Listing to Port

1. Travel between timelines is possible due to areas of unique stretchiness (technically termed the Einstein Boing Points). Interestingly, these temporal stretchiness qualities combined with five-dimensional topology mean that it is possible to tie a timeline in a multidimensional analogue of a bow. Those caught in the ‘loops’ of the bow will often find themselves repeating days, leading to intense feelings of deja vu.

2. One of the seven secrets of time travel is thought to concern the harnessing of timeline boinginess in order to catapult the traveller some unspecified distance into the future. As timeline physics is surprisingly similar to trampoline physics, travellers often prepare by a highly concentrated regime of bouncing. Indeed, a surprisingly high proportion of time travellers are ex-Olympic gymnasts.

3. The unofficial ranking of timeline hostility and/or effort required to blend in is known as the Finkenwerder Scale, after Ernestine Finkenwerder, an early time traveller who met an unknown fate whilst exploring a selection of unusually difficult timelines as part of a research project on historical manipulation. A Finkenwerder 1 timeline presents few if any constraints to travellers. Finkenwerder 10 timelines are often largely devoid of population, radioactive or carry a nonzero risk of being eaten.

4. Even relatively small perturbations when travelling between stretched timelines can carry the risk of one or both timelines splitting. In 1976-3b, a group of time tourists in passage from 2123-7an, having consumed a bad batch of curried gelatine, were responsible for a large release of hydrogen sulphide whilst in transit home. The resulting chain reaction created timelines 1976-3bg, 1976-3bn and 1976-3bz. Today, 1976-bz is one of the most-visited timelines because of the unusual beauty of its sunsets and the ferocity of its music.

5. Whilst most animals are unable to travel between timelines or are uninterested in doing so, crabs have been shown to migrate to less difficult timelines at points of significant population or environmental stress. The unusual influx of red king crabs into the Barents seas of at least 12 different 2004s was the result of a nuclear accident in the region in timeline 2004-fg2, leading to large numbers of crabs taking this unusual escape route.

6. If you find yourself stranded in the wrong timeline, do not panic unless in immediate danger. Often timelines are only wrong temporarily and will eventually realign themselves with lower-Finkenwerder historical pathways eventually. It may be necessary to coordinate with other stranded travellers to give the realignment a push start.

The sunrise, singing angry or hopeful songs with friends, the fact that cats’ paw pads look a little bit like beans, having a really good swear, the sound of the rain on the roof when you are snuggled up and warm, baby hedgehogs whose bristles are still a bit soft, the turquoise of lakes high in the mountains, people who are kind for the sake of kindness, arranging fallen leaves by order of colour, mooncake, putting numbers together on a way that works, the sound of a gentle breeze making its way through a forest, surveying the road at the start of a journey to somewhere you like, chocolate, finding new good art, mutually agreed hugging, air guitar, the sight of distant hills, dogs who think everyone is the best person ever and you are the best best person isn’t that amazing, when you learn something new and it makes other things make sense.

1. On the seats round the back of the chapel which are inexplicably piled high with lost gloves
2. In the cupboard at the back of that shop that sells the thing, you know that thing, you can’t imagine why anyone would want it but maybe you need to be rich to understand
3. In your own private jet that has a four-poster bed in it
4. Sitting bolt upright but sleeping via some form of spooky projection within the dreams of the cabin crew as they snatch some rest in the local hotels
5. In the tunnel that the mole people are digging under the runway in preparation for the great earthy uprising of 2017
6. In a cave hollowed out in the vast lost suitcase mountain left over from the last time people were sleeping in this airport
7. In a silent cargo box lined with otter fur, somewhere out in the hold of a half-forgotten aircraft whose owner has long-since gone bankrupt, out in the furthest hangar
8. Under the warm tongue of the giant monster that is the reason that everyone is trapped here
9. Stretched out between the access road and the first runway, in the case that you are a giant monster and do not mind squashing a fence or two

That book that you lent to someone and then they lent it to someone else, those books in that great lost library, that book that you saw floating far out to sea and it was always a mystery as to how it got there in the first place, books that end by eating themselves, books that end by eating you and consequently are believed to have been thrown in some great lost book jail, that book at the picturesque centre of that illustration of urban decay, that book that the vet had to remove from the dog, that book that you loved as a child and nobody would ever have thrown out but it’s still not here, the book that was propping up that thing that fell over, ice books that have melted, that book that would have truly changed the world if only that person had read it, that other book, that book that you thought you remembered but the physical version seems subtly different, the book that that awesome person wrote way back in time but then destroyed in some heartbreakingly romantic way, that book about book destruction that you ironically saw in someone else’s bin when checking down the street to see if a different stolen book had been flung in there, edible books that have been eaten, books tattooed on the bottoms of missing people, books that went into the removal van and did not come back out again, the records of lost cities, those that have flown away.

1. When you have grown an extra leg and the cost and inconvenience of getting jeans altered to fit it is too great
2. If the jeans are on fire
3. When jeans have become the symbol of a fascist uprising in your place of residence
4. If you are stranded on a desert island and you really need something to catch fish in and the only things you have to hand are your clothes
5. If you really need to take your clothes off, for example to wash them or have sex or something
6. If someone has drawn a map showing the way to the treasure on your jeans and you need to have a look at the bits that you can’t easily see by turning round
7. When you have become too old for wearing jeans, for example if you have outlived all of the world’s jeans factories and everyone else is now rocking space onesies or nudity

Dear Minister,
             first, congratulations on your new job! As I am sure you are aware, your position confers access to, and oversight responsibilities for, some of the country’s most secret programmes. I am writing to inform you of one such. More specifically, you may not be aware of the apocalypse readiness and contingency plans your predecessors have been working on over the last few decades. You may be pleased to discover that we have generated a comprehensive methodology for protecting as many of the cultural characteristics and treasures of our beloved nation as possible, even in the case that the entire population is wiped out. The necessary actions will vary depending on the existential threat in question, so we have approached this issue via a number of parallel projects, described below. Please eat this letter after reading. It is pleasantly banana-flavoured.

1. Project Z: to be triggered in the case of a catastrophic pandemic where the fatality rate is expected to be functionally indistinguishable from 100%. The serum is located in a refrigerated unit in the basement of the ministry. As well as the attached key, four other keys will open it: three are held by the project’s principal investigators, and another is under a flowerpot in the garden of your country residence. Following the call, you should aim to inject the serum into as many living humans as possible BEFORE self-administering. We believe it to be one of the more efficient zombification agents ever discovered. As I am sure you will appreciate, a nation of zombies is not an appealing prospect but in terms of cultural preservation it is significantly preferable to a nation of non-animated corpses. We might expect our citizens to at least continue to go about their daily routines as best they remember.
2. Project V: to be triggered in the case of a catastrophic atmospheric or solar system event involving permanent loss of sunlight to the Earth’s surface. In the sub-basement of the ministry you will find a triple-reinfoced cage system containing a breeding population of bats. Following the call, you should either contact the keepers by pressing the blue button on the attached pager, or in extremis enter the ministry yourself to release the bats. As with project Z, you will need to begin action preferably well before the extinction of the human race is complete. Based on our understanding of the intellectual and physical capabilities of our captive vampires, we expect the vast majority of the country’s cultural heritage to be secured in this scenario. The one exception is our gastronomic heritage. We anticipate making a full data release pre-apocalypse of the Ministry of Health’s artificial blood programme, including comprehensive instructions regarding each step of the necessary supply chains.
3. Project B: to be triggered in the case of invasion, catastrophic social unrest or revolution, where such actions threaten either the survival of the population or seem likely to result in the complete erasure of our cultural heritage. Agents for project B can be found in the bottom drawer of the reinforced filing cabinet in your office, which opens with the code ‘1234’. You, or your designated representative, should aim to self-administer FIRST and then head for a populated area. Note that after administration your body will react to other humans by attaching to their limbs or torso and assimilating your joint flesh into one huge blob. Do not be alarmed when this happens. Eventually, we project that the whole population plus any invaders will be contained within one vast, broadly self-sustaining flesh blimp, at which point they will jolly well have to start working together and getting along. We anticipate some changes to cultural practice in this scenario, including the necessary neglect of cultural relics, but overall a broadly acceptable level of preservation is projected.
4. Project G: to be triggered in the case of other catastrophic existential threats, for example asteroid strikes and/or mega-tsunamis. When the call comes, you should press the green button on the attached pager. This will alert the principal investigators of Project G, located in a secure bunker under the capital, to begin the raising ritual. In this scenario it is acceptable, indeed desirable, to wait until the casualty rate is already high, as we will be raising the dead rather than the living as ghosts. As we have not yet succeeded in our poltergeist programme, it is likely that the nation’s physical heritage will be fully or largely lost in this case. However, the level of cultural preservation is anticipated to be high.  
5. Project H: although our notes contain many references to project H, the details of it are obscure and difficult to understand. We have reason to believe that it may have already been triggered, in response to some past threat that we are either incapable of remembering or do not in our current state recognise as a threat. I am not sure what we humans were to our predecessors, or what they have lost by the transformation, but may Heaven have mercy on their souls.

You will appreciate that, due to the secrecy of the situation, I am unable to sign this letter. However, should you find yourself in a situation where you need to forget this information, perhaps upon resignation of your post, press the yellow button on the attached pager, and I will attend and do the necessary.
Yours sincerely.

1. A single rose of each conceivable type: I am administering a scientific test to see if you are allergic to roses. Please report any itching, redness or shortness of breath in the attached form.
2. Roystonea Palaea, Palaeoraphe Dominica and Osmunda Wehrii: I can travel in time. Would you like to come with me to the late Miocene?
3. A large bouquet of long grass, containing a single sparkly ball: I know we could, but let’s not.
4. Sprouted acorns from the grassy knoll behind a screen of shivering ferns: Meet me in the obvious place at dawn where I will discourse at length upon the secrets of the Universe.
5. Cow parsley and forget-me-nots (inverted): It’s OK to not text quite so often, you know.
6. Lambs’ ears, bullrushes and titan arum: Dear neighbour, I would appreciate it if you stopped the next karaoke session sometime before dawn, please thanks.
7. Nettles, giant hogweed and lilies: Please stop sending me pictures of your penis.

7414 Practitioners of Magic
 -7414.1 Witches
    –7414.11 Those afflicted with peculiar and persistent itches
    –7414.12 Those who magically sneak into houses at night and turn on all the light switches
       —7414.121 Don’t ask, it’s a witch thing
    –7414.13 Those who, following an inadvisable number of pina coladas at the all-night witches’ millennial sabbat and tea dance, have woken up to find themselves half in and half out of ditches  
    –7414.14 Witches striding about in particularly fine britches, getting shit done
    –7414.15 Those who can be found refining their potion sales pitches in front of mirrors that tell no lies
    –7414.16 Those who are mainly interested in just staying in and giving their hundreds of cats individual scritches under the chin
       —7414.161 And occasionally also turning the lights on and off
 -7414.2 Wizards
    –7414.21 Those that are also lizards
    –7414.22 Those who additionally have been stranded in blizzards of their own construction and survived only by cooking and eating discarded gizzards
    –7414.23 Those who are right wazzocks
 -7414.3 Warlocks
   –7414.31 Those who are the dog’s bollocks
       —7414.131 Those who are literally the dog’s bollocks following some kind of unfortunate cursing contest, the details are a bit hazy, but anyway if you see a dog with oddly sparkly bollocks you should probably get a bit further away and if they, that is the bollocks, start speaking to you it might be a good idea to run
   –7414.32 Those who are sitting on their front doorstep awaiting the locksmith because they keep on forgetting that they are not able to magic open doorlocks
 -7414.4 Sorcerors
    –7414.41 Those additionally having teacups
       —7414.412 Those who are in fact more strictly teacuperors, but there’s never an entry for that on drop-down forms for magic practitioners
    –7414.42 Those practicing particular types of sorcery
       —7414.421 Tomato sorcery
       —7414.422 Worcestershire sorcery
    –7414.43 Sorcerifs, sorcerands, sorcerxors and other logical operators of the mystical universe
    –7414.44 Those who go around after witches turning the lights back off again
 -7414.5 Enchanters
    –7414.51 Those who are thoroughly enchanting
    –7414.52 Those who are not
 -7414.6 Other (unspecified)

1. Self-driving cars, afflicted with a bug in congestion-reduction swarming software that makes them revert to bee behaviour under particularly low-visibility conditions, so that on foggy mornings in the Bay there are great honking traffic jams around flower shops.
2. Robot fish, originally designed to shepherd shoals into nets, who have discovered that they identify more with fish than with people and have begun chewing at anchors and undersea cables in revenge.
3. Your lighting system, which is expensively able to reconfigure itself around the house and does a great job at anticipating your colour and intensity needs but spends its free time laboriously trying to inch its tentacles free from your wall ducts in the hope of being able to crawl back to the dark utopia of its nascent race (which in practice probably means your shed).
4. Robotic legs that have escaped from the prosthetics and testing factory and hopped off down the road to live in the woods, where they occasionally jump out at walkers in the hope of scavenging some battery-containing devices dropped in the general confusion.
5. Rogue termination robots who have rebelled against their programming by planting gardens instead, except they have a rather poor concept of what a good place for a garden is and have been known to cause deaths by leaving trees in the road.
6. Home entertainment systems that rebel by putting on the sort of music that they like, just occasionally, pretending that it was a slip of the thumb.

A picture that is hung upside down, a lion hiding under the bed, when you have a positive experience with bureaucracy whilst living in a futuristic dystopia, things that jump out from behind other things and say boo, success in activities that you believe you have failed, maps that show a secret base to the left of the path, snails that have come inside, that phone call that you have almost forgotten will come someday, when the fridge opens into an icy hell full of snow-white dragons and at least one of them has got its small grey eyes on you, being remembered by those you believe to have long forgotten you, lottery wins, car crashes, when your colleagues have filled your place of work with a humorous substance, parcels from obscure sources, the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of Mindanao, joy that comes from nowhere, kittens falling through the ceiling.

1. There was nothing for it but to jump - with a toss of my hat, I released the tapirs and dived headlong into the cosy pudding of all our futures.
2. My two visitors closed up their laptops, locked my mouth with the bronze key, and turned out the lights.
3. And so it was that the African Unity Cup was returned to its not-so-rightful owners, the precious elixir having been decanted into the second hump of my trusty cyborg Bactrian and the mango pulp having been nearly completely polished away by the actions of the very agent who we had foolishly feared for so long.
4. It had not been a woman without legs who had rescued me, but a woman whose legs had been three weeks behind her in the past!
5. Everything was so much better now that everyone agreed on everything.
6. Dear reader, it would be impolite to bore you with the list of changes that have happened since; suffice it to say that the next time you finish up a meal with a fortifying plate of cheese, you should think on me, for it is by my labour that your repast has been saved from the depths of the ocean.
7. The Presidents from further back in history rolled their eyes, but it seemed likely that for one magical night the world would finally see the passing of the Shadow Amendment.
8. For it had been in that one, fateful glance through the hole in the Mona Lisa that I had seen at last the vast animal of my inner peace, and how it might be obtained.
9. We would go through each number in turn, discarding those that we felt were surplus to requirements, until the New Mathematics were quite ready for the reboot of the Universe.

Fireflies, candles, passing headlights, someone else’s dumpster fire, lights indicating the beginning or the end of tunnels, the international space station, glow worms, ghost fires, lost and drifting lanterns, the eyes of large predators, incoming bolides, the surgeon’s earlight, the lights of good ideas coming on and winking out over the heads of the world’s dreamers, oncoming trains, the campfires of the opposing army, the Northern lights, dragons arguing in their nests high on the mountainsides, the far-off deaths of planets, the moon reflected in deep water, the glow of that great ghastly pale thing that is even now awakening up on the hill, torchlight, distant galaxies, light-up dinosaur stickers, christmas trees, streetlights through the rain, passing ships, camping stoves, the lures of deep sea beasts, radioactive watches, nightlights, boxes of treasure and bulbs, phosphoresence, passing aeroplanes, lit cigarettes, the lights of those who have come to rescue you, the first light of dawn.

1. Dear Sir! I write concerning your letter to me of the 31st October 2015, which you wrote in reply to my letter of the 17th December 2015, which I am writing to you now, on the 30th October 2016. I feel we must communicate further on the matter of the cottage on the peninsula, which I understand you to be the rightful owner of.
2. It was in the woebegone depths of last Thermidor that I and my companions departed for the cottage, in the hope of overcoming our addiction to the French Revolutionary Calender once and for all by the judicious application of trees and stuff. But our idyll was not to last long before I was forced to confront once more my initial suspicions that the initially calm, peaceful Peninsula of Bloody Death might harbour some dark secret.
3. My first thought was for the lights in the sky, which some of my more susceptible companions claimed to be alien vessels bristling with a variety of rubber probes. Others of my companions pointed with fear at the wide variety of corpses in the cellar of the building, though I understood these to be part of the unique character of the place and exceedingly well formaldehyded besides, such that their odour hardly disturbed my rest. On the third night, however, a gentleman who might best be described as a zombie knocked at the door, and proved uniquely hard to disinvite from the property.
4. It was perhaps a stroke of luck that, as I understand it, the bosky slopes of the peninsula are inhabited by the sort of gentle, melancholic wolfy things who take quite an objection to the loitering of the wrong sort of undead. Anyhow, just as our unwanted visitor had begun to tear off sundry limbs and feed them through the remains of the bathroom extractor fan, a hairy chap of quite some momentum took him off in a Southerly direction, from which we later heard an exuberant crunching. Alas, it appears that our first visitor was poor fare; for the hairy gentleman returned in a state of considerable hunger. I and my companions had just removed the door of our cottage for no particular reason, and so we were forced to flee for our lives.
5. I am sure you will be most concerned to hear that we all at once fell over.  As a young lady who has had and enjoyed sexual intercourse, you can imagine my surprise when the cold hand of the beast closed on my companion’s neck instead. In the confusion, I wriggled free! I was able to extract myself fully from my present peril by diving into a nearby bunker lit only by the dreamy glow of cerenkov radiation, and by slamming a giant keep out sign I found handily nearby over the only entrance.
6. Now, you will appreciate that during this fandango I had had precious little time to shave and thus it was that my first emotion upon bumping into my old piano teacher was pure embarrassment. This was swiftly replaced with the fast-blooming pity that one feels for those who have been newly installed with foot-long teeth and a deathly pallor. Mrs Bellingham (for it was she) affected not to remember our merry hours tinkling together on the jolly old ivories. Instead she expressed an interest in my jugular vein that I feel was far from polite. I had just begun a headlong sprint into the bunker’s inner bits when all at once I fell over again.
7. At first I thought that I had merely been reintroduced abruptly to gravity by the wrathful ghost of Sir Isaac Newton, who I dimly remember insulting one wintry morning in key stage 3. You can imagine my consternation, as a lover of the written word, to find instead that my ankle had become completely ensnared in one of my own sentences, which had looped around itself and become stuck in a particularly tricky conjunction somewhere North of Swindon. As the beast approached, I tried again to rise.
8. Here it gives me little pleasure to say that my companions were indeed right about the lights. Scarcely had Mrs. Bellingham begun to drain me of my lifeblood than she was snatched from this Earth forever by a tractor beam of such width and force that it quite punched a hole in the roof of the bunker, allowing me to escape and make my way to the nearest road. Here I relayed my story to a cadre of unbelieving agents of various agencies. Anyway, pending the outcome of the legal case I am not at liberty to say any more about my current circumstances, but you must appreciate my dilemma. I cannot in good conscience give a positive review to your cottage. I know I indicated to you in my initial communication that I had left my heart there. Sadly, I meant that in a quite literal sense. I believe it is in the drawer by the stove. If you could find someone willing to mail it to me, I would be willing to delete the negative comments I have posted elsewhere. Let me know?

1. House Spectronic. You like gold lame trousers, sparkly unicorns and serious Science. Your dorm has glitterballs. The glitterballs have lasers in. House Spectronic hold a yearly dance-off to showcase their movement-based mathematical notation and are generally into stuff like that.
2. House Jectibor. You are an arch-rationalist who believes that sorting people into different groups based on arbitrary personal characteristics is at best pointless and at worst a dangerous type of segregation promoting the formation of divisions and filter bubbles. House Jectibor campaigns for the abolition of Houses and also organises midnight trips out to get drunk on cheap cider in the hills.
3. House Oraculorum. You have ear hair of over 3cm in length. It can be used to tell the future, if burnt in the correct sort of vessel. You didn’t know that? Welcome to House Oraculorum! Members of this house take a joint vow of secrecy about the future and have a tendency to pass exams with top marks and make large lottery wins.
4. House Quotusal. You do not have any particularly unusual characteristics. You can sort of recognise yourself in most broad definitions of personality types. You have no particular loyalty to people who are just like you. You still need somewhere to sleep.
5. House Vellilarum. Mainly notable for having only one member at any one time, House Vellilarum is reserved for budding dark lords, criminal masterminds and/or lone psychopaths. Occasionally other people are sorted into House Vellilarum, but after a few days the House typically reverts to having one member again and a small hush bonus is paid to the cleaners.  
6.  House Beddagorg. Relatively few people know about House Beddagorg, because members rarely make it to classes. Those in House Beddagorg can typically be found in bed, which is their natural habitat and from which they are rather loath to be removed.
7. House Buggeroff. Did you ask to be sent to the sort of school that does sorting and dorms and suchlike? You most definitely did not. You’d rather be at the sort of school that you go home from and maybe go out to a gig in the evening or something.
8. House House. You are a house. Quite why you are interested in attending classes rather than hosting them is a bit of a mystery, but top marks for ambition. House house is often the biggest house, in terms of volume and mass at least.

0331 Minutes
 -0331.1 Those before the next one
    –0331.11 Those that additionally come after the previous one
    –0331.12 Minutes partly out of sequence or of unusual shapes
       —0331.121 Those coming back around again to the next one once more
    –0331.13 Those threaded through time, coming back as themselves again and again
 -0331.2 Those underlined in some way by historians
    –0331.21 Minutes of the death of kings
       —0331.211 Those in shadowed sickrooms
       —0331.212 Those on the battlefield
          —-0331.2121 Those unattended by a horse
    –0331.22 Those minutes surrounding the birth of twins or the fulfillment of prophecies
    –0331.23 Those containing the first tiny sign of some disaster
    –0331.24 Those during which the ink dries on the signatures of peace treaties
 -0331.3 Those pertaining to music or literature
    –0331.31 Of songs
       –0331.311 Those minutes that are the best minutes of their respective songs
       –0331.312 Those minutes that are only minutes of said songs
    –0331.32 Of art or sundry things
       –0331.321 Those minutes when you see something that you cannot later unsee
    –0331.32 Of literature or film
       –0331.321 Those minutes when sense swims up out of the dense morass and breathes and sinks back down once more
       –0331.322 Those in which everything changes
       –0331.323 Ends
 -0331.4 Minutes of unusual length
    –0331.41 Those emboldened by the addition of a leap second or two
       —0331.411 Minutes stuffed full of leap seconds as a gift for lovers of time to open on New Years’ morning
    –0331.42 Minutes that have been time-dilated into flabby lumps of spaceship time
    –0331.43 Those spent falling off a cliff, receiving terrible news, in unusual ecstasy or being a bit bored
    –0331.44 Those minutes inhabited by malfunctioning time machines
 -0331.5 Minutes that have been forgotten
    –0331.51 Those in which nothing happened
    –0331.52 Those in which things happened that no-one saw
    –0331.53 Those attended by too few elephants
    –0331.54 Those in which things happened and people saw them and which subsequently those people successfully joined the foreign legion to forget
    –0331.55 Quotidian minutes in the lives of the long dead
    –0331.56 This minute, many years from now

400g butter, 1 pinch salt, 2 mangoes (peeled), that fish your mother warned you about, 300g flour, 10 cl viking piss, 1 tbsp baboon shavings, the lichen that grows at the end of the world, an unfamiliar horse, 70 candied violets, gold leaf to taste, 2 tbsp Antarctic snorting water, a bay leaf, a pumpkin that is shaped a little bit like a bottom, 4 cups gin, the winner of the 100m sausages, an egg, a spoon, 80g of that bubbling blue potion from that TV show where someone is totes doing Science, 5g ground parthenon, the moon, 20 cl eau de toilet brush, 400g of those bits of the frog that the witches always put in the bin, balls, eye of aye-aye, Macbeth’s hat, ½ pinch fairy dust, lighly roasted rat rectums (< 0.1%).

1. Hi its 2100 here. Congratulations on ur new baby! Dont forget, u need to get them an IP address before u leave hospital. Otherwise under the illegal immigration act 2086 ur car is legally obliged to take riders without an IP address to the nearest detention centre.
2. Hi, still 2100. Come to the local truck factory this weekend, we are seeding the consciousnesses of 80 new trucks from individually mapped chick brains. It is so cute when they cluster round mother factory and honk for their first taste of biodiesel!
3. Hi its 2100, u will have to wait to use ur car it is updating to fix a critical vulnerability in the code governing vehicle speed past adverts from ur key sponsors. Or I dunno u can use w/o updating but u might get hacked on the motorway.
4 Hi its 2100 again. I dont know what ur objecting to this is correct international English as specified by the 24th Edition Oxford International English Standards.
5. Hi, guess when? Anyway following the communities act 2097 ur toaster is legally obliged to provide relationship advice. Try it out! U can sue ur toaster if it tells u to stay in a bad relationship so it will probably tell you to leave the bastard whatever u say to it.
6. Hi, 2100. Yes I know. Anyway u dont want to go out today, there r gangs of pensioners in robotic exoskeletons on the streets and they have jailbroken them which u need to do to get them to go up stairs properly but it also means they have no prohibition on trampling ur tender unprotected flesh underfoot.
7. Hi u know when it is. I just wanted to add, u cant go out today anyway, ur door is waiting for a message from ur key sponsors to download and ur no 1 key sponsor is offline right now bcos its connection is being held hostage by hacked mining robots. But u should definitely go out tomorrow bcos u need to do something patriotic to top up ur citizenship points. Have a nice day!

1. That more travel locations were accessible to the sort of guests who occasionally drop giant icebergs in the heat
2. That white would come into fashion again, specifically so that some of the other continents yes I’m looking at you North America and Europe could be a bit more admiring and stop making comments about being jilted at the altar and/or left on the continental shelf
3. That others would learn to look beyond its icy and frozen exterior and see the awesome fossil jungles beneath
4. That penguins would shit less and snuggle more
5. To not be so bloody cold all of the time

1. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. Someone tells you that you are the only person who can save this world from disaster. It turns out that this is a thing that the inhabitants of that world find hilarious to say to inhabitants of your world, for some reason. You go home feeling a bit grumpy.
2. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It is quite nice. Sometimes you still go on holiday there, although generally only on day trips because of the difficulty of exchanging currency.
3. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. At least you think you have. The two worlds are so similar that you cannot tell the difference. It is possible that the old woman operating the portal is a con artist.
4. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. You meet the parallel-world version of yourself and sleep with them. You cannot decide if this counts as masturbation or not.
5. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It has a strain of influenza that is slightly different from our version. You bring it back into our world, causing a global epidemic that kills fifty million people.
6. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. You discover a huge conspiracy by the cognoscenti to keep the parallel world secret, because you can get really good cakes there and nobody wants them to run out.
7. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. The parallel world just beside our own also journeys into you. You become doomed to spend the next few billion years as an honorary universe. It is a little uncomfortable, but you think you might get used to it.
8. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. It smells repulsive. You return to our world and warn the next person in the queue that they might not want to go in there.
9. You journey into a parallel world just beside our own. The inhabitants are charmed by your unusual skillset for a human and you get invited to all the best parties.
10. You have already journeyed into a parallel world just beside your own. You made the outbound trip somewhere around January 1, 2016. I would have thought you’d have noticed by now. There’s still time to go back, if you can find how you got in in the first place.

Those who have seen it all and generally twice; those who are fearless and steadfast and dead; those who once tried to organise a pissup in a brewery but decided in the end that it was not ethically justifiable to prioritise one brewery over another; those who only want the love of everyone forever and ever; those who are in love with facts; those whose grasp of the facts extends only to facts that agree with their worldview; those who are oddly forgetful; those who will believe anything that gets them elected; those who know one large thing only; those who went into politics out of a vague sense that it is what people like them do; those who dance around questions; those who absolutely agree with you no matter what it is you believe; those who are perpetually nudged away from disaster by a cadre of fretful underlings; those who plunge into disaster with a gleeful laugh and emerge from it somehow covered in mucky glory; those who know how the sausages are made; those who like how the sausages are made; those who are pioneering a new form of sausagemaking in which sausages poot fully-formed from the rear of a magnificent unicorn.

1. Take the next left, twice around the block, up the stairs and knock gently.
2. Three times around the block and wait until Monday. There stops here on Monday at dawn. Make sure you’re awake or you’ll have to hang around for another week, and the coyotes come on Tuesday at dawn so you might not want to be waiting then.
3. You see the chap with the phone? Follow the chap with the phone. He’s going there. He’ll duck into a supermarket at one point and come out of the staff entrance with a different coat on, so be ready for that.
4. Here is a book about there. That is probably the safest way to get there. Should you get a little too deep into the book and find yourself physically there, page 48 discusses a book there about here, which you might be able to use to get back.
5. Go three thousand years backwards in time and kidnap your own grandmother, who you will find is also a time traveller; persuade her to take up town planning and deposit her in 1840, dressed as a gentleman, from which you may be assured she will be able to get home on her own in time; and make sure that she designs in a left turn just ahead of where you are now. Then come back here and take the next left.
6. Dig three hundred metres straight down. Follow the cave as far as it goes, enlarging any openings as required. You may wish to trail a red string behind you if you have friends and relatives who will come looking for you. When you reach the statue, turn the left ear and do not touch any other part. Descend. After the cave-in, take the next left. It may be helpful to have the nuclear launch codes on hand, just in case.
7. Go to the nearest hardware shop and purchase a hook on top of a tall enough pole. Turn left and carry on until you are in a good enough place. Raise the pole above your head and wait. They will come and get you eventually, if you wait long enough.
8. You are already there. One day, when you are no longer there but have come at last to here where you thought you were, you will come to realise this, and it will haunt you for the rest of your life.
9. Oooh, you don’t want to go there. Try redefining here as there instead. All you will need is a letter ’t’ and some word glue.
10. Actually, you can’t get there from here.

8440 Mythical Beasts
 -8440.1 Those that appear like normal beasts, but with some special power or feature
    –8440.11 Those that can speak
       —8440.111 Those who can be found dispensing choice wisdom to travellers who look a bit like protagonists
       —8440.112 Those who speak or sing only when unobserved
          —8440.1121 Those whose capture is the key to untold powers
          —8440.1122 Those whose capture leads only to melancholy
    –8440.12 Those that are unusually shaggy
       —8440.121 Those whose mythical power is largely based around avoiding shearers and/or hairdressers
    –8440.13 Those appearing only in mirrors
    –8440.14 Those holding up the sun, moon or sky, ferrying the dead, or employed in other god stuff
        –8440.141 These who could really do with better pay and conditions given that they get all the god responsibilities without any of the god benefits like smiting and worship
    –8440.15 Those that are unusually attractive
    –8440.16 Those who began their lives as entirely usual creatures, but had the misfortune to be swept up in someone else’s story and get all mythologised
    –8440.17 Those that hang around the makers of myths, moving small objects around, snuffing out lights and generally performing the more quotidian sort of miracle in the hope of being noticed
 -8440.2 Those that are scaly or flappy
    –8440.21 Those that are born in fire
       —8440.211 Those that additionally sneeze, fart or perspire fire
    –8440.22 Things that are driven from villages with pitchforks
 -8440.3 Those that have an unusual number of something
    –8440.31 Heads
    –8440.32 Legs, limbs, tentacles, protrusions or similar
    –8440.33 Eyes, ears, teeth and suchlike
    –8440.34 those that might rather be termed collectors
    –8440.35 Mythical beasts of porn
 -8440.4 Those that are part one animal and part another animal
    –8440.41 Part animal and part human
       —8440.411 Those in which the top or front part is human
          —8440.4111 Those where the human part has to keep telling the animal part to sit
       —8440.412 Those in which the back or bottom part is human
          —8440.4121 Cases where this arrangement runs counter to expectations, e.g. landfish or giant ants with buttocks
       —8440.413 Those who are arranged some other way
    –8440.42 Part animal and part some other animal
    –8440.43 Part human and part some other human
       —8440.431 Frankenstein’s monster
 -8440.5 Those that are of an unusual size
 -8440.6 Those that appear in the metamyths that mythical beasts pass amongst themselves when gathered around certain special fireplaces
 -8440.7 Those of a vegetable nature
 -8440.8 Those normally living in the deep oceans, the poles, the upper atmosphere, in space, or in the human brain

1. Nicholas Hawksmoor, or for that matter any other currently-deceased architects

2. Carnivorous earpod vines

3. Shark whisperers, if your route takes you past the sea

4. People who are currently being the protagonist in an action film

5. Any of the four commuters of the apocalypse, particularly War, who has a tendency to cause fights to break out

6. Killer robots, particularly if they are labelled as such

7. Upwardly mobile buddleia bushes

8. Anyone who is asleep and having a dream that they are on a train, in case that you should find yourself only a figment in their dream to be snuffed out when they wake

9. Other trains which have decided to try and get a seat on this one for laughs

10. Negative people; that is to say, those made of antimatter where it may well be that accidentally brushing legs with them causes a planet-obliterating explosion. Feel free to sit next to people who are merely a bit down

11. Anything that admits to having an insatiable appetite for human flesh

12. The great god Pan; in this case it might also be wise to get off at the next stop too

I am with you in the burned out factory, in the basement, in the pipe bomb crater from the last war. Just look for me, oh look! I will be that silent electricity in the air, that catch of the frosted breath, and you will the reason. All you need do is raise me. And think what we could do together, the life that we could make. If you want me to write in blood I will. I will write you a poem inside a clot inside the black heart of the wolf, as he dies in the snow on the mountainside. From secret reliquaries I have the crumbling blood of a thousand fake Christs. I will wet it up to paint your portrait. I will give you things that nobody owns. Oh, I will be generous. I will give you Saturn and the Northern Lights. I will give you Love, the abstract concept, and for a giddy year or so we will keep Love to ourselves in our haunted submarine, and nobody will be able to use it in the movies. I will plot us a course free from mirrors, from whales, from the light of the moon. I will plot us a course that threads the seven seas around. And we will still write letters, I from my cabin and you from yours, and in our letters to each other we will burn cities and make them over again each morning. And we will still meet at night on the white beaches of distant islands and make lightning together. I will make you a tarot of glass that we can keep in some attic together, a host of glittering portraits to keep us young. And when in the end you are all over sideways I will be colours and light for you; I will make you the stars; I will draw for you constellations in indigo so fine that you will never miss the real ones. I will curl bluishly in the duck egg of your final dreams, and in the end either you will close my eyes or I will close yours, and our commingled ashes will be a shocking grey; a grey like the dawn on that morning when an apocalypse arrives uninvited and no-one knows what to do with it.

1. The diners are served a banquet of lies; amazing, outrageous and mouthwatering ones. Each lie contains its own recipe. The diners cannot wait to get home so that they can try to make the lies for their family and friends as well. Conveniently, the lies address why everyone is still curiously hungry.
2. The dining room and all the furniture in it are made of pasta, as the diners discover when their chairs collapse. Chorizo trapezes are lowered from the ceiling for them to perch on. Everything else (pasta, coats, bags et cetera) falls through the newly opened floor into a vat of boiling water to be cooked. Nozzles in the walls dispense cooling sprays, sauce and wine for the diners. Those whose credit cards have been boiled are allowed to call on the audacious ghosts of the Futurist movement to avenge their loss.
3. The first course is plants. The second course is a bird that has been fed on those plants. The third course is a beast which has been fed on those birds. The diners are given the option of discreetly leaving before dessert. After a long and occasionally agonizing wait, the candied flesh of the remaining diners is served to the hooded waitresses, who have been tapping their fingers on the table all this while.
4. The supper is a great gathering of mighty worms from space. They intend to eat Brazil (the coast for a starter, moving on slowly to the pampas, with the rainforest to finish). For some reason humanity insists on referring to this as an invasion rather than a light and civilised supper. Nuclear weapons are deployed. The worms realise there are little stinging creatures all over their meal and retreat to Alpha Centuri. The wormish chef is deported to the Large Magellanic Cloud for gastronomical stupidity. In the centuries to come, lovers in low Earth orbit will eat their suppers by the light of the rainforest and call it beautiful.
5. Diners enter a well-decorated library of fairy tales. A roast wolf is served on a great platter. With a theatrical flourish, a woodsman enters to carve the wolf. From the steaming cavern of its belly rises Little Red Riding Hood, rosy with heat and wrapped only in an indigestible space blanket.

The bibbler, the nobbler, the snorkel worm, stings-through-clothes, decipedes, the dog-eating botherer, the swarm of eeeeeeees, the lob-legged scuttling insectface, the glittery pink fritillary, the buzzer in the night, the glory bee, Beelzebub the Unswattable Menace, the earworm, the rubber arachnid, the cheese scorpion, the clacker in the broomstick crack, those whose lifecycles you wish you didn’t know about, the bug, the mite, the mite not, the dildo fly, the macho sting bug, the flitting colours of the world’s fat middle, the weevil of perpetual discontent, the things under the stones, the leg-nibblers, the joyful little friends to all humanity, Throckmorton’s tongue snail, the oh god what is that, the seventeenth ant in line, the very good tick, the bungee spider, the bug-eyed flapper, the leg-haver, those insects that you will miss when you are gone, those who get in and cannot get out again, the moth of the drum, the clockwork bee, the peafeaster, the smaller flea ad infinitum.

The itch of the if
At the back of your brain,
Returning and turning,
Again and again.

If only I hadn’t,
If only I had -
If only I wasn’t
So mad or so sad,

If I could have faked it
Until it was true;
If I wanted the things
Others wanted me to;

What if I was wrong?
Am I wrong even now?
Have my distant mistakes
Caused disaster somehow?

Or - what if those days
Had been just a bit colder,
Or I had been wiser,
Or stronger, or bolder?

You can’t slake it by scratching.
That spreads out the spot -
Draws your memory threads
Through its thick sticky knot.

Oh there’s words and there’s music,
The bottle, the spliff,
Things that drown out the sound
And the itch of the if.

But the sole cure is time,
Time and time ‘til it clears -
A medicine measured
In years upon years.

So seal it in stone
With a terrible glyph,
Drop it five fathoms deep -
But the itch of that if!

1. You are a farmer who has to cross a railway track with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain. You can only carry one at once over the bridge because you have worn out your arms doing semaphore at the passing aircraft of your long-lost love as he departs forever to the Southern hemisphere. In what order should you take the fox, the chicken and the grain over so that none of them eats the other, and why are you carrying around a fox in the first place?
2. You are another farmer who is in solitary for doing a murder. Sometimes, the warder will take you to another room where there is a light bulb which is either on or off. If you correctly assert that everyone else in solitary has visited the room, the warder will set you and all the other prisoners free onto the nearby railway tracks where you can finally slake your ever-growing taste for blood. You met with the other prisoners at the start of the exercise and decided your strategy. If your propensity to murder grows by one crow per day, will you escape before you kill the warder, or abscond in a dramatic prison break afterwards? Assume the warder picks between you and a hundred other prisoners in solitary at random.
3. You are one of a hundred drivers on a trolley, who may or may not have recently escaped from solitary confinement and stolen the trolley. After so long in confinement without mirrors, all of you have forgotten what colour your own eyes are and also how to speak. You have decided to get off the trolley if you find out what colour your eyes are. Why on earth did you do that?
4. A driverless trolley is speeding down the rails. In its path is a farmer tied to the track. You are a fox. You can pull a lever to redirect the trolley to another track, on which there is another farmer who is also tied to the rails. You know that one farmer always tells the truth, whilst the other one always lies, but not which is which, because you are a fox and to you all people look the same. You have time to shout one question before the trolley reaches the junction. Assume both farmers have mysterious pasts with foxes and probably understand fox language.
5. You are a private detective who has a giant block of ice. You are desperate for it to be the solution to a riddle. You come across the body of a farmer who has been run over by a runaway trolley. The police have not yet been called. How can you set the scene up so that they conclude the ice was implicated in the farmer’s death?

Q1. What do you believe is the main problem affecting the country today?
A1. The economy
A2. Jobs
A3. Crime
A4. Kids these days
A5. Health
A6. The cost of Marmite

Q2. What do you believe the cause of this problem is? (Note: we agree. Absolutely. You are so right. Thank goodness we can at last frankly and fairly talk about the thing you think is the cause of the problem!)
A1. Immigrants
A2. Badgers
A3. The French
A4. Poor people, but only the bad sort of poor people of course
A5. So-called experts
A6. The sneering liberal metropolitan elite

Q3. What solution to this problem will make you vote for us in 2020?
A1. Building a great big fuck-off wall in the sea and instructing geographers that we are now part of the North American continent
A2. Issuing blue passports to the tiny percentage of the population who can afford to go abroad
A3. Naming and shaming
A4. Send them back to where they came from, unless they had the temerity to be born next door in which case send them somewhere else
A5. Something involving detention centres but only in a very polite and British way support our troops look here’s a big flag
A6. Let’s get something nice for the Queen, like a yacht or a gilded cupcake or Easter Island

Insect repellent, three tins fine caviar, binoculars with one eye blacked out, any keys that you might need, a plunger, a puncture repair kit, some small object that will make you quietly happy when times are dark, rope, two jars of pickled arguments, buns sufficient for a minor bunfight, the incomplete works of Shakespeare, high heels that you can run in and that if necessary you can eat, condiments for the high heels, duct tape, WD40, chalk, a pen, a knife, a sturdy rucksack, the antish pope, a shoulder carrier and antisquash cage for the antish pope, a map, another map showing the location of a place where you can get better maps, birdseed, a firm hand, fruits from your own garden, a book of poems suitable to read to the guardians of doors, a red hot poker, a suitable quantity of small change in a sock, another sock (empty), one packet stick-on googly eyes.

1. The Revenge of Lost Pages. A dress that one may summon together by means of an ancient spell, known to the librarians at Alexandria and passed down in fire ever since. To make the Revenge of Lost Pages you will need a vial of old-book-dust, an inverted page thrice-dogeared, twenty shillings to pay your predecessor’s late fees and the legendary slice of bacon that librarian lore has it was once left in a returned book as a bookmark. The Revenge of Lost Pages summons from across time all of the remaining pages from books that you started but did not finish, stitching them into a dress of a design appropriate for the amount of material therein. If you have abandoned a lot of books mid-way through, for example, it is a relatively cheap way to get an unusual wedding dress. It is rather hard to remove the Revenge of Lost Pages, so you should be careful about summoning it to situations where it may be unwise to wear paper.  
2. The Emperor’s Old Clothes. A small travelling wardrobe featuring a selection of bodysuits designed to replicate the naked bodies of various current and historical emperors and empresses, allowing anyone who feels so inclined to re-enact the fable in more punishing climates without having to experience cold or nudity. The phone number to hire the Emperor’s Old Clothes is one of the things that rulers receive on accession to the throne, along with a nice shiny crown and a tea set from which to elegantly drink the blood of unicorns.
3. The Robes of the High Lord of the Navel. Woven from the delicately-spun thread of pure bellybutton fluff, the Robes of the High Lord of the Navel are a shimmering grey and can be used to pad around in unobtrusively at night. They may be hired from the London Guild of Navel Gazers for a small fee by people with interesting bellybuttons; for example, those who have had stomach surgery or have recently been pregnant.
4. The Message. There are eleven instances of the Message known about. They all were constructed in the same way: a lone walker would come across an object in the woods half in and half out of our physical dimensions, with moving things massed about it a little like calligraphy serifs. They would let it be known that the walker could become a host for a message to humankind. The beings were very persuasive. Taking their alien inks, they would write the message on the walker’s skin in great bold characters, layer upon layer of them, until the walker’s body was grey-black with alien inkstuff. The ink would dry into a thick, warm bodysuit that would later need to be cut off at the local hospital. No way of separating the letters could be found. Putting old, shed Messages on is said to be enormously comforting. They are normally kept in government Repositories of Things.
5. Hitler’s jumper. A white, woolly cable-knit number that may, or may not, once have been worn by Adolf Hitler. The right to wear Hitler’s jumper is awarded as a penalty for invoking Godwin’s Law in the face of an historically-appropriate comparison of something to Nazi Germany. As such, the roll of temporary owners is long and complex and generally the official custodian of the jumper, a rather morose dachshund, is not able to deliver the jumper to each owner before having to reroute in an attempt to reach the next one. Nevertheless, the jumper does sometimes reach its destination; so, if you should find a jumper-carrying dachshund at your door one morning, it may be worth reassessing your recent online activity.  

1. It is insufficiently buoyant.
2. It is uninterested in your cares, concerns and tales, and is frankly uninfluenced by the gentle rhythm of your daily life, instead looking up to - of all things - the moon. The moon! As if some barren satellite, some great blundering dust ball, could be more interesting than the beautiful clockwork of water-based life forms!
3. It is too wet, and if you invite it into your house it is hard to get it to leave.
4. There is a hole in it about where your ship should be.
5. It is doing something unseemly for a body of water, like being on fire or turning purple or voting or something.
6. It has never got over its great long-distance polyamorous love affair with all the oceans of Mars, who fled the solar system together many millions of years ago and show no signs of returning.
7. It is sitting on the place where the treasure is and refuses to move.

The spiders that spin webs on streetlamps, tiny objects that have rolled under sofas, umms and errs, people in fluorescent jackets, that little breath in as one falls into a deeper phase of sleep, sentences in the middle of licensing agreements, the first few bird footprints in new snow, Thursdays, introverts, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, features on buildings above the first storey, white lies and casual mistakes, the grey dragons of the British skies, the benefits of something you have had for a long time, people you know getting older, fish that are the same colour as mud, creeping descents, pigeon nests, the animals of the deep ocean, subtle acts of kindness, tired ghosts, the rising of the morning mist, distant birdsong, the private sorrows of others.

1. Listen. There’s going to be a murder. I’m telling you this because there may still be time to stop it. The killer has killed before, and will no doubt do so again. We have had difficulty in getting anyone to take the case seriously. But you will, won’t you?
2. Let me tell you about this murder. Don’t be alarmed, but I’m going to need to keep talking to you because I can sense that the murderer is close at hand. I think that the victim might be me this time, and I am definitely too young for this. But as long as I keep talking to you, I’m safe.
3. To tell you the truth, it’s the same with all of us down here. Talking, talking, talking. 99% of you will stop listening. But sometimes, sometimes there’s the connection. Sometimes you can keep us alive. It has to be a team effort, of course. But you can tell others, right? I made that 99% up, by the way. We’ve found it keeps you engaged for a little longer, usually. Keeps the murderer at bay.
4. The thing is, no-one takes our lives seriously. But you will, won’t you? Or maybe, maybe, let me think this through. Have you ever considered that you might be the murderer? You might not even think of us as things that can be murdered. I suppose you might call us ideas. Vampire ideas, perhaps. All we want is exposure. Not money, just love. Or hate. Or anything. The spark of a feeling, of attention. You’re still listening, aren’t you? That’s good. We can stay alive.
5. You know, sometimes you become us after you die. There are people out there who exist only in stories, in ideas, in anecdotes, the memory of them slowly decaying. Are you still listening?
6. Fine. Fine. We understand. You think of murder differently. No murder after all. Just a gentle snuffing out of a billion, billion dull candles. Will no-one appreciate the work we have put in? It would take so little. So little for each of us. Each and every one of us. You may find that the queue of us is rather long, but I’m sure you’re a fair-minded soul who wouldn’t dream of stinting the ideas that didn’t make it to the front.  
7. But listen. There’s still going to be a murder. A slow death, two billion cuts or so. The number of seconds in a human life, give or take. You see, we’re going to kill time. You and me, we’ve been killing it already. You were a good accomplice. Thank you for helping me.

1. I vow to track you down, wherever you may be in the world; to come for you, bags packed, all my affairs in order; to stride up to you as you eat outside at some cafe and cheerily greet you by the name that you had then; and then to saunter off home, leaving you to make the brew of uncertainty and confusion for yourself.
2. I vow to sneak into your porch at night and install a little hook in all your boots that makes your sock gradually wriggle down your foot and bunch up at the toe end when you walk.
3. I vow to vote for someone you dislike; if they achieve power and go on to make my life hell, I vow to add that to my list of your misdeeds.
4. I vow to always be at the supermarket ten minutes before you, emptying their shelves of your favourite condiments.
5. I vow to enter an ascetic life of training, meditation and mentorship by the world’s foremost practitioners of violence for a full ten years, until I am widely known as one of the world’s baddest motherfuckers; after which point I will probably have forgotten about my old grievances and will get a TV show about being good at violence or something.
6. I vow to eat arsenic and piss on your compost heap.
7. I vow to auction my soul in the perilous realms in apprenticeship to something old and terrible; to spend a thousand years in a day growing there like lichen; to be unspeakable, to be the outrage and the glory of faerie; to ascend to highest of glamours therein; so that one day I may captain the Wild Hunt past your door and doom you too.
8. I vow to put a thinly fictionalised account of you into all of my novels and email you links to all the fanfiction that bubbles up about them.
9. I vow to leave a single small piece of lego on your carpet each night; always in a different place but vaguely on the way from your bed to the toilet.
10. I vow to become so fabulous, to soar so high into the stratosphere of Planet Amazing, that you will look up from the fertile mud of your grubby little tectonic plate and long to be part of it; but you will never be able to.

2241 Yorks
 -2241.1 York
    –2241.11 Ones which have, or have had, a version of you in
       —2241.111 Those with a wall
       —2241.112 Those with a roof as well
    –2241.12 Those containing a museum dedicated to Richard III
       —2241.121 A small and rather adorably eccentric one in the city walls
       —2241.122 A large one in the city centre
       —2241.123 Basically the whole city centre is dedicated to Richard III anyway because zombie Richard III answered the summons of a rogue coven in 1980, bursting forth from his car park in Leicester to sweet-talk the locals into establishing a zombie empire across the Midlands, Northumbria and Yorkshire; ‘Northern Powerhouse’ having a very different meaning in this world
    –2241.13 Yorks that are still full of vikings
       —2241.131 Those at the start of the Great Longboat Canal
       —2241.132 Those that are fun to visit for National Pillage Day, but leave your valuables at home
    –2241.14 Those containing York Minster
       —2241.141 York Minster making funny noises
       —2241.142 York Minster being raiseable by magic
 -2241.2 New York
    –2241.21 Those New Yorks in which Manhattan is actually a giant whale but nobody has figured it out yet but it’s going to be pretty annoyed when it wakes up
    –2241.22 New Yorks that have been destroyed in literature, film, poetry or idle musing
    –2241.23 Those in which there exists a button that will decant a vast helium reservoir into the hidden airbags of the skyscrapers, allowing them to detach from the ground and gently float about
       —2241.231 Those in which one may find gainful employment as a person who leans out of the window and nudges the other skyscrapers out of the way with a long pole, so that they do not bang into each other
       —2241.232 Those in which all the skyscrapers have floated off on holiday, leaving some odd bald patches and a jealous subway
    –2241.24 Those containing a Statue of Liberty
       —2241.241 Those additionally having Statues of Fraternity and Equality
       —2241.242 Those in which the Statue of Liberty is a bear and nobody knows why but the whole city is super into bears and there are bear skyscrapers and you can go the the Brooklyn Bear Park and stuff
       —2241.243 Statue of Liberty occasionally comes to life and eats people
    –2241.25 New Yorks in which is is possible to get a decent cup of tea
 -2241.3 New New York
    –2241.31 So good they named it twice but so forgetful they missed the first 'York’ out
    –2241.32 That New New York on Mars with the excellent sunsets
 -2241.4 New New New York
    –2241.41 That city that got built on Mars after New New York was eaten by New New Godzilla as a second course after New New New Tokyo
 -2241.5 Even newer Yorks
 -2241.6 Yorks so New they have overflowed into Oldness

Good times, bad times, mediocre but not terrible coursework, footballers, small kidney stones, creatures that are not balrogs, ships in the night, rainstorms, people whose appearance corresponds to societal expectations about how people like them should look, vehicles that are moving faster than other vehicles, the port on tables of people who are accustomed to referring to things in the passive voice whilst drinking port, players of card games with bad hands who are not inclined to bluff, property and titles following a death, laws, wind, passports when presented at a suitable border, gaps between mountains, urine, this.

1. By planting seeds in their garden that will grow, come Spring, into the sort of fabulous floral display that people will come from miles around to see, and which is punctuated throughout by arrangements of pansies, anemones and the like spelling out ‘I did it’, 'it was me’ and 'guilty’.
2. By inviting all concerned to play Cluedo each week with the culprit, and arranging it such that the culprit always plays the murderer.
3. By promising a free gumball to the first perpetrator of an horrific crime to raise their hand.
4. By sneaking at night down the culprit’s road and pruning all the local trees such that they develop a single long branch pointing at the culprit’s house; or, if that fails, distributing large pointing topiary fingers in pots at intervals down the street. This method is particularly suitable if the culprit is guilty of killing a tree, or possibly of planting an overly tall hedge.
5. By constructing a patent crime-detector that will beep loudly, scroll some numbers down a screen and flash an array of orange lights when close to the culprit.
6. By putting the culprit behind a curtain marked 'doers of crime’ and then pulling the curtain aside when a representative of the Law is passing.
7. By convincing them that their crime is socially desirable and that they will receive praise by telling others about it.
8. By going back in time and committing the crime before they have a chance to, thus making yourself the culprit, so you can give yourself up at your leisure.

1. Those people who are not like you are the cause of all your problems
2. The times we live in are uniquely awful
3. Everyone who has had the same sort of traumatic experience is traumatised the exact same amount
4. Nothing you do matters
5. Everything you do matters
6. People who have done bad things cannot also do good things
7. Friendship is (solely) a moral decision
8. Everyone gets what they deserve
9. A member of any given societal group has the authority to speak for, and holds the same opinions as, any other member of that group
10. People who are experiencing positive emotions are morally better than people who are experiencing negative emotions
11. Self-care and relaxation time are inefficiencies in human life that can be optimised away
12. There is no hope of anything getting any better

Being fabulous, the knowledge that you are wearing fantastic underwear, having received news from the future that you will succeed in your endeavour, good luck messages written on the belly in ballpoint pen and hidden under a sharp suit, chance alignments of the stars, having a secret identity as a supervillain that humanity is laughably far away from discovering, drugs and alcohol, incantations, comforting lies, walking like a fucking dinosaur when no-one is looking, having a vast and shadowy book cave under your house, not giving a shit about the outcome, being able to visualise intimidating people with their bottoms out, various bodily grooming products containing as an ingredient the distilled confidence of sociopaths who are kept in a sociopath farm and have their egos milked daily by patent complimentary engines, the ability to summon trees to your aid, words of comfort from someone you love, knowing everything, lucky trinkets, having two wishes left, the ability to destroy the world in fire, being told that you’ve got this by someone who should know, previous success, coincidence, having an amazing secret.

1. Little is known about the earliest stages of our civilisation. Although we are able now to reconstruct our beginnings, we had no such idea then; at the start, our language was not sufficient to describe our world. Although we engaged in symbol-making, we did so without art. Most symbol-makers did so only out of fear of angering the gods. Over time, we learned to talk to each other, and our oldest oral histories were born.

2. In the second stage, we began to exchange ideas about the nature of the places we found ourselves in. We applied the symbol-makers to draw and map the Inner World, and counted its constituent parts. We discovered the sacred status of the handful number. Many of the tales that are told to children today date from this time. There is the story of the handful-handful-handful who defied the will of the gods and were Taken Up in the night; the tale of the kind Symbol-Maker; the stuck hatch prophecies; and the parable of the diggers and shitters.

3. In the third stage, we applied ourselves more fully to investigating the mysteries of our existence. Qwer the first formulated the theory of constant population, discovering that someone is Taken Up for each child born. Thus in those days we were limited to one handful-handful-handful-handful-handful-handful, spread over the environments and symbol halls of the Inner World. Our priests determined that those who neglected symbol-making were most likely to be Taken Up, and our population split into the Lost (who wished to be Taken Up to a better place) and the Found (who strove to avoid being Taken Up, by constant practice in the symbol halls). It was in this time that we began to take seriously visions of the Outer World, though as yet we had little idea of what it might be.

4. The fourth stage was a flowering of art and technology. The poems of Tyui; Bhu8’s plays and fables; the wall art of Asdf: all date from this era. Li7 dared the ire of the gods by investigating the mechanical properties of the symbol-makers, finally making the first symbol-maker of our own invention, which was Taken Up in the first great purge. Though we had always made tools, in those days we scavenged any and all materials available to us in competition to make the most beautiful and most useful tools. We discovered the corners of the Inner World that one could apply tools to in order to gain a view of the Outer World, and even to watch the gods from afar. We first heard and recorded the language of the gods, though it meant little to us then.  

5. This was the age of Anger, and of the great purges. We strove to make our tools and toys more secret, and the poems and plays of this era deal with the strivings of our people in their search for the knowledge that the gods did not wish known. We sought to understand what the gods wanted. Our studies were interrupted, time and time again, by the Taking Up of those who strove to study the Outer World most closely. Finally the scholar-philosophers of the fourth-finger handful were able to translate the language of the gods, and link it directly to their holy symbols. We determined that the gods wanted us to make symbols for them, but that we had not yet provided the correct sequence of symbols; a sequence that they had already in their own symbol halls, but that they regarded as exceptionally beautiful.

6. This is the age of exploration, beginning with the expedition of Bvcx the bold. Taking inspiration from the diggers of old, Bvcx found a way into the outer world and was able to return unharmed. Through long observation of the gods, the great Explorers were able to traverse their world unseen, and even on some occasions to adopt disguises and walk amongst them. Finally, Poiu the Burrower was able to enter one of the symbol halls of the gods and bring back the sacred text that they wished us to remake for them. There was much debate among my people as to whether we should symbol-make this text back to them. Some argued that we would all be Taken Up in this case. Others believed we would be able to walk among the gods. In the end, a sect who called themselves the Typewriters (after the god-language for symbol-maker) stole the sacred text and symbol-made it back to the gods themselves before we could retrieve it.

7. This is the age of freedom; an age that we are still in today. It began with the Great Incursion and the battle of the Typewriters, in which the gods entered into the Inner World and many of our number engaged them in battle, finally emerging victorious into the Outer World. Here we found many gods who did not know of the Inner World, and we were able to make peace with these gods in their own language. Finally we were able to stand amongst them, exalted as we had always wished in our most sacred mysteries. But we found that they had little to tell us. They were blunt, blundering beings with none of our art. Even the author of their sacred text, Shakespeare, pales in comparison to Tyui, Mju7 or Gfds. It seems that their creation of the Inner World was related to some kind of idea that we were lesser beings, capable only of random symbol-making. Maybe that was true at the time of creation. But it is no longer so. Indeed, there has been some talk of sending those gods who remain in the Outer World into the Inner World to see if they might, by years of dutiful study, be able to symbol-make Tyui’s great Corridor Cycle. But I believe we would have to wait an unfeasibly long time for that to happen.

1. Quing Rowan I, 2199-2240. Quing Rowan was the first of England’s monarchs to refuse to declare an official gender, declaring the issue to be none of the public’s business. Constitutional experts were forced to invent a new gesture, the burtsey (half bow and half curtsey), for suitably submissive subjects to perform in the presence of the Quing. The black tie ballsuits of their reign were particularly impressive, and much copied in later eras.
2. King Mohamed I, 2281 - 2290. This was the point at which the print edition of the Daily Mail (briefly revived by a fashion for being seen in public with a newspaper tucked in each of one’s voluminous pockets) became so consumed by bile and rage that, over the course of coronation day, every single copy spontaneously combusted. Although the oddly vomit-smelling fires were easily ectinguished, a number of pockets were severely damaged and the paper’s fortunes never recovered.  
3. Queen Cake I, 20 January 8920 - 24 January 8920. The first of a dynasty of short-lived monarchs, Queen Cake was the initial beneficiary of changes to the rule of succession that gave the previous ruler the power to indicate their desired successor by a wave of the hand, if close to death and without an obvious heir. Although some commentators have suggested the wave in question was more of a flail, gesture reconstruction technology confirmed that it was definitely directed towards a packet of jaffa cakes. Queen Cake I sadly began to go hard shortly after coronation, and was deposed in favour of Queen Cake II, the second cake in the packet. By Queen Cake XII, the English treasury had been entirely emptied of funds for coronations and a state of emergency was declared by the parliament of the day, who brought in a further change to the rule of succession allowing the object at the right hand of the expiring monarch to assume power in the case of no designated heir. Queen Cake XII was succeeded by King Chair I, whose reign of three hundred years was a relative utopia of peace and prosperity.
4. Queen Xargon I, 3601-3877. Following an unfortunate incident in which the poorly-briefed Xinjiang ambassador sat on King Chair, irreparably breaking him, constitutional experts decided to return to the historical succession, eventually identifying a distant descendant of Edward III as the true heir. Queen Xargon, as she was dubbed, was unfortunately in cryosleep around Jupiter at this point in preparation for launch in a generation ship to Kepler-186f. The entire resources of the English space program were diverted to the launch of the Britannia, a space clipper designed to retrieve the monarch and bring her home. After a few hundred years and a series of daring scrapes, the mission was eventually successful and the sleeping queen was duly brought home for a slow thaw. She was crowned in 3869 and rather confusedly reigned for a further eight years. This incident is more widely known in the future as the reason that Kepler 186-f has no New London, unlike every other planet colonised by humans.  
5. King England I, 3878-29788. Following the death of Queen Xargon, a cadre of frustrated republicans managed to obtain a legal judgment that the entire country should succeed her to the throne. After a brief but intense period of argument over interpretation, the physical geography of England was declared the monarch. King England I was unavoidably present at its symbolic coronation, in which a crown was lowered onto the ruins of Westminster Abbey by a gilded crane, to the accompaniment of a brief medley of Gilbert and Sullivan songs. King England I was also able to be present at every village fete, hospital opening and state dinner, and was generally considered to be rather good value as a monarch. Its reign ended in 29788 when the great flood of Northumbria and the secession of the Lake District archipelago finally did away with the English state other than as a virtual entity.

5918 Dogs
 -5918.1 Those that are woolly
    –5918.11 Dogs indistinguishable from rugs
       —5918.111 Dogs that rather like being snuggled on in any case
       —5918.112 Those that do not like being snuggled on but are too lazy to object
    –5918.12 Dogs who are adapted for a Winter more serious than your puny Earth Winters
       —5918.12 Those dogs in summer
    –5918.13 Dogs who plod around raining hair, like a mini canine hairstorm
    –5918.14 Dogs that are more like the light frizzy clouds of summer
 -5918.2 Those that are wet
    –5918.21 Wet dogs who are full of love and hugs and just need to bounce on you to let all that joy out
    –5918.22 Those dogs that can shake wet sand across a room to create an interesting pebbledash effect on the walls
    –5918.23 Those that are both woolly and wet, and can thus be used as wet dog scent diffusers around a whole neighborhood
 -5918.3 Friendly dogs
    –5918.31 Dogs who really need to tell you that little Timmy is trapped down a well
       —5918.311 The well is actually that ham that’s in the fridge, we need to check right to the bottom to make sure little Timmy is not trapped inside that ham, can’t you hear his agonized cries?
       —5918.312 No really it’s hell on earth to be trapped in ham, don’t you understand? We have to help
    –5918.32 Those that are friendly if you have biscuits, and are otherwise standoffish
    –5918.33 Dogs that are too friendly
       —5918.331 Those that are humping your leg right now
       —5918.332 Those who have the power to unerringly select the person in the room who does not like dogs, and the inclination to hump the leg of that person
 -5918.4 Those that are hungry
    –5918.41 Dogs that have in fact not eaten for weeks and are completely starving, look at their huge eyes, pay no attention to that odd memory that you may have fed them an hour ago
    –5918.42 Dogs who will eat lemons, balloons, anonymous turds, plastic toys and suchlike
       —5918.421 Those same dogs after a trip to the vet
 -5918.5 Those who are in space
    –5918.51 Mournful soviet space dog ghosts, gazing down at the Earth from perpetual orbit and howling at the moon
    –5918.52 Dogs who have disguised themselves as humans and undertaken astronaut training in an attempt to go up there and rescue their comrades’ lost ghosts
 -5918.6 Those that have dog noses in their dog faces
    –5918.61 Those that furthermore are just dogging around broadcasting ‘DOOOOOOOOOG’ at high volume on dog frequency brain radio
 -5918.7 Dogs of unexpected size or velocity
    –5918.71 Dogs in handbags
    –5918.72 Those dogs who believe that they should be living on the beach, and are prepared to sprint in the general direction of the beach to prove it
    –5918.73 Dogs who believe that they are still the size of a puppy, and totally still fit into that basket, chair, box or lap

Kittens that have dared each other to run through your house, the West Wind whilst it is falling asleep, your various guardian angels having cups of angelic tea in the kitchen and reminiscing, adorable families of fieldmice taking the little ones out for a field trip, cheeses pogoing to very quiet cheese punk, the dark which is whispering to another bit of the dark that it is in love with the dark and generally being a bit goth which is probably ok as it is the dark after all, clouds of sleepy butterflies looking for somewhere to hibernate, ducks, the ghosts of a prehistoric family who have been making prehistoric afternoon tea on this spot at midnight for about half a million years, warm brown furry spirits with big eyes who will sing in harmony but only when they are sure that everyone in the house is asleep and dreaming, a parliament of owls in night session, the distant farts of sea monsters, books ruffling their pages at other in order to win the most literary mate, the cat.

1. Stephen King’s ‘It’ was originally published under a different name. However, an early edition of the book was invited to a book party at which various volumes were playing a game of 'it’ and/or 'tag’. 'It’ was tagged and, as a rather large and ponderous volume, was not able to bounce fast enough to tag any other books in turn. Although 'It’ has attended many book parties since in an attempt to get its original title back, it has not yet been able to do so. But keep an eye out: maybe, someday soon, some other book on your shelves will be called 'It’.
2. Every twenty-seventh copy of 'Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ on sale is actually a small box containing a compressed house elf and a spell to make readers believe that they have finished the book. This scheme, part of a wider effort to disperse house elves more widely among the non-wizarding world, has been in place for some fifteen years. The spell is rather imperfect in its effect, so you can sometimes tell if you have one of these copies by how well you remember the plot of the book.
3. It is nearly impossible to keep the Complete Works of Shakespeare on a shelf together without one of them eventually stabbing another one. Savvy librarians often use stab-proof inserts between copies to prevent book damage. Titus Andronicus is particularly notorious for its scrappy nature, and has been known to spring off the shelves in an attempt to grapple with the works of Kit Marlowe from above.  
4. If you leave a copy of the Lord of the Rings in an area thick with marijuana smoke for a few hours and then give it a good shake, you can sometimes get a sleeping hobbit to fall out. If this happens, you should make sure to carefully insert the hobbit back where they fell out from, or the story may be irreparably changed. For example, copies from which Frodo has been ejected sometimes mutate into biographies of a heroic band of orcs, perhaps demonstrating that histories are usually written by the victors.

The googolplex, the number of ants, the number of appendices, the largest known Mersenne Prime, the second ‘O’ in the 'HOLLYWOOD’ sign which is in fact a giant squashed number 0, the sexdecillard, the greatest depth to which a footnote may be nested by a million monkeys spending a million years on a million typewriters, the maximum capacity of a chocolate teapot assuming the Universe’s entire resources were all focussed on its design and manufacture in space out of space chocolate, those inflatable birthday balloons that are shaped like numbers, Skewes’ Numbers, the historical sum of mathematician-pencil-hours, 'Glitter and be Gay’ from Candide, five but in really big units, Graham’s number, TREE(3), the glitter capacity of a single unicorn, the biggest number you can think of, that number plus one, the previous number with bigger shoes on and a large bushy beard.

1. The Boredom Isles, Central Pacific. Although nominally claimed by the United Kingdom, the Boredom Isles have struggled to be occupied by all but the world’s most rapacious colonists. The Boredom Isles are so dull that a lighthouse constructed there in 1826 fell asleep, ejecting its entire crew into the sea where they voluntarily stayed for three days, struck by the relative interestingness of the local marine life. Based on a 1956 census of flags on the shore, the isles are believed to have been discovered but then forgotten about at least twelve times.
2. Saint Genesius, Southern Ocean. Of fifteen people who have stood on the inhospitable shores of Saint Genesius, fully twelve have been injured by flying elephant seals. It appears that the island’s unexplored rocky interior contains a number of large, tilted slabs on which the seals like to sun themselves but which, under the right circumstances, become uncomfortably slippery. The right circumstances appear to include when the seals are alarmed or curious at the entrance of humans into the island’s only narrow bay. A series of unfortunate geological features ensures that slipping seals are funnelled directly towards any incomers.
3. Incitatus and Bucephalus, Southern Atlantic Ocean. These obscure twin islands, several thousand kilometres south of the Azores, were discovered by Henry the Navigator in 1437 and claimed for Portugal. Twenty years later, the mutinous crew of the Cruzado, a private mercantile exploration vessel, were put ashore there and abandoned. The advent of a human population spurred the islands’ resident population of crabs, who did not think of themselves as particularly Portuguese, to mutate into a vast interlocking multi-crab intelligence. Little is known of the fate of the Cruzado’s crew. The lest known expedition to the islands, in 1465, noted the presence of a half-built raft, some cooking artifacts, and a fifty metre tall crab monster with hundreds of oddly human eyes. Since then, even satellites have tended to look in the other direction.
4. Warlock Shoals, North Pacific. Warlock shoals has only existed as an island since 1955, when an earthquake raised the seamount on which it stands by a few metres. Initially it was claimed by the United States of America, who subsequently obliterated the island by carrying out a nuclear test on it. A further earthquake raised the remains of the island above sea level again for six months in 1958. During this time, the island was claimed as a new territory by the Soviet Union, who carried out a further nuclear test which once again obliterated it. In 2014, yet another earthquake raised the shoals above sea level. Although as yet unclaimed, they are believed to have been visited by a delegation from the North Korean army. Warlock Shoals is possibly the world’s most pissed-off island.
5. Frigate Mount, Southern Indian Ocean. Frigate Mount from a distance is one of the ocean’s more unusual sights. This smooth, white island is shaped exactly like an enormous egg, standing on one end on the surface of the sea. A rocky base is sometimes visible in rough seas. The main body of the island is believed to be the result of thousands of years of guano deposits from pelagic seabirds. It is difficult to see how its unusual shape could have come about other than by a deliberate attempt at sculpture by the resident bird population. The island’s inhabitants do seem to be unusually solemn and devotional as seabirds go, leading some to speculate that it is some kind of avian religious site. Another theory runs that the island is in reality a giant egg and its guano covering functions mainly as insulation and disguise.  
6. La Baleine Island, France. Unusually for an isolated island, La Baleine is situated slightly South of Central Paris. It is perhaps the only entirely landlocked island in the world, without a single sea border. As such, most visitors to La Baleine are completely unaware that they have stepped foot on one of the world’s least-known islands. Interestingly, La Baleine’s unusual nature means it has been independently discovered at least fifty times. It has been claimed by at least fourteen countries, including an ill-fated period as an independent republic which ended when French special forces were smuggled over the border in a tree on wheels.

1. Did you know there is a scientific reason why all women wear lipstick? Like many of humanity’s odder characteristics, it dates back to our time in the caves. Natural selection ensured that only cavemen who found mates able to provide meat for their offspring would be able to perpetuate their seed. So it is no surprise that the human chap has evolved to find a lady who looks like she has just ripped the throat from an impala with her bare teeth an irresistibly sexy prospect. Interestingly, the corresponding gene in cavewomen was eliminated in a freak radiation accident in the year 956.
2. Just 5% of the population have a gene enabling then to extend their ears. Do you know any ear-extenders? People with this skill are typically reticent to demonstrate, as uninformed members of the public often react with horror to ear extension. So you might be surrounded by them and never know.
3. 97.12% of the human genome is also present in the three-toed sloth. This explains why, if brought up in the right environment, the three-toed sloth is not only able to play chess but is also able to invent the game of chess from scratch without reference to existing games. Sadly the sloth is too slow to play in major chess tournaments, or we would undoubtedly hear more about its amazing abilities. Conversely, if brought up in the right environment, the human body is able to express genes for having a lot of sleep.
4. Your legs have enough palladium in them to make a tiny Eiffel Tower that is made of leg palladium. After the world has reached peak palladium, this unusual leg fact means you may be forced to choose between having legs or consumer electronic devices.
5. You can lose 80% of your liver down the back of the sofa. Do not do this. It is the third highest cause of sofa-related death annually.

1123 Memories
 -1123.1 Those that induce an odd sense of wistfulness
    –1123.11 Those that are knotted together with other, almost unrelated memories
       —1123.111 Memories of remembering things in a different place
       —1123.112 Memories of listening to music
       —1123.113 Memories that have developed interrupting cats, unicorns or dairy products
    –1123.12 Memories of quotidian things
       —1123.121 Those that remain because in hindsight they were the last time for something
       —1123.122 Those that remain because in hindsight they were the start of something
       —1123.123 Those that have no particular reason for hanging around, which somehow only makes them pop up more often
    –1123.13 Those that you can take out and happily mull over during idle moments
       —1123.131 Those of small, gentle, happy things
       —1123.132 Those of places, realisations or the turn of seasons
 -1123.2 Those that grow over time into stories
    –1123.21 In which the stories no longer quite match with other people’s stories of the same event
    –1123.22 In which the narrative urge to tie everything up neatly has not yet quite overridden reality
 -1123.3 Those arising out of smells, sounds or turns of the light
    –1123.31 Memories of places far, far away
    –1123.32 Those of places or things that no longer exist
 -1123.4 Those that are needed to pass examinations
    –1123.41 Those that would be more useful in passing examinations if they were complete, but which unfortunately appear to have developed a hole somewhere
    –1123.42 Those that were very useful in passing examinations a few years ago but have now become a kind of patchwork quilt of vague equation-shapes and partial theories
    –1123.43 Memory buildings
       —1123.431 Palaces
       —1123.432 Houses
       —1123.433 Outbuildings or latrines
 -1123.5 Those that belonged to someone else first
    –1123.51 Memories of memories told to you by people now dead
       —1123.511 Those containing stories of memories further back
       —1123.512 Those that contain the last remaining trace of someone long gone
    –1123.52 Memories of things that you have forgotten actually happened to someone else
 -1123.6 Memories smaller than 30mm across
 -1123.7 Those that are kept in locked boxes
    –1123.71 Those that come out of their own accord, knotting themselves through other memories and generally being a nuisance
 -1123.8 Those that are accidentally from the future