Listing to Port

1. Three mice who live in a postbox, eating postcards and scrawling ‘return to sender’ in blue biro on letters whose handwriting they dislike.

2. A mouse buzzing with conspiracy theories, lives in a distillery, puts on a tiny diving suit at night to delve into the vats where she believes some great secret is held. When the distillery office is closed she wriggles under the door and logs on to gmail to send long screeds in CAPITAL LETTERS to anyone with a likely e-mail address.

3. Some number of laboratory mice, perhaps fifty, who have, by dint of peering out of their cages at nearby computer screens, taught themselves a certain amount of biology and statistics. These mice have formed a small society, dedicated to gaming the results of mouse-based experiments; they send round tiny circulars full of instructions, such as 'turn LEFT then RIGHT then RIGHT again in the maze’, or 'wait TEN minutes, then press the button TWICE and look disappointed’. Everything is memorised and then eaten. They are believed to be the true architects beneath at least twenty peer-reviewed papers.

4. The mouse who ate Wales one night, but had fortunately left full instructions such that it could be reconstructed by the morning with most of the mountains in the right place.

5. The mouse that lived under the cat’s bowl for a giddy, perilous few weeks, emerging through a small hole at night to gorge on cat food whilst the cat slept on the bed.

6. Shakespeare’s pet mouse, name unknown. It is believed that this mouse was personally responsible for the majority of 'Two Gentlemen of Verona’. The effort required in committing pen to paper (primarily at night when the bard was asleep) so tired the mouse that he slept for more than three hundred years, before briefly waking to contribute three pages to 'Under Milk Wood’. I believe he is now asleep in a willow bower somewhere North of Wenlock Edge. He will probably not write for you, so don’t try it.

7. There was a mouse who got an exceptionally high score in Tetris, largely by wriggling under the blocks as they fell to flip them over at the last moment.

8. Twenty-nine mice who, by dint of forming a large pyramid, were able to operate a monster truck; this having been their dream for some time and their reason for becoming so proficient at mouse acrobatics. Sadly the truck was soon retrieved by the police. These mice have now moved on to a flight training school, where they peer myopically from loose simulator panels and formulate exotic dreams.

9. Two hundred and forty mice in the vicinity of Bangor, Maine, who meet on Thursdays to eat butter and refine their Theory of Everything. These mice have had exceptional trouble in keeping up with the scientific literature, but are occasionally able to get printouts of papers through the post from a rogue capybara in Peru. It is a frustrating life. Certain of their number tried travelling to Harvard to attempt to sneak into conferences, but after an incident in which three mice got overexcited and tried to punch a Professor who they felt had made inappropriate remarks about the cosmological constant, they have largely kept to their own little thicket in the woods.

1. The ability to actually herd actual cats.
2. The ability to know what other people are thinking, but only in the specific case that they are thinking about going for dessert.
3. The ability to take long road trips without needing a toilet break.
4. The ability to eat dubious and ancient leftovers from the back of the fridge without getting sick.
5. Can leap medium-size hurdles in a single bound.
6. The ability to fly and walk through walls, but only when asleep.
7. Amazing powers of detection in matters relating to euphemism, innuendo and puns.
8. Can shave yaks in record time.
9. The ability to tickle yourself.

1. Pair of (probably?) socks, approx 2m long, red wool. Found drifting in space by object cleanup.
2. Jar of long white worms, approx 80cm in height, in some kind of jelly. Strong odour. Have been informed these are a delicacy on New Titan.
3. Two pairs false teeth. First pair thirty teeth including eight of canine-type; second pair twelve teeth including four of canine-type. Seem to be matching: possibly belonging to a two-mouthed species or ceremonial parent-and-child set?
4. Small brown furry creature, approx 50cm long, with stripy tail. Very vocal. Unsure if lost property or lost property owner come to collect. Language (if it is language) unavailable in Universal Translator but have sent a picture of the creature to the developers with a request for inclusion in the next update.
5. Compete set of hypervenusian chess in four dimensions. Looks as if abandoned mid-game. Protrusion into third dimension mainly dominated by red and infrared pieces. Have requested assessment by chess expert as catastrophic dimensional energy release is possible if game left unfinished.  
6. Blue and yellow striped mitten, five fingers, probably belonging to human child. Left on wall in main lobby.
7. Basket of yellow eggs, slightly slimy. Believe these to be New Titan Crocodilian eggs, in which case leaving them in a public place is part of the life cycle and they have been incorrectly deposited here. New Titan authorities contacted for repatriation. Strong preference expressed for repatriation before hatching.
8. Portable nitrogen-sulphur atmosphere generator, approx 1m long, exterior chrome with art deco stylings. Currently sealed in isolation vault as faulty on switch is triggered by loud noises.
9. Small robotic exoskeleton, approx 90cm high, six limbs, probably belonging to one of the Kepler-442b species. Appears to be intelligent and is asking to claim asylum. Have sent request to hub legal centre regarding a) status as property or independent being, b) survivability of local conditions for likely owner without exoskeleton and c) our obligations under intergalactic quarantine law if owner is present in the shuttle hub.

1. Miss Helen Thirnwicket, London. Unlike the other librarians on this list, Miss Thirnwicket was not a natural adventurer. Rather, she was the unfortunate victim of a typo. Instead of signing on, as she thought,  as a librarian of Acton (West London) she found herself under contract to be a librarian of Action (no location specified). The local authority duly supplied her with a small mobile library and instructions to take it to perilous locations. Miss Thirnwicket dutifully hauled the library through a selection of mountains, caves, cliff faces and urban wastelands. Although she prided herself in introducing the works of the Bronte sisters to places they had not previously been, in practice very few withdrawals were made from the library, because many of her clients did not have the necessary ID on them to be issued with a library card. However her small store of Kendal Mint Cake and whisky soon became rightly famous among thrill-seekers.
2. Mr. Dalton Kingsbury, Charlotte. Mr. Kingsbury was unfortunate in inheriting a particularly rowdy library. The words would squeeze out of the books at night and gallop around the library floor, often leaving surfaces splattered with exclamation marks. Instead of wearily cleaning up the mess each morning, however, Mr. Kingsbury took a more confrontational approach. Each night he chased the wild words with a small net, often stuffing them back into the wrong books and locking them in. In later years he became famous as a word-tamer and wrote a number of extremely tightly-controlled books. He was never quite trusted by words, however. He died at age 45 after choking on a rogue ‘incarnadine’ that had somehow made it into his clam chowder.
3.  Omar of Alexandria, Egypt. That we do knot know more about Omar of Alexandria is testament to his unfortunate end. Omar was one of the last librarians to desert the Library of Alexandria before its destruction, and managed to save a number of books that had been thought lost. These included Berossus’ Babylonaica, the complete works of Hypatia, and a humorous book about cats thought to have been written by Sappho under a rather weak pseudonym. Having become obsessed with the idea that libraries were unsafe, Omar took to keeping these books under his pillow. As a result, he was unable to sleep well. Eventually he fell asleep on an elephant with the books under his arm, and both he and they fell into the Nile and were drowned.  
4. Mrs. Vera Hawthorne, Rye Central Library. Mrs. Hawthorne is famous for having gone to extraordinary lengths in chasing down a particularly obscure inter-library loan. As it turned out, the requested book’s entry in the British Library catalogue was in error, the book having been stolen by pirates in 1823. Undeterred, Mrs. Hawthorne joined a group of international literary vigilantes, tracked down the descendants of the pirates, and ascertained that the book had been abandoned when the pirates’ ship was beached on an obscure subantarctic island. After a brief course on sailing at the local marina, Mrs. Hawthorne set off to collect the book in a small dinghy, surviving due to her remarkable facility in making friends with dolphins. The book had been used as unconventional nesting material by a large colony of penguins but Mrs. Hawthorne devotedly reassembled it, before stowing away on an Antarctic Research vessel to bring the book home. Sadly, the original submitter of the loan request had passed away by this time, and the British Library declined to take the book back due to its strong odour of penguin guano. Instead, Mrs. Hawthorne took it home with the intention of reading it and possibly writing an autobiography. Nothing has been heard of her since. Interestingly, the original loan request is no longer available, so the identity of the book itself remains obscure.  
5. Dr. Loic Laplace, Paris. Dr. Laplace is the head librarian of the International Centre for Perilous Books in Paris, a combined library and safe house for books that have, through no fault of their own, been used as accesories to murder. The collection includes a number of curiousities that require particularly careful handling: books that have been treated witch contact poisons; those that are particularly large, heavy or spiky; books that have been hollowed-out to make space for weapons; and books that are highly radioactive. As a result, Dr. Laplace has been hospitalised sixteen times and is missing two fingers and half the hair on his head. It is a testament to his great love of difficult books that he perseveres. The Centre is entirely funded by donations; ten thousand euros is believed to be enough to obtain a no-questions-asked library card and certain specialised instructions from the staff.

1. For more than a hundred years, there was only one subway system on Mars. It was one of those things that the colonists complained about, along with the red dust that got on everything and the air company ice-cream machines, which were broken more often than not. The subway was at Lycus Sulci, in the administrative centre, and it only had five stops. In its third year of operation there was a dust avalanche at Crater Wall Station and, when everything had been cleaned out, the tracks were slightly buckled. Ever since that time, commuters to the colonial headquarters could hear a faint tune behind the electric hum of the railway as the trains reached the end of the line. There was a rumour that it was the same tune that had been heard in the Great Pyramid at Giza, five days before its destruction.
2. In time, the air company removed the ice-cream machines and moved its workers from pay in cash to pay in company store tokens, citing increased costs for solar panel components. The colonial court upheld the legality of this decision. One morning, fifty air-company workers were trapped on a malfunctioning train carriage, shuttling back and forth between imaginary stops at the end of the line. When they were finally rescued, they marched on the company’s headquarters, singing the railway song to some words of their own invention. There were riots, and the garrison at Gordii Dorsum was called in.
3. Later on, after the Battle of Abus Vallis and the Breathless Days, after the Easter Ceasefire and the Great Turning-out, the song became the anthem of the Republic of Olympus Mons. It was said to have been an ancient African song, sung by slaves rebelling against unjust kings. They had always intended to send an ambassador back to the Court at Kigali to investigate further, but somehow they were always too busy with Mars matters.
4. Eventually, something went wrong with the colony’s genetic improvement program. An age of perpetual embarrassment began. It is very difficult to decipher any of the writings from that time, because they could perform prodigious acts of euphemism; their medical notes were like epic poems. They are known to have invented a new kind of excretion, referred to on occasion as ‘Number three’. They became known as a people who could fill a conversation entirely with the minutiae of dust and who lived out their lives in private rooms.
5. On the other side of Mars, where there were five more baby republics and an emperor with maybe fifty subjects, they sung a mocking version of the song and it was about people who cannot say what they mean. They were still singing the song after the end of the Republic of Olympus Mons, which was overrun by genetically-modified attack pandas from the Air Company who sneaked in whilst all the Republic’s Sentries happened to all be enjoying a leisurely Number Three at the same time.  
6. The baby republics had ice-cream machines, and they were all planning to build subway systems, and they had engineered a kind of ivy that grew in the thin air of the plains and produced a reasonable facsimile of vanilla pods. It was their efforts that eventually made Southern Mars the dessert capital of the Solar System. Visitors came from all over. The shuttle company calculated fuel requirements under the assumption that they would leave a kilogram or two heavier than when they had arrived. In those days, the song was sung in custard parlours; it was said to be a lament for the great library at Alexandria.
7. Inspired by the song, the baby republics ploughed the custard-parlour profits into a great university, which survived and grew beyond the days when custard-parlours were considered hopelessly old-fashioned. In time, seven of the drowned Oxford colleges relocated there, and two from Cambridge. In those days the streets were dug into canals, and the university, which was in itself also a city, resembled a Venice that had never been dusted.
8. The university had a hundred years in which it was obsessed with time. During those years, a child grew up who had been sung the song in her cradle, and whenever she was uncomfortable thereafter she would hum it to herself. Eventually, she inherited an office in the Faculty of Time and discovered three of the seven secrets of time travel, which she refused to share with her collaborators. Instead, she determined to travel back to the destruction of the library at Alexandria. Lacking the Fourth Secret, however, she could travel only back as far as the destruction of the pyramids; and without the fifth secret, she was not able to travel to public places; and without the sixth secret she could not quite control her final location. Thus it was that she found herself in a secret chamber of the Great Pyramid, and her equipment to get home in another secret chamber, and no way of knowing quite when she was. Undeterred, she chipped away at the separating wall, singing the song to herself the while. After five days, her return equipment self-destructed, destroying the pyramid. As it happened, one of the local warring parties had been setting explosives in the pyramid the whole while in any case, so they were only too happy to take responsibility. But the soldiers never forgot that the pyramid had serenaded them with its death song, before it finally crumbled into dust.

1. Do not stray from the path.
2. When you stray from the path, know that you can never quite go back to the same one. But there is always still be a way out.
3. There will be side streets down which you may see a lone bagpiper, or the embassy of a nation you have never heard of, or an ancient wooden door that stands a crack open, or a shop that sells sweets from the exact other side of the world.
4. There will come a time when it rains, and you will be near those buildings. Those buildings with their great metal-and-stone lobbies and their glass and their plants in pots and lifts and escalators in perpetual silent motion behind the security gates. Know that there are beings within who will chip out your soul from your body’s stone slab, and worse: they will teach you that this is what everyone does. Know too that sheltering from the rain is a thing that is protected, for a short while.
5. Those beings have loves and lives and difficulties of their own, too. You may find yourself at dinner with them. Or you may see them at dinner through the plate glass of the night city. Sometimes they have secrets like splinters of diamond wedged into their busy hearts. If you can pull these splinters loose, you may be allowed beyond the silent security gates.
6. Do not do this. Never do this. If you look up as the moon rises and find yourself on the wet streets with a handful of diamond splinters, drop them in a drain. You will be a long way from the path, but there is still time.
7. In any case, if you find yourself at dinner, do try the duck.
8. There will be a river to cross, but you may do so by any of a hundred bridges. Do not fret: this choice is not important.
9. There will be a door in a wall. There will be a forest, but it will have people instead of trees, and the wolves will be beautiful. There will be a castle, and you can enter it with coins. There will be a cottage by the water where an old lady will sell you tea. You will know all these things when you see them.
10. If you stray until nightfall, the forest will be lit with neon and rippling with music. It will be wine and sweat and breath and skin. It may not be resistable. And you may find yourself in a cold morning, overgrown with all the forest’s ivy, as if a hundred years have passed. Know then that you are not rooted in place. You are a long way from the path, but there is still time.
11. The other side lies over the mountains. They say that in the mountains there are beings who must be paid in blood. Ignore this message. When you come to have tea with them, remember that they have lives and loves and difficulties of their own. If you can pay them in stories, they will give you safe passage up the concrete stairs.
12. Out past the concrete stairs, the city ends.
13. Know that there are many ways to be unscathed, and not all desirable; and many ways to leave, and not all desirable. Know that you have loves and a life and difficulties of your own, too. Know that there is no shame in staying. This is how we came to the city for the first time, too.

4988 Bears
 -4988.1 Real bears
    –4988.11 Polar
       —4988.111 Grolar
    –4988.12 Grizzly
       —4988.121 Both grumpy and grizzly
    –4988.13 Black
    –4988.14 Panda
       —4988.141 Adorable baby international-diplomacy pandas
    –4988.14 Other
       —4988.141 Bear stars of Youtube
 -4988.2 Things that look like bears
    –4988.21 Beards that look like the owner is eating a bear
    –4988.22 Mounds of fluff that look like hibernating bears
 -4988.3 Bears of myth and story
 -4988.4 International bears of mystery
    –4988.41 Those bears that are found on subway systems around the world
    –4988.42 Bears in ill-fitting coats and sunglasses, eating meat
    –4988.43 Bears lurking under manhole covers and between the cracks of the pavement
    –4988.44 Bears that sit in the rain and tell melancholy stories
    –4988.45 Those bears that lie upside-down in your favourite chair and refuse to move
 -4988.5 Bears in rhyming situations
    –4988.51 In their lairs
    –4988.52 On the stairs
    –4988.53 Doing a stage routine that once was Fred Astaire’s
 -4988.6 Toy bears

1. The Recursive Garden, West Wittering. The Recursive Garden appears at first glance to be a rather plain, circular garden containing only plantings of unusually large size. At its centre, however, a circular hedge conceals an exact replica of the outer garden at half the scale (with more standard-size plantings), which in turn contains a further replica at half the scale again (with dinky little alpine plants). A number of further recursions can be found at the centre of the garden, but the plants in these (other than a few well-selected bonsai trees) are artificial replicas.

2. The Perfumed Gardens of Carnal Pleasure, Tunbridge Wells. A rather lascivious formal garden, said to have been laid out to the suggestions of the Earl of Rochester. The Perfumed Gardens are designed to provide an ideal arena for outdoor frolics: soft beds of moss, inventive nooks and crannies, plants with shady reputations and more suggestive swings than one can shake a stick at. A large and active rabbit population is maintained to provide further inspiration, though the original troupe of imported monkeys sadly succumbed to one English Winter too many. The gardener’s shed, which is full of fascinating implements, can be visited for a small extra fee.

3. Talbot’s Travelling Garden, location unknown. Talbot’s travelling garden is a small but perfectly-formed formal garden located on the back of a flat-bed truck. It may well have passed you on the road at some point, although the sides are typically raised when on the move to protect the plants from wind damage. Talbot’s Garden can be visited, but you have to find it first. Its location and opening hours are never advertised. It tends to travel to places that the proprietor thinks could do with a bit more greenery, spend a day or two opened out in a sunny spot, and then move onwards. Some Garden-seekers have had luck asking after the Garden’s resident cat, which is enormous, three-legged and ginger.

4. The Carnivorous Garden, Brighton. A recent opening. Sadly not much more information is available about the Carnivorous Garden other than its name and the exhortation at the gate that travellers enter entirely at their own risk. We have singularly failed to track down anyone who has visited it.

Puce, violet, purple purple, goth purple, bruise, silly purple, impending thunderstorm, school play Roman, this toy is supposed to be for girls purple, distant mountains, railway buddleia, heather, purple leather, angry face, prose purple, candied violets, plum, eccentric letter-writer purple, alarming curtains, resurrected bat-plant, shiny beetle purple, aubergine, arguably blue purple, old lady hat, purple lightsaber, glitter purple.

1. World’s largest ball of water, Pacific Ocean (somewhere). Not easily delimited from the rest of the ocean, but technically present. The location of the world’s largest ball of water without fish and stuff in is currently unknown.
2. World’s largest ball of beetle-rolled dung, Hyderabad. Unfortunately this was eaten shortly afterwards without formal confirmation. But even now there is a lingering air of beetle amazement in the city that you can sense if you have your head close to the ground.
3. World’s smallest record-breakingly large ball of something, Kansas. Last seen falling down the back of a chest of drawers.
4. World’s largest ball of elephants, Nairobi. More technically referred to as an enormous snuggle.
5. World’s largest ball for balls of things, Bali. The organisers are held to have hired a large venue to play giant-ball marbles. Sadly we were not allowed in, not being spherical, and so have no further information.