Listing to Port

0780 Ghosts
 -0780.1 Those of the long dead
    –0780.11 Those that have forgotten quite what they ever were
       —0780.111 Those who died at sea, having long slow conversations with generations of whales
       —0780.112 Those that drift around the plumbing of cities, feeding on snatched words and truck exhaust, only coming out in the fog
    –0780.12 Those who know how to do one thing very well, and have been doing it for thousands of years
    –0780.13 Renaissance ghosts
       —0780.131 Those from the actual renaissance
 -0780.2 Those of the recently deceased
    –0780.21 Those of the famous or infamous
       —0780.211 Those who, having formed an attachment to cameras, have ended up haunting them, causing irritating lens flare and mysterious particles on the sensor
    –0780.22 Those who have left a story unfinished
       —0780.221 Those who whisper their stories in the ear of people who are falling asleep, and who will not remember on waking
       —0780.222 Those who have taken to haunting their last book, in the hope of forcing more ink out of the page
    –0780.23 Those who died singing and have not stopped since
    –0780.24 Those whose spookily ernest warnings about dangerous rocks, caves or mountainsides have attracted a whole new slew of visitors to perilous locations.
    –0780.25 Ghosts trying to dodge each other in corridors, having not worked yet that they can go straight through
    –0780.26 The moderately long-dead, riding around on ceiling fans, having been told that this will make them look more recently-deceased
 -0780.3 Those of animals, birds or insects
    –0780.21 The ghosts of mice
       –0780.211 Those who congregate in great friendly invisible groups
       –0780.212 Those whose rushing around and squeaking in million-strong flocks is sometimes mistaken for the North wind, but which can be distinguished by an astute observer of cat behaviour
    –0780.22 Ghosts of slow lorises and bush babies that have faded to nothing more than huge translucent eyes
    –0780.23 Cockroach ghosts
       —0780.241 Those that are the source of unexplained crunches underfoot
 -0780.4 Those of objects
    –0780.41 The wandering ghosts of planets that have fallen into another sun, and that now cluster round G-type stars like woebegone moths
    –0780.42 Ghosts of useful objects that have been destroyed, hanging around tutting at humanity
 -0780.5 Those of concepts or other intangible things
    –0780.51 Ghosts of Christmases or other celebrations
       —0780.511 Those ghosts of Christmas who get together for a jolly Christmas lunch, consuming the recently-released souls of hapless turkeys and leaving them double-ghosted.
    –0780.52 Ghosts of disproved theories, hanging round universities, trying to get back in.

1. How to put your hair in a bun. You will need: one bun (wholemeal is best), and some butter. Cut the bun in half and spread with butter. Insert hair.

2. How to put your hair in a ponytail. You will need: one pony. Position yourself close to the business end of the pony. Part the pony’s tail, and insert hair. Note: due to the tendency of ponies to move about, kick and/or shit, this hairstyle may be best adopted for a limited time only.

3. How to put your hair in cornrows. You will need: a cornfield. Go into the cornfield, find some corn that is sort of lined up, and put your hair there.

4. How to rock a Mohican. You will need: to be registered as a childminder in New York State or Massachusetts, and for there to be someone in the Mohican tribe who has a baby that they want minding, and for them to want you to look after their baby, and for that baby to need a nap whilst in your care. Method: lift baby and rock.

5. How to put your hair in bunches. You will need: to decide. Bunches of what? Flowers or bananas?

6. How to put your hair in pigtails. You will need: two pigs with curly tails. Method: wait until pigs are next to each other. Part hair into two. Insert each part through one pig’s tail. Note: due to the tendency of pigs to not remain at constant separation, this hairstyle is likely to be of even shorter duration than the ponytail. Why not just wear it loose instead?

1. By following your nose.
2. By getting to the bottom of things.
3. By keeping logs.
4. By sorting through litter.
5. By working it out.
6. By a process of elimination.

Gold, marigold, forcefully cheerful office, jonquil, jaundice, piss, bananas, fresh chips, autumn tree, bee stripe, custard, cowardy custard, bug-attracting summer dress, surprising bruise, cheese, chartreuse, lemon, warning sign, fairy princess wig, rubber duck, teeming wasp nest, advocaat, road markings, dystopian sunrise, cartoon character looking into a treasure chest, school bus, beachside idyll, turmeric, honey, highlighter pen, generic warm thing illustration, invisibility jacket, trombone, dandelion, swanky courgette, suspect snow, saffron, dramatic llama, ochre, amber, giant hypnotic cat eye, canary, flax, cornfield, you should see a doctor about that, unwatered plant, topaz, mustard, mango, middle-of-the-rainbow.

1. When you would like the pleasure of turning down an invitation to a party, but no invitation arrives.
2. When you come up with a succinct and brilliant answer to a question you were asked and then you remember that you were actually asked the question four weeks ago and the actual answer you gave was ‘dunno, maybe?’.
3. When you learn that someone you know has had an exciting adventure in a mysterious fantasy world existing just beside our own, even though you are clearly the protagonist.
4. When an initial delicious waft of bacon smell resolves itself into the first tentative nasal foray of an unpleasant fart.
5. When you are listening to a list of acknowledgements and you think that maybe your name has not been called yet because you are getting a special acknowledgement at the end, but it is actually just because your contribution has been forgotten.
6. When you know that you had an amazing dream but you cannot remember any of the details.
7. When you finally listen to a tune that has been going round in your head for weeks, only to discover that you were remembering it wrong.
8. When owing to an exciting case of mistaken identity you are spirited away to the palace of the Queen of Cats for the year’s finest feline ball, but you are allergic to cat hair.
9. When you are saving a treat for yourself and you accidentally save it too long and it goes off.  
10. When you check for new notifications, but there are none.

1. This is the mile when I first needed a pee. We were on the way home, on the old road over the hills. The sun was setting and the baby was asleep in the back and we were on the part of the road where it’s just trees, mile after mile. I said, I might need to stop. But there aren’t any services around here, he said. Can you wait?
2-7. These are the miles when I thought it would be OK. Better to wait. I didn’t want to wake the baby. But of course it wasn’t. Here’s the thing, I said to him. I’ve just had a baby. My bladder doesn’t work very well. I think I really need to go. I need to go right now. We have to stop. Fine, he said. There’s a sign to a cafe. Let’s turn off here.
8. This is the mile we drove along the side road into the forest. No cafe in sight. Curious at first, peering through the dappled tree-light. Is it down a path? Did the sign fall off? And then down the rutted track, him cursing me, me cursing him: no cafe, can we even turn round? You’ll have to go in the woods, he said. Fine, I said. But you know I can’t go with anyone watching. Let me at least find a bush or something.
9. I don’t know if this was a mile or not, but it felt like one. Down the great open sweep of conifer forest, looking back all the while: can I see the car? Yes. Can I still see the car? Yes. And then, with the car out of sight: what if there were a stray walker coming over the ridge? What if that shadow is the wall of a house? And onwards, onwards. All the way on to the great old tree, the fallen tree with the dark crack up its side large enough for a person to squeeze in. It seemed like a gift, then.
10. This is the descent into darkness, the descent that went on and on. Was it a mile? It could have been. They said, later, at the checkpoint, that one must know the ritual to get in. Piss in a circle and put your hand on the black patch on the tree’s rotten heart. So I guess I was just lucky or something. Lucky, too, to step back into the tree’s new black fork and not out into the forest, confused in the darkness. The system is meant to keep out waifs and strays. Once you’re in, however, there’s no going back out again.
11. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. They did not know what to do with me at the checkpoint. I think I was there for hours, maybe days. My breasts were filling up with milk. I was desperate to get back. They said there was no paperwork for me. I thought they were wearing masks, and then I realised that only some of them were. They gave me food, which I ate. Eventually they gave me a pass to the House. Ask the Custodian, they said. If you can get in to see her she is duty bound to give you one gift, and it is only one, but that one can be passage back to the outside world. For anything extra, there is a price.
12. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. Don’t leave the path, they said. And at the House, they sent me back, again. This time there were strange beasts in the undergrowth. Someone said I shouldn’t have eaten the food, but too late now.
13. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest.
14. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest.
15. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. It had been a while, by this point. Going there, getting sent back. Someone said I could get beyond the gate if I put a flat copper coin into the mouth of the gargoyle above the door and put the lantern out, and I’d left the path to climb up to the cave with the clockwork dragon and chipped off a single copper scale to see if that would work, but when the lantern was out I could see hundreds of eyes, bright green in the darkness, peering from the ivy, and something scuttled past to block the door, and I knew there must be other protections at work.
15. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. And here’s the thing. Mothers don’t have adventures. Mothers don’t get caught in fairy realms. Mothers are not the subject of the story. When this happens to a mother, the child is the subject of the story, and the story is about abandonment and loss, about a scar that never quite heals. I was desperate to get home. My milk had dried up. I drugged the green-eyed beasts with the purple flowers that grew down by the lake. But I couldn’t find the way through the library.
16.-43. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest, with the weaver’s key and the map of the orangery roof. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest, armed with a silver needle. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest with the needle wiped in my blood and a crown of lavender and bramble. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is the mile from the checkpoint to the House in the Forest Under the Forest. This is all the miles, until the final door, and the Custodian, and her grudgingly-given token of freedom.
44-45. These are the miles I stumbled out of the woods, bramble-torn and muddied, the ink of the Forest Under the Forest splattered up my forearms, out into a winter dawn and an empty lay-by. I knew that it would be later. That’s part of the deal, isn’t it? You never come back to the same time. And down the road, at the cafe we had somehow missed, I found out just how much later. Too much later. Years and years. The awful story was already written. Unexplainable abandonment. Loss. I could go and see it, or not. The thing is, I told the waitress, I don’t have a ride home. Wait until my shift ends, she said. I’ll take you. The thing is, I said, I’m not sure I have a home anymore. I sat there until the sun was high in the sky. Then I went back into the woods.
46-47. These are the miles back into the woods. The path was familiar, now. I stopped for a few minutes at the long crack in the hollow tree. Then I went in.
48. This is the mile to the House in the Forest. Just the once, this time. I knew the system. I knew the way. I knew the words to speak and the forms to sign. I knew the sinister glint in the Custodian’s eye. I need to go back to when I left the first time, I said. Everything as it was. Can you do that? And she smiled, as if this had not been the first time she was asked that, and nodded. What do I need to do to make that happen? I asked.  Well yes, she said. There’s always a price. Let’s talk, I said.
49. This is the mile I walked out of the woods, victorious: the clock exactly where it should be, the car waiting. You took your time, he said. The baby was awake; he was blinking at the dappled light coming through the trees by the lay-by. Well, I’m back now, I said. Let’s get home.
50. This is for all the other miles, sweet stolen domestic miles, home and back again. We don’t use the road over the hills now. It takes too long that way, I told him. There’s talk that his mother may move closer, anyway. I’ve a second baby on the way. I try to live in the moment. Don’t we all? I don’t think about those strange lost years if I can avoid it. But here’s the thing. Mothers don’t have adventures, no. Or maybe I should say, now: mothers keep very quiet about their adventures. But everyone loves it when young men have adventures. So yes, there was a price. He’ll find out when he turns sixteen.

1. Eat words. Devour them book by book. Chew them over, casually and quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Take words on picnics beneath waterfalls. Raid the library at midnight for juicy poetry.
2. Be a fan of words. Follow them about. Ask others where to find the best words and go to the places they recommend and hang about there trying to look interesting. Have sweet reveries about words before you fall asleep at night.
3. Get to know words. Go out for a coffee and bring your words with you and look up five hours later to see that your coffee has gone cold. Stay out with words until it is slightly too late. Have silly little adventures with words that make you giggle, but which you cannot quite explain to other people. Write letters to words and wait breathlessly for their reply.
4. Have a relationship with words. Dream all day of the moment when you get to touch them. Look words in the i and tell them what you are going to do to them, and then do it.
5. Have a bad relationship with words. Lie awake at 5 a.m. wondering where you went wrong with words. Take long walks alone to avoid the messes that you and words have made together. Let words hold you and explain why they no longer love you, but only cry when they have gone.
6. Murder words. Cut them. Cut them again and again until you can no longer quite see what they were before. Wall up words in dead-end paragraphs and leave them there to decay unread.
7. Rewrite history. Raise words from the dead, raw and new and clean, and shape them back into something that can be set free into the world. Keep their history a secret. Let them only know that you love them. Watch them go away from you and hope that they come back.
8. Grow old with words. Let them get well-worn and familiar. Let them be polished smooth like seeds while time roughs you up. Hold words in your hand and live together until you die, then let them close your eyes. Let them mourn. But leave them plenty of good soil, so that they can grow when you are gone.

0012 Categorization systems
 -0012.1 Those relating to books
    –0012.11 By subject matter
       —0012.111 Dewey decimal
       —0012.112 Library of Congress, Colon, Harvard-Yenching or other commonly-used system
       —0012.113 This library is too much of a special snowflake to use a classification system adopted by other libraries
    –0012.12 By colour
    –0012.13 By alphabetical or numerical order
       —0012.131 Alphabetical order by author
       —0012.132 Alphabetical order by title
       —0012.133 By number of pages
       —0012.134 Alphabetical order by some vague concept associated with the book
    –0012.14 By where there is a space on the bookshelf that they can be shoved into
    –0012.15 By where there is a space on a flat surface that they can be put
       —0012.151 Those that utilise low or zero gravity to use flat surfaces in all directions
    –0012.16 Terrifying vortices of utter book anarchy
 -0012.2 Those relating to people
    –0012.21 Categorization by personality
       —0012.211 Those that are general enough that one may see oneself in all the categories
    –0012.22 Categorization by physical characteristics
       —0012.221 Those that miss out, order or suborder people in such a way as to advance a theory of which characteristics are best
       —0012.222 Those involving internet comments sections
    –0012.23 Categorization by point of origin
    –0012.24 Categorization by primary occupation
       —0012.241 Those that imply not having a job equals not being a proper person
    –0012.25 Categorization by general societal role and/or age
       —0012.251 Systems that categorise women into moms and not-moms
 -0012.3 Those relating to objects
    –0012.21 Categorization by size
       –0012.211 Systems that involve lining things up by physical size
    –0012.22 Categorization by colour
       –0012.222 Systems that involve lining things up by colour
          –0012.2221 Those that are basically things-lined-up-by-colour porn for people who like that kind of thing
    –0012.23 Categorization by what they do
       –0012.231 Drawers of thingies and whatnots
 -0012.4 Those relating to abstract concepts
 -0012.5 Those relating to everything
    –0012.51 Categorization systems that include themselves
    –0012.52 Those that do not

The franc, the like, the feline unit of affection, the rupee, the krone, the bitcoin, the dinar, the birr, the utilitarian lump, the ariasy, the pula, the euro, the quetzal, the won, the morsel of exposure, the manly nod, the som, the yen, the trading card, the lols, the pound in your pocket, the ringgit, the guilder, the ruble, the marble, the British Standard Moment of Attention, the chocolate button, the shred of self-worth, the manat, the taka, the yuan, the bottom dollar, the punt.

Outer space, London, the sea, some bunnies, a rock, the black door into the
depths of the Parallel Forest, a very quiet place, long-forgotten pirate
treasure, some clouds, some crowds, a stuffed polar bear, John Dee’s
scrying mirror, the Earth’s mantle.