1. So it all started at the local shop. You know the sort of thing. Stacking shelves and stuff. Complicated by the fact that payroll had messed up my contract so thoroughly that I ended up paying the top rate of tax, child support to a fifteenth cousin in the Shetland Isles and interest payments towards an outstanding parking fine incurred in 1875 near my place of birth. So my take-home pay was 1p. It is OK to discuss pay, isn’t it? Modern age and all that. Fortunately that was in the days when 1p sweets existed, so at least I got to go home with a banana duck once in a while. Anyway, one of our customers used to hand over his cash with his fingers twisted up like this, and one day I was a bit bored so I did the same thing back, and he said how surprised he was to meet a fellow Hughes-Fotherwell alumnus here, and did I need a better job?
2. So of course I said yes, and the next thing I know I’m up at the big house buffing the crockery. Serious crockery. I mean, I’d never used a butter dish before. And this guy has, like, a scallop turntable and I have to know how to get the sauce out. Polish the camembert crank. Pre-stretch the celery flange. Grease the cocktail slide. Then one day I put two fingers in his asparagus launcher. Bad idea. There was going to be a lawsuit, but word got out that International Crockery Magazine was sending a correspondent to smear both sides and nobody had the heart to continue after that.
3. Needless to say, I wasn’t sold on going back to domestic service. There was a bit of a payoff after the crockery incident, so I used it to set up a small business as an importer of banana ducks. Branched out into duck bananas after a while - confit duck in a crisp banana-shaped sugar shell, since you ask. Only my duck supplier was problematic. Eventually I got on the ferry to go and see what was up, and it turned out the ducks had revolted. Which obviously put a dent in my supply chain. Anyhow, the ducks tied me to an enormous slice of bread and floated me out on this lake full of ravenous gulls and geese and swans and emus and whatnot.
4. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing. Under the influence of sheer terror, I managed to paddle and hump that bread all the way to the Canal du Midi and thence out to sea. There I bumped into some pirates who had been shipwrecked. They were pretty glad to get bread, I can tell you, even if it was a bit soggy. Offered me a job straight away. But I couldn’t countenance a life of crime. After some discussion, we rebranded as providers of piracy experiences instead. You know the sort of thing - jump on board the yachts of the super-rich with your eyepatch on, sing a few Gilbert and Sullivan numbers and send a hat around. I made some fascinating contacts and nearly nobody tried to kill me. Started hiring myself out as a consultant in adventure, but it wasn’t really a secure profession. I remember telling this guy on this giant purple yacht about this and he said he could sort something.
5. It must have worked because the next thing I know I was being headhunted by a NASA subcontractor for a mission to Mars. Literally headhunted - they just wanted the head. They had this system, see, you plop the head in, tiny little rocket which doesn’t need much fuel, sleep until Mars and then pootle around in this little rover with spider legs. Obviously wouldn’t go down too well with the public so there was a cover story. The main camera was going to be broken. Helmetcam pictures only, head shots, all rockets filmed from long distance. They thought the camera thing might become a meme. They’d even invested in an app that did helmetcam-style pictures with a red filter: ‘Nancycam’. I was going to be called Nancy for this project, you see, after Nancy Reagan. Anyhow, they hadn’t quite got ethical approval yet but they were pretty sure about it. So there I was on the operating table, knife poised, when there was a power cut. Kind of lucky, because by the time the electric company got it sorted word had come down from on high that they wanted a nice white space dude with a little bit of stubble and could we see his hands too. So I was out of a job again.
6. I was a bit off the idea of government agencies by then. Thought I’d go for academia instead. Obviously a bit challenging with my employment history but I put in a few speculative applications to see if I could wing it and lo and behold, I got an interview for the new Professorship of Bollocks at the University of West Wittering. Totally truthful at the interview and they didn’t believe a word of it. So of course they offered me the post straight away. Only thing was, someone had made a terrible mistake. It was actually a Professorship of real bollocks. Sponsored by a major dog company. They wanted to make a brand of treat biscuits with a testicle-licking sort of taste for the discerning canine bachelor. So I spent three months supervising students swabbing dog balls. Bit disappointing. I decided it was time to move on.
7. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve tried all the other options, more or less, and they don’t work for me. You will not have a more loyal library assistant. Seriously. Also, I can get the library a great deal on banana ducks.
9077 Systems of Government
-9077.1 Government by random people
–9077.11 Those whose parents also did the governing
—9077.111 Somehow the populace are on board with this
–9077.12 Those who have been appointed by some mystical authority
–9077.13 Those who just sort of wandered in and started governing
-9077.2 Government by whoever is best at shooting people
-9077.3 Government by people who were actually voted for
–9077.31 People who were voted for once and have managed to turn this into a perpetual mandate
–9077.32 People who were voted for under a one party official, ten thousand votes system
–9077.33 People who were voted for entirely legitimately on the basis of policies aimed at making the next electoral term awesome at the expense of the entire rest of the future
–9077.34 People who were voted for entirely legitimately on the basis of policies aimed at making life awesome for the small number of people who bothered or were able to vote, at the expense of everyone else
–9077.35 Governments genuinely interested in optimising welfare
—9077.351 Engaged in perpetual arguments about the definition of optimising and the components of welfare
-9077.4 Government by perpetual crisis
–9077.41 In which democracy will totally be resumed as soon as the crisis is over
–9077.42 In which democracy is still in place, but who would trust a country in crisis to those other people?
–9077.43 In which the timing and winner of elections is largely governed by who has been impeached most recently
-9077.5 Government by those who did a revolution
–9077.51 In which democracy will totally be resumed after we’ve finished renaming streets, airports and cocktails after the date, heroes and symbols of the revolution
-9077.6 Government by those who have the most stuff
–9077.61 Additionally optimised towards making sure that more stuff goes to people who already have a lot of stuff
-9077.7 Evanescent government by the beautiful and doomed
-9077.8 Government by cats
Down the back of the sofa, in the attic, behind the radiator, in your
other trousers, should we get the cat x-rayed, it’s stuck to the
ceiling, under the sofa, was it real to start with or just a concept,
did you eat it, did I eat it, left it at the shops, it’s inside the big
bag of other bags, disintegrated into dust, in the undergrowth, in the
toilet, under your hat, it’s where you left it, you’ll find out when the
postcard arrives, let’s retrace our route, in the fruit bowl, where the
ransom note says it is, try your coat pocket, behind the bookcase, in
your suitcase, in the baby, stolen, sold it, you’re holding it, in the
freezer, behind the cheese, have you seen youtube it’s now in Greece,
look in the first place you looked again, have you tried phoning it,
it’s behind your ear.
1. Morning cup of coffee was slightly purple, wasted eleven minutes in futile investigation why.
2. Struck suddenly immobile by the beauty and wonder and terror of the world upon the first glimpse of spring trees in the sunlight, being only brought back to reality by distant birdsong some time later.
3. There was that closed door that you always walked past on the way here, the small black one, and today someone slipped out of it and you realised from the smoke and flames and the pitchfork that fell out that it was actually a door into hell, and you felt the need to inform the police that there was a door into hell on their local beat, and the nice gentleman on the phone did not seem to be taking the peril seriously so you had to argue for a while and that’s why you’re late.
4. Very realistic dream about getting here on time interrupted by alarm clock. Resulting false sense of security led to insufficient hurrying.
5. Delayed train.
6. After much study, you have determined that twelve minutes were mysteriously omitted from 1387, possibly the fault of the Cathars. Not many people know this. Have decided to stick to the correct calendar, i.e. with the twelve minutes added.
7. No excuse given, other than mysterious look.
8. Oh god, the fish!
9. Morning toast unexpectedly turned into a council of war with the Butter People, necessitating the making of more toast spread only with marmalade.
10. On the way here spotted a pair of capybaras having tea down a back alley. Had to investigate. Discovered a capybara cafe. Amazing! Here’s the address, you should try it.
11. Overslept.
12. Catastrophic dislocation in time leading to three frantic years attempting to get back to the present day while being chased throughout the ages by an irate crustacean named Jim. However, your sense of obligation to the current appointment was sufficiently strong that you managed to make it back here within twelve minutes of the scheduled time despite the personal and societal costs of doing so, including the impending consequences of selling your grandparents to mountain pirates in Laos, the introduction of a cocoa-destroying virus to Patagonia in 1200 likely leading to the elimination of chocolate from the world, and the notification of three alien species to the existence of Earth in the 21st century as a source of dental supplies. Nice to meet you, can I have a chocolate before they cease to exist?
Ranked in order of satisfactoriness
10. The crackly paper one finds filling the spaces within exceptionally large boxes which have been used to deliver much smaller items.
9. The scratchy, non-absorbent material, vaguely reminiscent of grease-proof paper, which was provided in British schools in the 1980’s for the wiping of the arse; to be stolen from a museum of historical bogroll, a vague and rambling ransom note being left in its place.
8. A page from any one of the ten billion sequential catalogues delivered to the door after the one-off purchase of a small item from the catalogue website; particularly if there is seemingly no way to cancel them.
7. An origami crane constructed from one of the many free newspapers remaining in the final carriage of a subway train in some major city, after it reaches the end of the line.
6. A slice of hand-slapped rye bread, served on a flat slab with some pate in a flowerpot.
5. The enormously expensive prototype version of a bendy, flexible and absorbent smartphone, to be launched in 2017 with great fanfare by some technology giant or other.
4. An artisanal, chemical-free, vitamin-enriched, nourishing washcloth, woven to an ancient pattern by Yorkshire peasants using flax and yak fluff from officially certified International Bathing Society sources, to be purchased from a high-end supermarket.
3. Rabelais’ list of things to wipe the arse with, printed on soft, absorbent paper by some online printing service or other.
2. A cloth woven from the fur of an outrageously cute kitten, the event itself being memorialised on the internet under the headline ‘This tiny kitten had all its fur cut off… what happened next will astonish you!’.
1. The silk sleeve of a billionaire’s slightly stained pyjamas, extracted from a London penthouse in the dead hours of the afternoon by a crack team of trained pigeons, said pigeons having also extracted a gold-plated bog-brush and a traumatised pug, leaving only a smattering of pieon-shit in their wake.
1. There was a Roman trading vessel that became gloriously, giddily lost; lost enough that it rounded Cape Bojador by accident and set off down the African coast in the vain hope of finding some sort of channel that would lead it home. Many of the crew jumped ship near what is now the border between Angola and Namibia. Those remaining, seized with a kind of wrong-headed fervour, sailed the ship on a direct course for Antarctica. Improbably, they made it; the ship froze tight in the Antarctic pack ice and, owing to the vagaries of the local currents, drifted until it was wedged between an ice flow coming down from the continent and a small island. In short order it was completely entombed in ice. The hold was full of clay jars of garum, which shattered by and by. A small, salty under-ice lake of garum formed, complete with its own garum ecosystem. Over time, things evolved there that had never been seen anywhere else. These days one may find the location by a small brown stain in the ice, if one knows where to look. Eventually the glacier will spit the ship out again into the unwelcoming sea, and the seals, all unknowing, will have a Roman banquet.
2. There was a bus that began its service somewhere on the Atlantic coast of France; perhaps it was La Rochelle, I am not quite sure. Eventually it was sold a number of times, always to the East. It was if it had acquired a kind if travelling destiny. Purchasers began noticing and passing on this information, in initially flippant tones: you might want to keep this bus for a year and then sell it Eastwards, because that’s what all the other owners have done. It was seen in Vienna, then Bucharest, then Krasnodar; it spent a couple of years in the service of a private owner near Samarkand. Eventually the bus, which was increasingly decrepit, found itself operating a shuttle service between the small towns East of Vladivostok, right against Russia’s Pacific coast. Someone had painted the bus’s destiny in large cyrillic letters on the side: This Bus Goes East. But by this time no-one wanted to buy it, East or West. The owners, taking a kind of pity on the bus, drove it to a remote sea cliff, set their backs to the East, and pushed it off to finish its journey on its own. However, being a bus and not a living creature, it sank. I believe, however, that it has become a habitat for a number of fascinating sea stars.
3. There was an aeroplane that was bought by the lesser sort of billionaire, and he did not have any real use for it other than as a status symbol. Shortly after its purchase, indeed, he took his billions and retired to a small Caribbean island, where he mostly stayed inside and received massages. After a few years of this the billionaire developed extremely squidgy muscles and as a result became quite unhinged. Observing that massages are uncomfortable when one has sunburn, he set the aircraft to circling round the island with the hope of drumming up extra cloud cover, or at least a contrail or two. Eventually, he ordered the aircraft to stay up a little too long and it ran out of fuel and crashed. The records were falsified, of course; the paper trail leads to an empty spot in the Arizona desert. Some say that this has happened more than once, and that there is an island with a reef of dead aircraft around it, an island with a perpetual exhaust haze and the lingering smell of Jet A. These people are probably masseurs and you should give them an extra-large tip.
4. It is a little-known fact that there were dinosaurs who sent a probe into space; unfortunately, being a tiny nation obsessed with recycling, reusing and generally cleaning up after themselves, they left no fossils or anything else that could trouble the theories of palaeontologists. Indeed, the probe is all that remains. The cleanliness-obsessed dinosaurs invested its design with near-endless reusability. Eventually, after a good explore, it came to rest on Mars. From Mars, it watched the Earth convulse in the aftermath of a meteor strike; from Mars, it heard the last communication from its masters; and thereafter, from Mars, it sat and observed the silent Earth. Occasionally it slept for a few thousand years, or trundled about to find suitable minerals to mine to replace its aging components. I think at the moment it may be sleeping. Who knows what it will find when it wakes?
1. Gravity is a lie, a pernicious myth brought on by eating too many bad apples. The real reason the river flows to the sea is far more complex and more interesting. This is how it happens: there is a rumour among the dead that they can be set free by a Word. Perhaps the Word is the name of God, or a concept so large that all other concepts are knocked loose, perhaps only a sequence that undoes the lazy electricity of ghost-thoughts through the air. It is not a word that anyone knows as yet, but after all there are only so many words that can ever exist. The flow of water is a numerological experiment on a grand scale. If you could but see them! The billion ghosts of the world, hunched over the water with their fingers clicking out permutations, hastening the water down to its final end, where the long slow voice of the sea speaks the litany of discovered words out loud.
2. In a way, it is odd that they do this. You see, mathematics is a lie, a lullaby of a clockwork cosmos sung to soothe our sleeping fears. The Knights Templar knew something of this in their mysteries, though it was never spoken aloud. Maybe it is just that ghosts have spent too long sleeping. In any case the ocean cannot speak. The tragedy of the ocean is that its thoughts cannot be expressed; and if it could it would have no equal to express them to. The only thing the ocean can do is a kind of wordless singing. But the songs of the ocean are outside human hearing. Sometimes, when the sun is bright, one may see them rising up like white wisps of mist from the water’s surface.
3. There is a great conspiracy that says that matter can change, and those who have this disease say that it is not songs at all, but water made into air. It is a rumour spread by physicists and fools. They say that clouds are water grown thick in the air. If they had but seen the clouds! As civilisations age, they become lighter, until they rise up from the earth. The clouds are the homes of the ones who came before us, but be sure that they will close the shutters when we come poking around in realms we are not supposed to be. The ones who came before them live in the moon, and it may be that they themselves have elders in the sun.
4. Biology too is full of lies, lies that slither though the ears and nestle, sated with the enormity of their deception, in the nether chambers of the heart. For be sure, there are beings that we cannot see. Beings that live at ninety degrees to humanity. Maybe we put them there with some accursed alchemy or other in the distant distant past. But being wedged at such an angle across reality, they cannot rise as the ones who came before have done; and that is why they cry when clouds pass over. There are those who can taste the bitterness of the rain, and perhaps they are the ones who come closest to knowing the plight of the displaced.
5. Alchemy is a lie, of course. It is a lie with stained fingers, which is both the best and worst kind. The ghosts of the world know this. And as time goes past and swells the ranks of the dead, the harder they work at shepherding the bitter waters down towards their great and futile engines of computation and the faster the rivers flow. The displaced watch them, and maybe they cry harder too. It is not hard to cry at the futility of the world and its great knit fabric, its mysteries and myths and conspiracies, and all of them lies.
1. Romeo and Juliet’s melancholy ghosts wandered blank-eyed and mystified through Verona until the twelfth day after their deaths, each believing themselves alone. Then a sudden shock of recognition flowed over the city as they passed through each other in the marketplace. For the next few days, the city lay sweating at night in spectral joy. The ghosts of Italy, swept up in a wave of theatrical passion, flocked to the city to fuck against the walls of their enemies and drift, sated, through their wine vats. Then Juliet’s ghost realised that Romeo’s ghost was not actually in love with her, but only with the idea of the ghost of the mystery of her; and Romeo’s ghost realised that Juliet’s ghost still picked her nose even though she was no longer capable of making snot, and was a little too fond of haunting the bedrooms of long-haired musicians; and each of them realised that the other was kind of annoying. Italy’s susceptible ghosts responded by initiating mystical punch-ups in the street and slapping dinner from tables in front of the mystified living. The season of spectral pugilism lasted for more than a month and made the city almost uninhabitable. Then Juliet’s ghost came to some agreement with the visiting phantoms of Rabelais and Chaucer, who had sensed that something literary was going on, and floated off in search of a different story. Romeo’s ghost subsequently took up with a succession of other deceased ladies. I believe that he currently haunts the toilet of a bar in Chievo, where he interrupts patrons mid-shit to grumble to them about women.
2. Chiron and Demetrius came to (in the spectral sense) in the remains of the pie that they had been baked in. Having gained some unusually intimate insights into pie and its construction, they became famed far and wide in the world of ghosts as pie experts. If one wished to haunt a pie, particularly if it was a large pie, they were the ghosts to consult. If one wished to make a pie, they maintained a team of poltergeists to move ingredients around and light fires in the middle of the night. They are believed to be nearly entirely responsible for the season of hauntings in 1620 - 1670 which led to a sharp but temporary decline in the popularity of pie among the living. Subsequently, seeking new challenges, they moved on to haunting small pastries. These days they are often involved, when they can be raised (for they are rather old and sluggish ghosts by now) in making canapes of various sorts seem uncanny.
3. As is now well known, the ghost of Richard III ended up haunting a car park in Leicester. He was able to gain a small measure of satisfaction by manipulating susceptible drivers into clipping each other’s wing-mirrors and lying about it, but it is probably fair to say he was never truly happy about it.
4. The ghost of Othello stood pointedly in Iago’s cell, tapping his feet, until Iago was executed. Subsequently, Iago’s ghost woke to the sensation of being punched into the middle of next week. Thereafter Othello’s ghost and Iago’s ghost were separated by approximately half a week and so Othello was unable to complete his revenge. However, Iago’s ghost was plagued by nearly unendurable deja vu following his temporal dislocation and he ended up quite unable to plot any further villainy. Instead, he floats around Venice’s canals with only his nose above the water level, whimpering.
5. Hamlet’s ghost woke to find Fortinbras in charge. Having now been definitively usurped, he was not at all happy. He entered into a period of intensive vacillation, choosing a room in one of the castle towers for this purpose. The room became famous because one could not enter it without emerging, some hours later, with a vague sense that one had spent a lot of time overthinking something and failing to come to a conclusion. Several hundred years later, he emerged with a resolute look in his eye. His subsequent attempts to drop a sword on Fortinbras’s latest descendent all failed, however, as he was completely unable to interact with solid objects. In great frustration he hired Chiron and Demetrius to bake him into a pie which was served at the royal table, with the hope of thus investing the entire royal line of Denmark with extreme difficulty in making decisions. Unfortunately the pie was flipped out of the kitchen window by a careless poltergeist and eaten by dogs. The dogs of Elsinore are, to this day, unusually indecisive.
Some explanation may be due. Back in the day, I did readthroughs with a group of people who, over the course of a number of years, worked their way through the entirety of Shakespeare’s plays. Doing this sort of thing is a) awesome, b) inculcates a certain amount of Shakespeare geekery, and c) gives one a strong sense that sometimes the great bard liked to reuse a plot point or two. So I thought I’d have a go at trying to condense down some of those reusable plot points into a sort of flowchart, vaguely based around the idea of asking Shakespeare for advice on your play-like dilemmas. I don’t claim to have shoehorned in every plot point he ever wrote, but there is at least one plot point from all the plays here. Including some of the ‘maybe Shakespeare contributed 5 lines of verse in act 4’ plays.
The click for bigness aspect here is complicated. Tumblr resizes stuff to 1280px wide, which is big enough to read, well, most of it. So click on the image for a a mostly readable version. If you want a fully readable version, I’ve put one up here (edit: on imgur as fluffhouse server no longer exists)
Reblogging the giant Shakespeare plots flowchart for Shakespeare’s birthday.
7099 Things beneath the surface of the Earth
-7099.1 Caves and their inhabitants
–7099.11 The sandy-bottomed caves of containable peril and their gentle, bucolic tour guides
–7099.12 Sea caves that are full of old stories washed smooth and round
–7099.13 Those caves that have hidden depths
–7099.14 Caves that draw you in with the siren song of one more crystalline chamber or cathedral arch or echoing shaft or treasure chest or sheaf of crumbling paper, the call of the ancient and unseen, and they never quite deliver but just enough to keep you going back and back and back and back again, and the cave sits at the back of your dreams, working your subconscious like a machine to find new ways to corkscrew round that final obstruction, and it whispers that you will die there and somehow this does not seem so bad
–7099.15 Pale beings with wormlike fingers, counting up time with their heartbeats until they can come up
–7099.16 It’s just a cave you guys of course we can sleep here tonight what’s the worst that could happen?
-7099.2 Basements, cellars and holes and their inhabitants.
–7099.21 Dingy and depressing flats
–7099.22 The secret basements of billionaires
–7099.23 Nuclear bunkers
-7099.3 Tunnels for human use
–7099.31 Subway systems
-7099.3 Tunnels for animal use
–7099.31 Lairs, dens and suchlike
–7099.32 Things that look like caves but are actually unusually large gullets
–7099.33 Things that look like caves but are actually unusually large orifices (non-gullet)
-7099.4 Tunnels for the use of eldritch beasts
–7099.41 Those that run beneath Washington D.C.
-7099.5 Underground lakes
–7099.51 Those that glow with a sinister light
–7099.52 Those into which you have just dropped your camera
-7099.6 Buried items
–7099.61 Alive
–7099.62 Dead
–7099.63 Schrodinger’s zombie and its fascinating friends
–7099.64 Treasure
–7099.65 Cheese and butter
-7099.7 Magma and suchlike
–7099.71 The stuff at the very centre of the Earth