1. When you set a pan on fire and the rising hot air fills a large balloon which you did not realise was attached to your kitchen, leading to part of your house floating away, but ever afterwards you joke that the culprit was a souffle rising instead because that sounds like you are a better cook.
2. When you space your cookies too closely on the tin and once they get into the oven they start elbowing each other and this leads to a fight and someone calls the cookie police and you end up having to explain to a load of terribly serious biscuits in blue that yes, the riot did start here but you don’t know where the perpetrators are now.
3. When there is inexplicably a kitchen on the runway at a major airport, leading to some hastily-aborted takeoffs and disruption and delay for millions of holidaymakers.
4. When you drop a pan of spaghetti and the strands accidentally spell out a major state secret which, owing to a conjunction of mirrors, is seen by a passing spy satellite, and ever afterwards you have multiple intelligence agencies on your tail at all times.
5. When you weave an incantation over the oven, making chips that are terrified of sunlight, and the chips wriggle off into the darkest crevices of your house but occasionally they emerge to try and rescue any other chips that you might make and sometimes you can hear them in the night rubbing themselves together for warmth and making plans to raid the local chip shop and you are generally not happy with the mass of sentient potatoflesh in your vicinity.
6. When your squid ink sauce is not black enough so you follow an instruction on the internet that says to add a black hole and the black hole ends up consuming your pasta, you, your kitchen and the planet Earth.
0330 Ruins
-0330.1 Things on the cusp of becoming a ruin
–0330.11 Buildings recently shuttered
—0330.111 Those into which acorns are settling down for the long task of unpicking masonry
—0330.112 Those from which we look away, knowing how much they were loved once
—0330.113 Those that have been cogs but now find the machine broken
–0330.12 Those awaiting the wrecking ball
–0330.13 Those that cannot run from the approaching war
–0330.14 Things once described as having shabby chic, which they cannot get oer and regard as their greatest compliment
–0330.15 Unpracticed skills and unexercised memories
-0330.2 Those that have stood ruinous for a little while
–0330.21 Ruins that are infested by psychogegraphers
—0330.211 Those in which it is difficult to get a good ruined building shot without having to threaten to ruin a few people who are hogging the line of sight with their cameras
–0330.22 Ruined buildings wrapped up with ruined humans and ruined ideas, still somehow holding each other together
-0330.3 Those being eaten up or reclaimed by nature
–0330.31 Lost cities, being picked over by the world’s forests, with just a few buildings remaining
–0330.32 Lost forests, being eaten up by the world’s cities, with just a few trees remaining
–0330.33 Ruined wildebeest, being eaten up by the world’s lions
–0330.34 Ruined plans, being eaten up by cows on the line at Huntingdon
-0330.4 Those sinking beneath something
–0330.41 Those that are the aperitifs of global warming
–0330.42 Those whose ocean is creeping sand
—0330.421 The pink-curled spirals of worn-away buildings, disappearing into heat-shimmers on the horizon
–0330.43 Sinking beneath the accumulated weight of expectations as to what constitutes a ruin
–0330.44 Sinking beneath a tide of posing rock bands, blown in by a passing lightning storm
—0330.441 Those which can yet be saved by a kind of pied piper photographer figure
-0330.5 Those that have become hidden
–0330.51 Those ruins that are beneath your feet even now, unseen
–0330.52 Those that haunt the dreams of archaeologists
—0330.521 Those that are hidden under such items as boulders, snakes and nazis
–0330.53 Those that will shake loose of earth only when there is no-one left to understand them
-0330.6 Those that exist in memory only
–0330.61 Those that are ruins of memories, unpicked by later events
-0330.7 Those that have never existed
–0330.71 Things that are not the ruin of something much older and greater, but would like you to think they are
—0330.711 Those that decorate theme parks
—0330.712 Things that are still great, but no longer believe that they are
Surrey scone bombs; dialogue; giant lasers flicking across the world’s blissful fields so that giant kittens may chase them; clustering-together-and-having-an-awkward-hug bombing; typography snipers who wear their kerning tight around their waists; rifles that are actually trifles that have had a bit nibbled off the top; magic rainbow peace unicorns; lovercraft taking off from the carriers of the world to dispense sweet music in the night; the giant nuclear arses of the the world’s superpowers, harnessing the power of the atom to make glowing bottoms; the circus cannon; cupid’s dart, arrow, bolt and pushpin; the mild tut; the mighty broadbutterknife drawn gleaming from its sheath at the dawn of the new sandwich; the fist (uncurled); the ploughshare; the bayonet fairy light fitting; the human brain; the tank (fish); the really big electric guitar with lots of twiddly bits on it; the confetti landmine; seasick sea dog yarnbombing in cosy basements, the tales slipping loose from time to time to trip and haul in passers-by; the weaponized version of ‘oh sod it, let’s go home for a beer’.
1. You wake in the night and the printer is printing gun parts. Your house has an AI and the AI has a prediction routine and it anticipates when you might need things and gets them for you. It’s normally very accurate. Out in the street, everything is still; but if you listen carefully, you can hear the printers in the other houses clattering away to themselves.
2. When the war finally gets to your town, it does so with drones. Little, plastic ones; the type that children play with. But these have explosive charges and are programmed to look for human heads. At first they just go for adults but later on the algorithm is not so picky. People take it in turns to take watch with their guns. Sometimes they bang into roofs, blowing off a solar tile or two. But mostly it is heads.
3. After a while, in the cities, they stretch nets and cloth and wires over the streets. There is no outdoors any more. Going from house to house is like travelling in a huge tent. By and by, refugees fill up some of the gaps. Car traffic slows to a trickle. Car space becomes people space. Eventually the drones find a way to pilot themselves beneath the roofs of the cloth city, but more nets and wires are added to keep them out.
4. There is a cyberwar going on as well, of course. Some days you can only get the news that tells the stories your people want to hear. Some days, you can only get the news the other people want to hear. Some days there is no news at all. Social media is so noisy, these days, that it is almost unusable. So the future is oddly like the past, if the postvans of the past had been fortified and self-driving. Most days the news merely says that there are many things that are classified. Everyone is in agreement that nearly everyone is lying anyway, so what is the point? But you still listen.
5. Phone towers are important. These days they are hastily-reinforced, grey metal behemoths. The drones swarm round them in the early hours, getting in formation, bouncing off and flying back up. When enough are gathered and in the right places, they detonate together. It doesn’t often work, but sometimes it brings the tower down.
6. You are not sure, really, who the other side is. Is there another side? The drones are powered by an algorithm; this is how the news sites are generated, too, and how they are reworded and retweaked just for you, so that no two people ever get the same news. Even the truck bombs are self-driving. The vigilantes going house to house claim they are on your side. The centres of technology are shuttered, gone below ground somewhere. Perhaps you could try and find out. But it is so hard to travel, these days.
An engine of sweet forgetting; a machine that has a meticulous name but we are not quite sure what it does even though things go in and things come out; that machine that is pushing up the daffodils; a machine that dances when no-one is watching; a machine that binges on snow and sleeps it off during the summer; one that is always watching; a paralytical engine, cogs-down behind a bush; a speak-your-secrets machine; one that tidies all mess, and the causes of mess, and the causes of the causes of that mess; a machine that crushes the simple dreams of biscuits; a hoping machine; a device; one that wears a mask to disguise its lack of face; a donkey generator; one that ends rain and spouts tomorrows.
1. 2017 is about guessing. President Trump guessing at what his voters might like, and doing that. Trump’s voters guessing at what he might like, and doing that. The rest of the world guessing what the fuck is going to happen next. It is basically like the world’s shittest game of paper telephone.
2. Most of the shit that is due to hit the fan in 2017 hits the fan at relatively low speed, providing only a surprisingly light sprinkling of turd droplets. Just as we are about to heave a collective sigh of relief, some other unexpected large jobbie (for example: recession in China leading to unrest; terrorist incident involving Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal; global pandemic; etc.) plunges towards the fan, leaving everyone well-splattered. I like to call this the brown swan scenario.
3. 2017 is a farce, involving a stream of increasingly non-coherent reasons as to why Brexit has not yet been triggered; a harrassed President Trump who has decided he doesn’t like being president doing his best to get impeached and getting excused at every turn; and widespread infestations of sinister clowns.
4. A brief and efficient shitshow. Literally brief, as the survivors eventually declare March 8th the first day of the new calendar.
5. Some unexpectedly great thing happens (major innovation in energy or medicine; confirmed discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life; the rise of some major new arts idiom) which makes humanity sit back and think a little. Then someone makes porn of the new thing. Then someone uses it to justify their frankly unjustifiable political agenda. Then we proceed as in one of the other scenarios.
6. It turns out someone else gets the magic lamp in 2017, although they have to forcibly prise Nigel Farage’s fingers off the spout first. The genie’s first words are ‘Oh, thank fuck.’
1. I resolve to go to the Jim every day. To stand around near the Jim, semi-unobtrusively in my mask and warm winter gloves, until the Jim asks me to go away. Then to move on to the next Jim. No Jim shall be fully comfortable in 2017. If I run out of Jims, I shall move on to Jacks, or possibly Joes.
2. I resolve to walk under the career ladder at a point when a career farce is being filmed, leading to a pot of career paint landing on my head. I will dodge the two gentlemen crossing the street with the big glass ceiling by swinging on the career rope helpfully provided, which will hoist me straight up to the career roof with minimal effort when the career piano is knocked from the window by that chap on the career third floor with the glass of champagne.
3. I resolve to save money. I will save it from whoever is mistreating it, by force if necessary. I will stalk the night, ever alert to the siren call of misapplied currency, in my mask and warm winter gloves. When I have saved enough money, I will let it loose in the woods where it can frolic with the little squirrels in peace.
4. I will lose weights. Not my own weights, because I need those in my kitchen for when I cook for the little squirrels. No. I will lose your weights. I will go into your lifting-palaces and roll your heavy-items into handily adjacent rivers. Soon, the guns of the muscled will be no more.
5. To get into shape. The shape will be a triangle. I will be sleeping in a special mould to achieve this resolution.
6. To meet new people. This one is easy. I will be meeting lots of new people. Most of them will be called Jim.
1. January: The magnified echo of a goblin weeping in a distant sewage pipe.
2. February: The rustly harrumph emitted by a disgruntled book which has been placed in an inaccessible corner instead of being the book that you pull out to make the secret door open.
3. March: That noise that unicorns make when they migrate overhead to Pluto, from which they are not coming back.
4. April: The weary sigh of a bisexual Pantone executive deleting a surplus shade of purple from the database.
5. May: A kettle’s whistle.
6. June: The gentle hiss of a fart being released in a well-stacked lift.
7. July: The tap of feet in expensive shoes, waiting in a long queue for the knife sharpener.
8. August: The b of the bang of a starting gun.
9. September: The swift rustle of a signature being signed.
10. October: An endless clatter of keys, and the tapping of dust falling on the roof.
11. November: The sort of robust plop that a turd makes hitting water when there is going to be a lot of splashback.
12. December: The metallic shriek of an old filing cabinet slamming closed.
1. Trelephant leaves. The trelephant is a colder-climate relation of the elephant. In order to conserve energy it spends the winter sleeping on one leg, similarly to the lawn flamingo. This, combined with the barkiness of their skin, leads to trelephants often being misidentified as trees. To add to the confusion, many trelephants are obsessive leaf collectors who like to display their collections along their many tentacles. They usually drop these leaves during their winter sleep. Trelephant leaves can be identified by their catalogue numbers, usually marked on the underside next to the stem.
2. Sock-worms. The small, translucent ghost-forms of these worms lurk in winter mud waiting for walkers to come past. When they spot a nearby boot, they float up through the sole and summon their own sock-worm egg back through time at the point of hatching, fulfilling their spiritual destiny and allowing the ghost to dissipate. The newly-hatched worm lives in the sock, eating little holes and dreaming about woodlands, until it is washed or squished. At this point it forms a ghost again and migrates back to the woods, ready for the next walker.
3. The bungalows of the Little People. You may need a magnifying glass to spot these, depending on how little your local Little People are. It is generally considered a sign of bad luck to have trespassed in the realms of the Little People to such an extent that you have tracked them home on your boots. The Little People cannot do a great deal to harm you, but they can definitely make you itch in places it is hard to reach.
4. Nether boots. Often dismissed as the result of standing on a reflective surface, the attachment of nether boots to the underside of your feet is actually a deeply worrying occurrence. You should detach them immediately with a sharp trowel. Otherwise you may find yourself slowly flowing down through your bootsoles into a nether copy who only exists in mirrored surfaces. Eventually, you may end up stuck as a reflection without a person in some frozen lake somewhere.
5. Hole seeds. These are small, purple and elongated, a little like grains of rice. They can often be found in boot mud following lengthy digressions from the proper path. If planted, they will grow holes of various sizes; some are large enough to enter and may even be accessorized with staircases or ladders. We are unsure whether this is a good idea or not. Nobody who has entered them has ever come back, but that may be because they have found an awesome reason to stay wherever they ended up.
1. The Alexandrian Rook. We are unsure whether this beast was originally a book or a bird. It is believed to draw its origin from the sack of library of Alexandria; the first specimens being either burned and librarian-haunted books that nonetheless managed to escape, or crow-like birds who found themselves able to successfully hide in the book ash. These days they appear whilst roosting to be small books with all-black pages. When threatened with reading, they unfold themselves and fly off. However, over the years they have evolved exceptionally dull titles and as a result are rarely removed from the shelves.
2. The Gentlemen. Each library has its own unique code for summoning the Gentlemen. For example, one might take out and put back the third book on the bottom shelf nearest the door, the favourite book of the head librarian, and each book whose author begins with Z. Once summoned, the gentlemen (who are impeccably groomed) will enter the library. An extremely polite request will be made, usually of something the summoner cannot afford to lose. The summoner’s liver is a common example. The Gentlemen will wax lyrical about how happy this item will make them. Most people still manage to refuse, but are left with a vague but uncomfortable sense of having violated the social contract. No punishment is exacted. The Gentlemen may be heard to tut slightly as they leave.
3. The late fine. Initially animated by Doris of Sendai, the original pirate-witch-ninja, the late fine is a sentient pile of pieces of eight which has spent the past eighty years wandering the libraries of the world. It is believed to be looking for a library from which Doris once borrowed and neglected to return a book on practical cutlass use. Sadly the fees accruing to that withdrawal are now likely to exceed the value of the late fine. Being a rather timid beast which does not fancy a telling-off, we believe it may have ascertained the correct library many years ago and have been avoiding it ever since.
4. The Gudrunsen collection. In 1849, a small village in Northern Sweden was cursed into books by something that came out of a tree in a hollow. The books, which are attractively leather-bound, contain what appears to be an ever-evolving stream of consciousness from each resident. Some are aware that they are trapped in books, though most believe that they are dreaming. The Gudrunsen collection was held in a library funded by relatives of the books for nearly a hundred years, but was accidentally sold to a Finnish collector in the years following World War II. Its current whereabouts are unknown.