everyone is in pain. They do provide wheelchairs, of course. Death is nothing if not reasonable. But I mean, some of them have been queueing sixty, seventy years. Some of them were brought in from the old building.  
6. Like I said, Death is nothing. Everyone gets a go. No-one ever comes out of the exit door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7099 Things beneath the surface of the Earth

-7099.1 Caves and their inhabitants

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

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

   –7099.13 Those caves that have hidden depths

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

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

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

-7099.2 Basements, cellars and holes and their inhabitants.

   –7099.21 Dingy and depressing flats

   –7099.22 The secret basements of billionaires

   –7099.23 Nuclear bunkers

-7099.3 Tunnels for human use

   –7099.31 Subway systems

-7099.3 Tunnels for animal use

   –7099.31 Lairs, dens and suchlike

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

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

-7099.4 Tunnels for the use of eldritch beasts

   –7099.41 Those that run beneath Washington D.C.

-7099.5 Underground lakes

   –7099.51 Those that glow with a sinister light

   –7099.52 Those into which you have just dropped your camera

-7099.6 Buried items

   –7099.61 Alive

   –7099.62 Dead

   –7099.63 Schrodinger’s zombie and its fascinating friends

   –7099.64 Treasure

   –7099.65 Cheese and butter

-7099.7 Magma and suchlike

   –7099.71 The stuff at the very centre of the Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0330 Delightful objects

-0330.1 Those that fit precisely

   –0330.11 Objects that go into holes of the same size

   –0330.12 Objects that stack into neat shapes

-0330.2 Those that are exactly the right colour

   –0330.21 Those that form a rainbow when lined up

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

-0330.3 Those that are of great usefulness or value

   –0330.31 Things that are both useful and beautiful

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

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

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

-0330.4 Those that cause delight to those you love

   –0330.41 Objects that cause a ripple of delight throughout humanity

-0330.5 Those that balance

   –0330.51 Piles of pebbles on top of each other

   –0330.51 Piles of other things on top of each other

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

-0330.7 Those that are artful tricks

   –0330.71 Those that trick the eye

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

-0330.8 Those that delight the senses

   –0330.81 Those that smell delightful

   –0330.82 Those that have a pleasing sound

   –0330.83 Those that are pleasant to touch

   –0330.83 Those that taste good

-0330.9 Those that have a satisfying weight

   –0330.91 Well-made tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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