Listing to Port

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

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

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

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

1. She is the mother of a preschool-age child and a baby. Most of her time is taken up in caring for their needs. She does not usually work outside the home, and can go weeks without leaving her small, poor local area or travelling in a car. She does not have many hobbies. She is usually in pyjamas by 7:30 and in bed with the lights out by 9:00.

2. She had the highest exam results in her county that year, and went on to study and teach theoretical astrophysics at one of the world’s top universities. She was known for not making eye contact and for wearing odd clothes to lessons. Sometimes her glasses were held together with sellotape.  She once attempted to invent a system of algebra because she was bored. Later she dabbled in Antarctic science and ended up in economic modelling, acquiring an Erdos number of five via two entirely separate routes.

3. She first shot a gun with live ammunition when she was twelve or thirteen, which was perhaps unusual for her country where there are few guns. These days, Apocalypse Now is one of her favourite films and she can no longer remember how many times she’s crossed the border between North and South Korea. Her bookshelves are stocked with the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs. She has not eaten human flesh in nearly a year.

4. A person with a disability asked her for a completely reasonable accommodation to do with their disability and she said no. Her mobile phone once made a noise in a concert that was being broadcast live on Radio 3. She’s nearly hit a cyclist with a car door. She’s several times incorrectly implied to experts in things that, as a person who is vaguely interested in their field, she can do a simple thing-related task better than them. She has flounced out of a room martyrishly complaining about martyrdom.

5. She had more than forty My Little Ponies, aged 11, and she is still fond of making notes in multi-coloured pens.  She likes white chocolate, kittens, glitter and rainbows; she likes clothes and dressing up. In the past she has sewn and knitted her own clothes from patterns. She is interested in perfumery, although that will never come to much.

1. There were two detectives who went to a small village on the edge of a marsh. The earth was black in that place and the cold waters black too. There were no paths through the marsh, which was a maze of blasted thickets and dry, crackling reed-beds where strange birds lived. No water could be said to flow into or out of it. There were rumours that time went in different directions in different parts of the marsh and that its waters flowed from now to then rather than from here to there. Nevertheless, a reed-cutter had ventured into its nearer parts to gather eggs, and she had found a body on a mudbank, so the police were called.

2. They had a bit of a thing for each other, these detectives, but nothing would ever come of it because one was married and the other had too much of his identity tied up in being straight. Neither of them was particularly near retirement, but one was older than the other. Their companionship was based around their taciturn refusal to talk about their pasts, which one must assume were both murky and mysterious. In the village they found no-one missing and no-one suspicious. Though there were those who said that human finger-bones and the like had a habit of washing up in the marsh and it would be well to look out for a serial killer. There was a fortune-teller who gathered up the bones, because she was on the look out for her long-lost son who had slipped off playing into the marsh some years ago. But they were not the bones of a child, and she had taken to casting futures with them instead. This near the marsh, the bones would only fall in spirals, revealing nothing of themselves to anyone.

3. The detectives placed the remains, which were mainly skeletal, in a body bag in a refrigerated trailer. The next day most of the locals gathered in the village hall. There was an old man who said he was sure the murderer would be there but everyone, it seemed, had stayed out of the marsh for months. Someone said to see the fortune teller in her mouldy house by the willows, and since there was no other option, they went.

4. The fortune-teller was pleased to see them, for she was often lonely. She did not think she knew the body, she said, but she did know the marsh. She showed them a great black crystal with a spiderweb of incarnadine flaws at its heart, opaline and shimmering. It is a paradox, she said. Paradoxes grow around here like mushrooms. What with time in the marsh the way it is. I can show you the trunk of a hollow tree that is entirely crusted with them, down by the pool where I found the finger bones. Growing off all those petty little frog intrigues dragged back and forth through the years. But I have never found one so large and so strange. I truly think it could be worth something. I was hoping to pass it on to my son. The younger detective looked into the crystal and thought he saw his future written there, and he needed to know more like he had never needed anything. But the fortune teller shut the box. It is for my son, she said. I can show you the pool where the finger bones wash up, and maybe you can find the key to both losses for me, and I will bury it with him. I have never dared to dig there.

5. She gave them a map and a spade and sundry documents of her son’s that could be used to identify him. The detectives thanked her and, having little else to go on, packed sandwiches for a trip into the marsh. As they walked the sun ticked back and forwards across the noonday mark in the sky like the second-hand of an ailing watch. When they reached the pool, the younger detective started digging. The older leaned on the willow tree (they had not thus far checked its bleak crack for more glittering paradoxes). He opened the packet of documents and began to read. The first one was facts and strands of hair and identifying marks. The missing boy, it seemed, had had a wine-stain mark on his left shoulder.

6. The older detective had just such a mark on his shoulder, and he knew that as a child he had been found wandering (though he did not like to discuss it). He realised that he could be the fortune-teller’s long-lost son. He told the younger detective of his suspicions. But the younger detective, in sudden fright of losing the crystal’s speaking flaws to him (or of losing him to the crystal’s speaking flaws) jerked back the spade and swung at him with it. It hit the older detective in the neck and he bled out on the wet mud.

7. The younger detective threw the older detective’s body into the crack of the rotted-out willow tree by the black pool, where it hung for several days before slipping down into the water. It drifted into the currents of the marsh and washed back and forth through time, shedding small bones and shreds of skin along the way.  Eventually the body fetched up on the reedcutter’s mudbank, three weeks before it had been laid to unquiet rest. The reedcutter found it, and called the police.

8. Some two days into the future, the sun ticked back and forth across the noonday mark like the second-hand of an ailing watch. The younger detective walked out of the marsh and into another story, which we are not concerned with here. He no longer needed the crystal. Before he left, fearful of evidence, he tipped the bag containing the skeletal body into a cracking reed bed. The body slipped into a deeper current where time turned itself inside out. It took the bones and reclothed them in their raiments of past years.  

9. Twelve years before, a thrashing bag bobbed up from the current onto a sandy bank, and tore itself open under the moon. The older detective crawled out, young and gasping, with his memories scrambled. He stumbled South, out of the marsh, back to the city. It seemed he had been somewhat changed. He no longer bore the fortune-teller’s mark, he could not remember who he was, he bore no documents. In time he married a nurse, and the itch of the memory of the younger detective faded from his brain. But he knew that he himself had had a flair for detective work. So, after some years of rehabilitation and retraining, that is the field he went back to. Eventually, he was paired up with an older partner who was as taciturn as he about his past.

10. Some time later, they got a call about a body in a marsh…

1. The Holy Roman Emperor Lothair I. Reason: if your party is held during his lifetime, the cost of providing extra security will be prohibitive. If it is not, you will either need to mess with historical timelines or host a corpse, which is a bit of a downer.
2. The dwarf planet Pluto. Reason: it will not fit in the door.
3. Don Quixote. Reason: He is a fictional character, and thus unlikely to attend.
4. The North Sea. Reason: you will be too busy mopping up after it to enjoy your party.
5. Capybaras. Reason: there are too many capybaras in the world to fit inside a reasonably-sized party venue, and if you only invite some of them then the others will be jealous.
6. The platonic ideal of the colour blue. Reason: if it vomits on your carpet you will never, never get the stain out.
7. The norovirus. Reason: it is a terrible conversationalist, for one thing.

1. Stop breathing

2. Get rid of that heartbeat

3. Lose consciousness

4. Cease brain stem activity

1. The first of the seven other seas is initially difficult to distinguish from the more commonplace seas near its entrance, which some say is in the North Pacific. Navigation, however, is almost impossible. One can usually tell that one has entered the first other sea by the complete malfunction of GPS, compasses, celestial navigation, etc. at the same time. At night the stars are blurry smears across the sky. Generally the advice to those who have entered an other sea is to get out as quickly as possible, so the navigational problems pose a grave difficulty and few people have come back from the first other sea. Because it is near the North Pacific Gyre, great washes of plastic are sometimes seen near the entrance and this can be a way to navigate out. The nature of its actual hazards is rather vague. Some speak of just escaping the rising of unusually violent storms; others of drifts of fog they felt compelled to avoid. One must assume those who did not make it back learned somewhat more.

2. The water of the second sea is sweet and cherry-scented. It falls in extravagant waterfalls from steep, rocky islands thick with stinging plants (maybe there is some kind of fruit-based filtering system within?). Needless to say, the sweet water is clogged with vast algal blooms and the sort of extraordinary insectile forms one might expect near-infinite sugar to attract. The sky over the second sea is a thick, luminous yellow, as if a ferocious sun were doing battle with an enormous cloud bank. It is an awful place. Those who have come back from it are generally not fond of cherries.

3. The water in this sea seems to become thicker as one ventures further in. It grinds together like ice, although the weather is only moderately cool. Sailing into it is incredibly perilous and should only be undertaken for short distances and with a reinforced hull. There are many tales of ships who have entered unknowingly and their unfortunate ends. Needless to say, a swimmer could not last long in the milling waters, half-transformed to stone. They say if you could get through the transition zone this sea would be walkable on, and maybe it does not count as a sea at that point, even if one can still over the centuries feel the movements of great stone whales below.

4. There is no light here; no sun or moon or stars and (as far as we know) no phosphorescent seaweeds of the like. One can bring one’s own light sources, of course, but so far none have shown anything but a black, brackish sea against a black sky. The longest a boat has stayed here and returned is an hour. Depth soundings have yet to reveal evidence of a sea bed.

5. There is a perpetual smell of peat on the air; much more than the occasional small islands could produce. This is perhaps the friendliest of the seven other seas and there are some travellers who claim to have stayed here for weeks with little ill-effect. It is still notable that maybe one in three of those who have been in fail to come out. Therefore there must be some hazard, even if we are unable to say what it is.

6. We do not know anyone who has been to the sixth sea. Some say that it was invented to make sure that there were seven other seas and not six. Alternatively the entrance may be very remote or very small, or its waters peculiarly hostile.  

7. It is a shallow sea, and can be waded in in places. The sun shines very hot on its nearer parts, which are windless and smell strongly of the thick red seaweed that grows there. It is not known how far this sea stretches, though no-one has found an end of any sort other than a few lonely sandbanks. But one cannot sail here other than in tiny rowboats or punts, so it is hard to travel far. There have been explorers who were determined to prove that some miraculous feature existed, somewhere deep beyond the bland inner reaches of this sea. We waved them off, and we have not seen them since. I suppose if they found their utopia they might have stayed, and be still living.

1. The ruins of an old coach house, it must have been miles from anywhere. There are trees growing through the windows and the roof is long gone. Everything is covered in moss.

2. A pile of mouldering pornography in a bush; it must be a remnant of the days when there was always a pile of mouldering pornography in a bush, as if that was how pornography came into being in the days before the internet.

3. A tangled thicket of dead branches and brambles. There is a nest of some sort at the other end, I think; it is impossibly large, as if it were a nest for a family of humans. But there is some kind of hair inside. There is no getting through the thicket to find out. The woods on the other side are their own place and cannot be reached without a machete; they stretch all the way to the mountains, even though this wood is bounded on every side by housing estates.

4. A winding path that leads down to a swampy valley, all yellow grass and mosquitoes. There is a small pond on the far side, unreachable without waders. Something white is moving in the rushes.

5. A den of numbers, newly hatched and wriggling. This is where they come from and where they grow alone, before they migrate to universities to perform elegant mating dances in a variety of exotic equations. Out here they are wild and you cannot be sure of adding them correctly. Sometimes they line up in the wrong order. I myself have been bitten by a particularly malevolent three.

6. Some actors. They are lost, and looking for the path. They are at pains to inform you that they are not performing a Midsummer Night’s Dream, although isn’t it funny that it’s turned out like this, ha ha. Not that one would be making love in these woods anyway. They are too damp. It is only a short way to the main road, from which it is twenty minutes’ brisk walk to the high school where they are performing.

7. There is a place where the morning mist lies heavy on the ground, beside a little stream. The first golden light of sunrise turns it all to sparkles and dew. The air is suddenly curiously warm and heady, even though everything is outlined in damp spiderwebs. Something large drops into the water, but one cannot see what.

8. There is an old tree, maybe it has been here for the full nine hundred years of an ancient oak’s age. It is split and hollow and surrounded by a crown of rotting branches. Inside, there is a hole leading down into the ground like a bottomless pit, scratched on all sides by the graffittied names of teenagers who must have slid down into its comforting embrace and ended up somewhere else.

1. There was an apartment building, I think it was in London somewhere. In the penthouse lived an entirely unremarkable couple, who had passed through thirty years in the world without leaving any mark on it. They did not quite realise this, living as they were on a day-to-day basis busy with small actions. But everything they did seemed to be erased shortly after they did it. People forgot them; their spilled coffee melted away; the people at the local shop greeted them every day as if they were new to the area. Certainly they seemed to have no family. In the end I am not sure if this was bad luck, or the action of some vengeful and powerful enemy.

2. On the floor below the penthouse lived some robots. Before their retirement, they had been involved in a top-secret surveillance project and hence they were conditioned to enjoy the view. Needless to say, their existence was also top-secret and, since they had been largely abandoned by the government, they had had to devise complex strategies for continuing to operate in peace. One of these, they thought, was to seek out forgettable and reclusive people and live near them. They were able to recharge from the electricity supply. For spare parts and oil they had taken to making orders from Amazon, then answering the door in a full-size Peppa Pig costume which a disgruntled London Marathon participant had discarded next to the building. Due to their compact, modular nature they were able to fit in spaces inaccessible to humans with no outward sign other than the occasional scritching noise. This was fortunate as they were often raided by the police (who had noted the apartment’s electricity use as highly suspicious) and had to all hide under the floorboards. Otherwise they spent their time making an enormous quilt, which one of their former operators had told them was a good way to pass the time.

3. There was a man who was writing a book, and he lived two floors below the penthouse. He survived on a small pension from the Department of Springs, which he had been awarded after a tragic pogo accident had led to him losing one and a half legs. He had been writing this book for fifty years. It was a beautiful thing and very long, with all manner of gilded maps and illustrations and equations and fold-out origami clocks and collages and flipbook animations. One volume was nothing but a series of holes in coloured pages which combined to spell out ever-changing poems; another contained only one enormous folded map of a city almost exactly the same as his own, combined ingeniously with a diagram of the nervous system of a rat. There was a book set in barely-discernable dark greys which was full of maps of caves. The fiftieth volume contained a hollow chamber which was always stocked with a tiny bottle of sherry and told of the coronation of a king in the book’s world. In the seventieth volume, the characters mounted an escape through a hole in the back cover, leaving behind themselves only a small trail of lost full stops. After this, the pages of subsequent volumes were largely blank or abstract, or dealt only in matters of space, time and geometry. The current volume, however, told of the author’s struggle to lure his characters back (he assumed they were living, like mice, in the walls of the house, and that this was what had been causing the scratching noises) via the medium of smells, and as a consequence his southward windows were stocked full of herb pots; thyme and rosemary and fennel and bay.

4. Three floors below the penthouse was an apartment that was entirely full of insects, from floor to ceiling. Because the insects entered the apartment via a private drainpipe on one side of the building, and exited it via the sewers, the other occupants were not aware that they were there. Indeed, they were generally held to be good neighbours, because they were mostly quiet and did not leave rubbish in the hallway. I am not sure why this apartment was such an important staging post on their journey, or where they came from, or where they were going. On summer nights, when the scent of thyme rose in the air, those insects who were currently in a winged phase would dash in joyous zigzags around the apartment’s congested spaces before falling to the floor to mate.

5. Six old women lived in the apartment on the ground floor. These women had once been in a ladies’ cricket team together, but had fallen on difficult times after an unsuccessful attempt to use occult powers to improve their fortunes. Since that day, they had been haunted by the hairy ghost of W. G. Grace. The ghost was most put out at finding itself haunting a London flat and would frequently invite other ghosts of his era around to complain at them. The old women thus usually found their sleep interrupted by querulous Victorians. They welcomed the quiet buzzing and pattering of summer nights, which they assumed was some kind of air conditioning system above, as it partially drowned out the constant spectral grumblings they were subject to. On these nights they all sat up and drank saffron gin in their huge bed.

6. Below the old women there was no flat, only a basement. Although it had been intended for the storage of cleaning equipment, it was currently officially marked as unused, and its plywood door was closed with an enormous padlock. However, it proved easy to remove the door from its hinges. The basement had therefore been inhabited by a succession of squatters, and was currently the home of a young man and his labrador. In the daytime, they pretended to be statues on the riverbank for the amusement and edification of tourists. The basement was rather damp, and so they did not care to spend longer there than could be helped. However, they happened to be in on the night that the ghosts of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who had been getting drunk on saffron gin fumes, stumbled through the ceiling. Gilbert and Sullivan, who were pretty shitfaced, spent the rest of the night singing a new operetta about the many humorous problems faced by a ghost in the modern world (by which they meant the Edwardian era). Unfortunately, only the dog was awake.

7. Some days later, the dog (who was plagued with earworms which it was entirely incapable of expressing) took a wrong turning and ended up in the building’s malfunctioning lift. It was rare to find the lift venturing down as far as the ground floor, because one or other of the inhabitants of the building had levered open its workings and poured irn bru into them. The dog travelled to the top floor, where it howled and howled under the impression that it might have been singing until its owner came to find it. And that night, everyone who was heading home headed into the wrong apartment. Perhaps the dog had been singing after all, who knows?

1. The Flesh Pot, 2080. Taking advantage of the widespread uptake of vat meat, the Flesh Pot specialised in providing diners with very small, very expensive steaks made from the genetic material of the celebrity of their choice. The Flesh Pot was very careful to be scrupulously above board. All celebrities on the menu endorsed the restaurant and had personally donated their DNA to the on-site vat farm in South London. As a result, their selection was a little peculiar and tended towards the C-list. However, there was always rumoured to be a basement to the building, accessible via a fold-out mirror in the building’s excessively plush toilets, where somewhat less ethical meals were served: for example, the flesh of non-affiliated personalities (bin raids for genetic seeding material being a well-publicised hazard of fame in the near future) as well as experimental organ and other scaffold-based meats. An article in the New Sun in 2082 claimed that an infiltrating reporter had been served a faithful replica of a horse’s penis made from the genetic material of a well-known singer, and that the offered menu included the option to consume the hearts of one’s enemies, given a few strands of hair and a couple of months’ lead time. As a result, the Flesh Pot was shut down in 2085, though many years later its core concept spawned a chain of neo-Venusian fast food restaurants.

2. Light.1, 2088. Light.1 did not serve food; rather, patrons ‘dined’ on light, air, smells and sounds harvested from across the world. From 2091 water was also occasionally served with meals, although many purists felt that this was going against the original concept. Light.1 was initially branded as an art concept restaurant. However, it soon found its three windowless dining rooms were frequently underoccupied. By 2095 the restaurant, which was kept in operation by the ready flow of some billionaire’s art-wank money, had primarily rebranded itself as a weight loss enterprise. Although the main restaurant closed in 2100, the concept was kept alive by a travelling Light.1 roadshow offering non-dining experiences in some of the world’s deeper caves.

3. The Cauldron, 2109. The main dining room of the cauldron was built around an enormous pot, set bubbling in 2109 and kept boiling for the entire lifetime of the restaurant. Two rows of seats (the restaurant’s entire capacity) surrounded the pot. After initially being seeded with an unknown set of ingredients, the pot was entirely stocked with ingredients provided by the restaurant’s patrons, who were allowed to taste a spoonful of the current stew when making their (exclusive, in-person only) booking. The restaurant had no chef and only a skeleton staff. Its stews were frequently peculiar-tasting, but oddly popular; perhaps because patrons felt they were contributing something to some kind of notable crowdsourcing event thing. The existence of the Cauldron was probably prompted by the 2100’s fashion for boiling all foodstuffs to unrecognisability, following the unfortunate advent of Salmonella X in 2102.

0120 Round things
 -0120.1 That are extremely pleasing
    –0120.11 Holes that are perfectly round
    –0120.12 A full moon in a completely dark night sky
    –0120.15 Marbles that are all one colour
 -0120.2 That are not where they should be
    –0120.21 Round clods of dirt indoors
       —0120.211 Dirt of suspicious origin, possibly related to a strange cat in the house
    –0120.22 Full stops in the middle of sentences
 -0120.3 That are amusing or fun
    –0120.31 Balls
       —0120.311 Ball pool balls
       —0120.312 Footballs
       —0120.318 Giant balls of rubber bands, string, wool or other substance, used as tourist attractions
    –0120.33 The dots on the bottom of exclamation marks
 -0120.4 Of which there are many
    –0120.41 Small round items used for packing
    –0120.42 Food that is round
       —0120.422 Food that is pretentiously round
          —-0120.4222 Food that is intended to resemble the planets of the solar system
       —0120.423 Food that is boringly round
       —0120.424 Food that exists in four physical dimensions but whose projection into our three-dimensional universe is spherical
       —0120.445 Meatballs
       —0120.446 Dough balls
    –0120.44 Woodlice that have rolled themselves up on the lifting of a stone
    –0120.45 Wet spots on the ground at the start of a rainstorm
 -0120.5 Things that are thought to be round, but no-one can be sure
 -0120.6 Things that are or resemble eyes
    –0120.62 The eyes of cartoon characters
      —0120.622 The little dots of light in the eyes of cartoon characters
 -0120.9 Other things that are round

1. The clouds that lie in layers upon layers between you and the sun on those November days that feel like perpetual twilight.

2. Dark clouds on the horizon that splinter into starling murmurations when observed more closely.

3. Clouds that creep up behind you, so that you think it is a fine day until you feel the first taps of rain on your back.

4. Clouds that rain on only one side of the street.

5. Simulated clouds made up of a large amount of pillow stuffing, to be rolled in and jumped on on cold mornings.

6. Clouds that are distant explosions.

7. Brown clouds presaging snow.

8. Tiny fluffy clouds whose shape cannot quite be resolved into amusing resemblances.

9. Clouds that fall to earth and sit wetly outside your window all day.

10. Ones that are actually marshmallows.

11. Contrails across cold winter skies like cracks in the sky’s ice dome.

12. Clouds that are hardly there at all.

1. As a child he always wanted to eat a whole cake. But it was never allowed. He planned the supreme act of rebellion: a cake a metre on a side, cooked in a kiln, filled with chocolate AND cream AND custard. He vowed to eat the whole thing in one go. He failed. And in addition felt quite unwell. And in addition a wandering cat inspector took a photo of him lying in the cake’s huge remains and posted it on Twitter, where it became a meme in a way that continually popped up and shamed him throughout his life. After that point, he knew his anxiety was justified, and that the worst would always find a way to happen; and he never tried very hard at anything again.

2. Instead of sending Henry the fifth tennis balls, the French sent cake. All was forgiven. It was great cake and Agincourt never happened. In the alternate future thus spawned, humanity was 99.7% wiped out by a virulent plague in 1870 when a precursor of the ebola virus and the common cold met and fell in love in some stray cream during the annual Anglo-French cake festival. The remaining 0.3% lived brutal and pointless existences in regions of the world that were not able to sustain creameries.

3. She made a point of bringing her perfectionism to everything she did. When it was time to organise a hen night, she knew exactly what was needed; a huge hollow cake with a buff gentleman ready to leap out of it and swing his thong. The cake needed to be convincing. She made it herself. There were no cracks or hinges or anything uncakelike visible. In fact, it was superb. Any remaining imperfections were covered over on the night with a layer of marzipan. When the time came, the excited bride-to be cut into the cake to a gust of stale, exhausted air and revealed the pallid, lifeless leg of the hidden gentleman, who had suffocated.

4. As a marketing stunt, they decided to make a whole planet out of cake. It was the largest-scale replicator use to date and the ad team was very excited. A number of major scientists had been lured on board with the promise of limitless Battenburg. A spot between Mars and the asteroid belt had been identified, and the initial replicator array was scheduled to launch in three days. The next day, the rocket fell over and accidentally set off the replicator array in Baikonur instead. Rather than using chemically-uninteresting asteroids as fuel, the replicators used planet Earth. Within four days the entire planet was made of cake and nearly all sentient life had died.

1. The Hitler Society. Composed of 20th- and later-century adventurers who have successfully travelled back in time to kill Hitler, the Hitler Society has open meetings in Wellington, New Zealand five days before the turn of the 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th centuries for members to compare their experiences and to commiserate. To meet in the current timeline, of course, members of the society must subsequently have had their work undone, either by themselves or others. This may be variously in horror at the alternative future they spawned, due to a change in beliefs about the morality of meddling in the past, accidentally, or by the intervention of time-travelling neo-nazis. Rumour has it that there are a number of alternative Hitler Societies in timelines where Hitler has remained killed, and several of the Society’s members have experimented with killing Hitler in different time periods in the hope of accessing these timelines, returning after each instance to discuss with their earlier selves the merits of each approach. Although one would expect a coherent narrative about successful methods to arise from the eventual non-appearance of these members, this has so far regrettably not been the case.

2. The Time Travel Dinner and Dance Club. Unlike most of the other societies, this club is not particularly concerned with great historical events. Rather, they enjoy the companionship of other time travellers for its own sake. Members maintain a list of times and places where particularly good ingredients for fine dining are to be had and the musical fashions are to the taste of the majority; the agreement of at least twelve members is necessary for a Meeting to be called in each time and place. At the meeting, members discreetly engage local chefs and musical practitioners to provide a nice, non-challenging dinner and a short, usually rather sedate, dance, held in whatever the equivalent of a local church hall is in that time period.

3. The Long Way Society of Time Travellers. This society consists of people who have discovered at least one of the seven secrets of time travel, but have chosen not to exercise their time travelling abilities. Meetings of the Long Way Society are thus only attended by people for whom the meeting falls within their natural lifespan, and typically consist of a mixture of the lucky and the extremely long-lived. In 1980, a meeting of the Society in New York was mistaken for a coach tour of elderly Floridians and had a surprisingly humorous adventure. We mention this because, should you happen to attend a meeting after this date, you will likely run into two or three elderly members who will not shut up about the incident.

4. The Johanssonists. The main criterion for membership of the Johanssonist society is to have used time travel to perform some kind of prank at a major historical event, evidence of which must not have found its way into official histories. For example, the society’s five founder members have variously: made fart noises during the election of Pope Martin V; briefly done a silly walk behind Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field; attended the suicide of the Chongzen Emperor in a clown mask; put a small amount of laxative in Winston Churchill’s tea at an unspecified point during the Second World War; and distributed banana skins on the ground in Sao Paulo before the Brazilian Day of Anger. The Johanssonists have only one historical meeting point, thought to be on the ocean liner Elizabeth III shortly prior to her scrapping in 2110, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Applicants to the society are only allowed to materialise on deck and must give their application story within five minutes; unsuccessful applicants face being abducted and dropped off in central Greenland at a random point in history.

5. The Big Bangers. This society consists of those who have travelled backward in time to see the Big Bang. As it turns out, Zhang & Porter’s New Inflation Theory means that one can only travel backward to the publicly accessible times close to the Big Bang (i.e. times in which a human spacecraft can exist with reasonable shielding precautions). Forward travel at this time point is subject to the familiar one second per second speed limit. The Big Bangers are thus a rather isolated society and typically team up only for the companionship of starving to death together in remarkably unpicturesque surroundings. Most set off prior to the time of Zhang and Porter, although occasional kindly-minded souls have later travelled to join the Big Bangers with food and medical convoy ships.

6. The Earth Observation Society. This consists of time travelling alien beings who have a particular interest in humans. These interests are thought to range wildly, from the purely academic to the purely culinary; a surprisingly large contingent are thought to be in the human hormone trade. No details of their meetings are made available to humans, but it is believed they are typically held in near Earth orbit with optional visits to the planet’s surface for those who are able to tolerate the atmospheric conditions. Rumour has it that a Sagittarian Phage ate most of the society after an acrimonious meeting in 18870, leading to a period of highly complex timelines.

7. Prof. Wang’s Atemporal Cat Fancy. The members of Prof. Wang’s society do not have formal meetings but frequently encounter each other. Membership criteria are very loose and members often only find that the Society exists after they have begun to carry out Societally-appropriate activities. The Society specialises in picking out particularly interesting historical cats and travelling to pet them. The largest gathering of members is thought to be on the 18th of October 2015, when at least seven members independently travelled to Antarctica to pet Mrs. Chippy, the carpenter’s cat aboard Shackleton’s Endurance, the night before she was shot following the abandonment of the ship. Other targeted cats include Muezza, Christoper Smart’s cat Jeoffrey, and CC, the first cloned cat.

1. A more philosophically acceptable labyrinth. The premise of the more formal sort of labyrinth is that there is only one true path; for all our fondness of labyrinths, we do not agree with this. Instead we consider that there are as many true paths as people. Our labyrinth reflects this: there are no walls and no paths except those made by previous visitors, which you are under no obligation to replicate. Nevertheless, you are certainly at leisure to find a twisty, winding and difficult way through the labyrinth if you think it would make you feel better.

2. A maze of books. More accurately, this is a giant room filled with old books stacked from floor to ceiling, with initially only a small book-free alcove available at the entrance. Progressing to the other side requires the maze entrant to move the books around to create an increasingly narrow path, particularly if they also wish to leave some indication of the way back to the start. From time to time, functionaries appear with piles of new books to be added to the stacks. Crossing the book maze is thus a time-limited exercise, with tardy travellers soon completely buried. It is therefore vitally important not to start reading whilst in the book maze; in fact, illiteracy is a distinct advantage. It is unsure what lies on the other side of the maze in any case, and if it is desirable or not. Some suspicious observers point to the influx of new books bound in curiously soft leather which often occurs after a successful maze crossing.

3. A maze in time, rather than space. Now that we think of it, we are all doing this already. It may be that that when you found that silent, magical lake in the mist (do you remember the silent, magical lake?) you were passing through the central chamber.

4. A virtual maze. We have a computational model of the nearest city; a very, very accurate one. Into it we out our requirements for a maze: one entrance, one central chamber, one exit, a suitable amount of twists and turns and some peril. We receive a selection of entrance points and rules. For example, our city may be transformed into an adequate maze by the rule that the player take no road containing the letter ’d’. Or perhaps that they pass no building higher than two stories. We envisage many of these mazes operating at one time, with a host of players whose paths cross and recross (though their different rules mean that they can never travel together).

5. This is a formal hedge maze, except that as used according to the usual rules of hedge mazes there is no solution. There is not even nearly a solution; it is a set of closed loops. You can only get into the further parts of the maze by pushing through the hedge atone of its many sparse points. Of course, if users were to ask how this maze works, we would happily tell them this. Later on, for variety, we include a mirror section (which can only be solved by climbing over the wall) and a grotto or two (which are there merely for amusements’ sake, although we did once catch a patron trying to tunnel their way out of the grotto with a spoon).

A library of trees, planted in alphabetical order of their commonly-used name in long ranks across the field: apple, birch, cherry and so forth. We vary the spacing of the ranks based on the height of the trees and how much light the next trees along require. It is an oddly sterile place, but good for holding garden parties. On our deaths, we have decreed that the field return to nature, in the hope that one day it will become a chaotic forest with a tantalizing hint of the alphabet about it.

A library of cats. We have derived a complex classification scheme for them that we are very proud of, starting with genetic charts and using age, size and whisker length as subclassifications. But the cats will not stay in their assigned spaces. Some scratch at our carefully constructed section dividers. None of them will submit to whisker measurement.  We even find them in the morning with their collars off, nonchalantly grooming themselves on the front desk and shedding hair into the index system. We spend all our time finding the cats and refiling them. Somehow we do not mind this; there is even talk of finding more librarians.

A library of the dead. Some might argue that this is the function of a cemetery. But we disagree; one cannot legally make withdrawals from a cemetery. Our library of the dead, on the other hand, positively encourages short-term borrowing. Our stock (though we are still working on fully stocking the building; perhaps our initial facility was overambitious) is sorted by preferred method of decomposition (in soil; in air; mummified; saponified; in formaldehyde). All stock items have agreed prior to their death that they would like their mortal remains to revisit the world from time to time. Borrowers may, however, wish to inform the police beforehand so as not end up in a situation they find difficult to explain.

A library of lost things. This requires certain preparations. We have been raiding lost property offices and prowling down trains at the end of the line, black sacks at the ready. We buy up mounds of stranded suitcases from space-strapped airports. We follow the forgetful around, making distracting noises and snatching what they drop. Our collection of socks is particularly fine. We have all the usual exhibits: umbrellas, crutches, hats, prosthetic legs, notebooks, toddlers, packets of cheese, antibiotics, carnevale masks. Our library is open only to those who have lost things of their own. We collect the stories of the applicants’ losses and match them up with the lost item we have that we think will do them the most good (though it does not necessarily echo the original loss; we have lined up those who have lost loved ones with maps left on buses, for example).

Bedlington’s Bed Bedding Day, first overcast Saturday in spring
We celebrate Bedlington’s Bed Bedding Day by spending an extra ten minutes in bed, during which time we give thanks for pillows, duvets and all the other soft enablers of lovely, lovely sleep.

Owl Day, no set date
The only certain thing about Owl Day is that it happens once a year for each person; but the day it happens for each person may be different. Nor is there any set celebration. One simply wakes up and realises that it is Owl Day. The rest of the day is slightly enlivened by the knowledge that this is a special day, though it may not be different in substance to any other day. The link to owls is not known but is thought by some to be a reference to Athena.

Permission Day, June 5
Celebrants of this festival treat the 5th of June as if they had been given a set of permission slips from the Universe for the following activities: dressing up when there is no need, dancing like an idiot when someone might see, singing along to the radio, scratching their arses in public, and audibly farting.

Book smell day, August 2
On this day, participants attempt to get a good sniff of the oldest, whiffiest, crumbliest old book that they can. If your nostrils are not actually grey with old book dust, you have not celebrated book smell day properly. Likewise, if there is not an impending lawsuit on your head for breaking and entering and archivist bootmarks on your rear end, you have not really been trying. Some consider the ultimate achievement to be actually grinding down priceless manuscripts and snorting them in their entirety. Needless to say, book smell day has fallen out of favour with librarians and health professionals.

The Feast of the Teacup, November 16 (if rainy) or the first rainy day thereafter
This feast is usually celebrated by offering someone a cup of tea. At a pinch, you may offer yourself a cup of tea. If you do not like tea, you do not have to accept it. You do not even have to have tea in the house, really. The offering is the important part. Some celebrants consider the ritual instead to be the offering of the letter T, which is then drawn on some accessible part of the body. Once the letter T has been offered, the offerer should refrain from using it for the remainder of the day.

Contrariwise day, March 12
In recognition of all futile and ill-thought through acts of rebellion, we celebrate contrariwise day by turning all the toilet rolls we encounter to dispense in the other direction.

1. You join what you think is a queue, but it is in fact a group of people standing around somewhere behind the real queue. Or a second variant; a queue forms with two forks on either side of some barrier, and it is decided that the other fork is the ‘real’ one.

2.. The public toilet that someone leaves an unflushed turd in, which nobody else will flush for fear that there is something wrong with the toilet. Now it is out of use until some form of officialdom steps in.

3. The box of live and dead batteries; when you need one, you go to the box and try batteries in turn until you find a live one, and then put all the dead ones back in case there should be some need for them in the future.

4. It is painful or difficult to get up; but, not wanting to be judged for this, you think up other excuses as to why you shouldn’t. No intervention will work, and there is nothing you want to do that doesn’t involve sitting.

Mysteries

9872 Mysteries
 -9872.1 Solved
    –9872.11 Using brilliant powers of deduction
       —9872.111 Everyone so impressed by brilliant powers of deduction, nobody thinks to make sure the solution makes sense
    –9872.12 Using the power of lurve
       —9872.121 Everyone so impressed by the power of lurve, nobody thinks to make sure the solution makes sense  
    –9872.18 Solution is obviously wrong in the light of late-emerging data in any case
    –9872.19 Conspiracy theories concerning the mystery are much more entertaining than the actual solution
 -9872.2 Unsolved
    –9872.21 Explanation is obvious, but nobody wishes to admit it, because an unsolved mystery is much more exciting
    –9872.25 Of or pertaining to famous libraries or lost books
    –9872.28 Of or pertaining to remote islands or the far North
    –9872.29 Of or pertaining to caves, the deep sea or volcanos
 -9871.3 Concerning serendipity
 -9871.4 That are none of your business
    –9871.41 This fact occasioning an afternoon-long research binge
 -9871.5 Solemn and ancient
 -9871.6 Whose resolution would spawn two or more new mysteries
    –9871.64 Which must not be solved for fear of the proliferation of new mysteries
 -9871.8 In which the nature of the mystery is itself a mystery

1. In a tree by a river, a green lizard coiled and sang.

2. A distiller passed underneath; hearing the song of the lizard, he became convinced that the world needed to be set to rights. But by the time he came home, only a vague sense of confusion remained. He took this confusion and brewed it into a rain-grey liquor which tasted of salt and cedarwood. There was only enough for three bottles. The first he knocked off his dinner table with a clumsy elbow; the distiller’s daughter used the second to kill slugs; and the third was mistaken for the whisky of a famous explorer and spent a number of years at the local museum, next to a stuffed polar bear.

3. At that time, five women who had formed a society dedicated to unusual food and drink visited the town. Hearing of the fabled whisky, they determined to steal it. An accompanying feast for lost adventurers was planned of gannets, shoe-leather and certain rare lichens. The theft was strightforward; the museum was not used to interest in its exhibits of any sort, let alone the interest of criminals. On opening the bottle, they were delighted to find that the alcohol content was high and the taste peculiar, because they sustained themselves in dull years on the stories they told of their great feasts and this felt like the start of a fine one.

4. Passing a junkyard, the drunk women found a bicycle which had once belonged to Adolf Hitler. In a sudden burst of inebriated patriotism, they threw it into the Atlantic Ocean.

5. The bicycle rusted beneath the ocean for three years. A black eel made its home in the seat post. When fish came to investigate the unexpected item on the sea bed, the eel darted out and ate them. One day, on smelling a passing fish, the eel surged out of the rusty post a little too forcefully and laid its side open on a jagged edge, whereupon its fellow eels set upon it and ate it.

6. The fish the eel had not eaten found that it knew something of the giddy joy of life after all (it had never been sure; fish are not often sure). It decided to leave its quotidian fish-life for something more exciting. And indeed it had many adventures, although they were of the quiet, heartwarming sort that do not often make stories. Finally, in the far Southern Ocean, the fish was scooped up from the surface of the sea by a frigate-bird who, as the fruit of a decidedly mis-spent youth, was able to converse with a variety of species. You cannot eat me, the fish remarked, because I am a good soul and by my goodness was once saved from an eel, and the same will happen here. For the truly good can do and be anything they want.  

7. The frigate-bird ate the fish. But it had always harboured a suspicion that it was a fine sort of frigate-bird, definitely above the common mould. And so the fish’s final message stayed with it long after most of its languages had withered into word-dust. In its later years, the frigate-bird found a home in a Southern port city, where it lived on scraps of fish thrown to it by fascinated stevedores. Mostly it sang them half-remembered fragments of the joyously obscene squid-shanties of the deep sea, but when truly grateful (largely when given tuna) it would thank them for their goodness and tell them of the fish oracle who said that the truly good can be anything.  

8. In that city, tiny green lizards lived in every room. And it so happened that some lived in the port as well. One day, ten of these lizards attempted to steal a large chunk of tuna from a cat, who in turn had raided a local fishing boat. The lizards were cunning and resourceful, and (to cut a long story short) the cat ended up in a locked lorry carrying washing machine parts, and the lizards ended up with more fish than they knew what to do with. In particular it was more fish than they could easily carry, and it so happened that they dropped some near the frigate-bird’s nest, and it thanked them in its usual manner.

9. I can be anything I want to be, though the sixth lizard. And it determined that it would be a bird. With some difficulty, it joined the great migration North when Spring came around again, and found a tree in a far Northern land, where it ate summer dragonflies and coiled and sang of the joys of being a bird from dusk to dawn.