MOPS Day 11: Instructions. Not quite a map, but almost. This was vaguely inspired by the peculiar writings of Daniil Kharms and the Codex Serafinianus.
See yesterday
The First Feast
The feast is held in a nautically-themed basement, somewhere in a distant and unedifying part of town. A reproduction of the last feast on the Titanic is served by a host of waiters in Pierre et Gilles sailor-boy costumes. As soon as the doors are closed, the noise of a tremendous rainstorm can be heard. A drip develops in the centre of the table. The first few courses are accompanied by the sounds of water trickling under the door.
By the third course, the floor is covered with a thin skim of water. The guests splash their way to the toilet, then back to their seats. The outside door is locked. By the fifth course, the waiters are wading through a foot of water, their sailor costumes damp and see-through. For the eighth course, the table is winched clear of the rising waters. The guests stand to eat their asparagus vinaigrette. By the tenth course, the guests must swim to recieve their peach and chartreuse jelly, delivered through a hatch in the ceiling.
The jelly is spiked with a powerful sleeping draught. The guests awake the next morning, alone, on a bare raft somewhere in the North Sea.
The Second Feast
The invitation states, wear masks. To avoid confusion, you are informed beforehand in a splendidly-typeset letter as to who of the others will be wearing which mask. The room has black, glassy-smooth reflective walls. Once the meal is served, it becomes apparent that nothing is what you expected it to be. The water is vodka. Eggs are served which have the white centrally, surrounded by a layer of yolk. A cake is brought in that is made entirely from meat; a game course sewed inside the skin of chicken legs; chocolates that are made from cheese. The final course is the facsimile of a full roast dinner in cake, marzipan and fondant.
At the end of the meal, the masks are removed. No-one is who you were told they were.
When you get home, the door of your house will be curiously ajar and small items will have been moved from their usual places.
The Third Feast
The third feast is held in a library. You are familiar with this library, but you were never aware of the room the feast is held in. It is behind a curiously nondescript door, which seems as though it might lead to a broom cupboard but in fact leads to a high-ceilinged gallery filled with all manner of obscure volumes. The head librarian meets you there, carrying a tray of magnetic letters. The letter you choose determines the meal that is served to you.
One might choose P and be led to a purple parlour, where peacock pate, partridge with pickled pear and pomegranates would be served; or A, and be led to an alcove in which waiters dressed as angels would offer asparagus, artichokes, andouillettes and amaretto. Those who choose X are strapped to a cruciform frame and spoon-fed a limp cross of xanthan gum. The unlucky few who choose Z are fed zebra steaks laced with opium, and sleep for the majority of the meal.
The next morning, the guests find a letter tattooed, discreetly, in the crook of their arm; but it is not always the letter they chose.
The Fourth Feast
The fourth feast is held in the room at the top of a tower, in a circular room with chequerboard windows of red and white stained glass. When the guests have taken their places at the round table, the ladder is drawn away and they are shut in.
After some time waiting, it becomes apparent that the cutlery is only a crude facsimile, and is in fact silver-painted biscuit and quite edible. The table decorations are inflatable and pressurised by soup. Shortly after this, the guests realise that the plates are fake, too; they form the second course. A valve is found whereby the windows can be drained of their central layers of red and white wine to reveal clear glass and the surrounding forest. A layer peels off the table to reveal the third course, and by deconstructing their chairs they are able to extract the fourth, which is hidden in the legs like marrow in bones.
By now it is well past midnight, and still no-one comes. Inspecting the walls, the guests find that some bricks can be removed. These bricks are chocolate-framed replicas, containing splendid puddings. The holes left by their absence form a ladder, by which they can descend the tower and go home.
The Fifth Feast
The first course is a food course. The second course is a sex course. They alternate in quick succession, until no-one can quite remember what they are supposed to be doing with their hands and mouths.
The Sixth Feast
The sixth feast is a replica of the funeral feast of King Midas. It is held in a remote country house, lit by dim lamps and perfumed with incense; a greek orthodox choir can be heard at times throughout the proceedings, although they are never seen. The black-clad waiters are hired magicians, sleight-of-hand artists and illusionists. Throughout the meal, they stealthily replace the items in the hall by exact replicas in pure gold, beginning subtly (table decorations, door handles, strolling peacocks) and ending with the cutlery as the guests are using it to eat dessert. As a finale, the waiters line up to pull the tablecloth out from under its contents. The guests laugh drunkenly over their honey wine, expecting a golden table; but instead the house disappears, and they are left, bereft of riches, on a low hill in the dim light of early sunrise.
The Seventh Feast
Jaded and tired, the guests meet on a ship in international waters. After making certain preparations, they secretly draw straws and then retire to their cabins. Later that evening, avatars of each guest meet at a virtual-reality table, where they share their thoughts on the splendid meal that is being served to each, individually, in separate parts of the ship. The guests know that one of their number is not real, but is instead an AI which has been supplied with certain knowledge about that person. The missing person forms the prime ingredient in the banquet they are eating.
Nostalgic for their first feast, they later sink the boat.
On the road at the moment, so here is an old list-like thing from t'other blog.
1. On this day, 10 years ago: you said something to a friend that you’ve suddenly realised accidentally came out as kind of insulting. You do realise that your friends probably haven’t had any respect for you since then, don’t you? You should apologise. Only it’s been a really long time, so you’d need a really big apology and they’re still going to think you’re a bit off.
2. Did you know? One of the first symptoms of throat cancer can be a sore throat!
3. You also have one new invitation to something you won’t enjoy by someone who’s taking pity on your social ineptness.
4. Fun fact! A gamma ray burst in the Milky Way could lead to a mass extinction event on Earth!
5. Don’t forget! 12:40 a.m., tomorrow, you’re scheduled to have that dream about the exam hall. Should I notify you 10 minutes beforehand so you can get there in time for everyone to see you have no clothes on, or shall I skip the reminder so that you arrive late and naked?
1. Cutlass Fogarty’s hoard of pony charms. This is a completely legit hoard, they’re made of gold and everything. In fact, Cutlass Fogarty was an unusually successful pirate within the bounds of his niche idiom, and by 1672 he had pretty much gathered up the global supply of pony charms. The only problem is, he was a bit too good at hiding them. It is said that he was finally persuaded to make a map with an ‘X’ on it on his deathbed, but owing to scaling issues the 'X’ covered most of Western Australia.
2. The Holy Omelette of Pope Valentine. Nearly all trace of this relic has been erased from history by some kind of sinister cabal, but it definitely passed into pirate hands in 1890 following the sinking of the Marlborough. For some years there was a rumour that it had been accidentally served up in a restaurant in Punta Arenas in 1922, but was returned to the kitchen due to its unacceptably damp and stale state. Its current location is unknown.
3. John Bonham’s Lost Hoard. John Bonham was in reality Jane, the rather bored daughter of a successful Kentish leather merchant. With little else to do, she decided to embark upon a short-lived but briefly notorious career of piracy along the Thames. Although she had a knack for alarming violence, she did not have a very discerning eye for treasure and as a result her hoard is said to be mostly trinkets, knick-knacks, sentimental dog pictures and the like. It may well be, therefore, that it has in fact been found but dismissed as a rubbish heap.
4. The Golden Chest of Jacques Le Dildo. This hoard is notorious amongst hunters of pirate treasure. Its location is in fact quite easily discernible. The chest, however, is entirely full of live and extremely lairy crabs. Jacques Le Dildo was very fond of crabs, and may in fact have set it up as some kind of crab hatchery.
5. The sacred cave of the Sisters of Hellfire. The Sisters of Hellfire were a renegade order of nuns who took an unusually direct approach to the problem of sacred works being sullied by profane, profit-obsessed owners. Over five decades of raiding, they are said to have amassed a huge collection of fine art, sculpture and relics. They are believed at this point to have retired from piracy and reverted to a more normal type of sacred order; the only difference being a hidden cave beneath their new nunnery, accessible only to the more senior orders.
6. Jack of the Split Ear. Jack considered the greatest treasure of all to be freedom, and as a result his famous chest is empty of everything except symbolism.
7. The Cursed Barquentine of Port Harcourt. The curse, as it turns out, is both real and pertinent to the nature of this treasure. Following an unfortunate incident (said by some to be the deliberate ramming of a peaceful sea serpent by a drunken crew), the brigantine was cursed with eternal seasickness. As a result, their adventures in search of treasure were usually unsuccessful. They also needed somewhere below decks to vomit, and their store of large empty chests soon proved useful for this purpose. In addition, the wreck is still cursed. You probably do not want to go there.
1. Daisy’s Automatic Kibble-o-mat. A laser detection system continually scans the central part of the food bowl. If any part of the bowl base becomes visible, an alarm sounds and an order for three hundred tonnes of salmon is made at the nearest online retailer with same-day delivery.
2. Dave Kitler’s PRODBOT. PRODBOT takes on the onerous task of getting up at 5am to prod the owner into opening a can of kitty food. While the cat has a much-needed lie-in, PRODBOT launches itself onto the owner’s bed and extends its patented claw attachment to provide regular face-batting. PRODBOT is programmable with six different miaows, including ‘get up now, I have just been sick’, 'get up now, there’s probably a dead mouse in the hall’, and 'GET UP NOW!!!’. The 2016 update also includes an award-winning solicitation purr.
3. Princess’s Cat Calendar. Does your cat forget when flea or worm treatment is due? Do they have cause to regret trustingly approaching you as you shake a bag of kitty treats, before scooping them up in a towel and forcing a buttered pill down their throat? Then they need Princess’s Cat Calendar! Fully customisable with a range of easily-recognisable sad and angry cat icons, Princess’s Cat Calendar ensures that cats need never be in the house on a regularly scheduled medicine night again.
4. Mr. Tibbles’ Patent Litter Reassurer. Does your cat get anxious that they may not have buried their excretions sufficiently? Place Tibbles’ Patent Reassurer near the litter area, and your cat will recieve a stream of comforting messages as they poo and clean up, including 'it’s OK’, 'no predator is ever going to find that’ and 'really, you can stop scratching the wall now, it doesn’t do anything.’ Perfect for the cat who poos outside the box.
5. Godzilla Fishface Jones II’s Outdoors Reboot Button. A highly successful invention that sadly plays on the credulity and poor memory of many cats, the Reboot Button has been widely distributed despite its complete lack of function. Godzilla Fishface Jones II claims that her invention has the power to change the state of the outdoor world to one more amenable to cats, e.g. not raining, less windy, no snow, fewer enemy cats, etc. The cat should simply come in, discreetly hit the reboot button, and then request to go out again. Although this fairly obviously does not work, most cats have too short an attention span to claim their money back or, indeed, notice that the product is not working.
1. There was a man who had a secret. He had always felt it was a very bad secret, and perhaps it was. But he had spent so long trying to avoid it that it was like a heavy stone in his mind that he could steer the waters of his thought around; the consequence being that all his thoughts were twisted round it, but never quite touched it. One day, after many years, he finally turned his thought towards it. But all he found, to his surprise, was a hole. He felt an odd sense of loss, as if he had suddenly been erased from the dictionary. After that, his secret became that he had lost his secret, and his story remained that the secret was too bad to tell.
2. There was a man who told him that no secret was too bad to tell, and then proceeded to tell him four or five things that could perhaps not quite be called secrets any more. And his real secret was that he liked it: all the telling of his vulnerable stories, the rush of it, showing his woundable parts to someone else like an upended snail.
3. There was a woman who comforted him one time, and she told him in reply that she had no secrets and no stories. Her secret, of course, was that this was not at all true. Once, as a child, someone had told her that good girls were smooth, seamless. That they lived lived like unblemished eggs, with no way in, beautiful and without feature. It was hard, very hard. But she built that egg, piece by piece, and sealed everything with awkward edges inside.
4. One time she was talking to a woman who replied in turn that she once found an egg inside an egg; an incredible curiosity. The story was well-honed and came out at parties a lot. Her secret was that it had never happened. She had read about it happening to someone else. She felt that her life was not very interesting. Why not add a little extra wonder, why not live some kind of magic realist life? Once, she told the story to a famous actor, and she later read an interview where he claimed the story as his own. Ever since then she had known a kind of smug kinship.
5. Here was the actor’s other story: when he was a child, he saw seven magpies in a storm, tumbling fighting through the sky across the roofs of the housing estate. And after that he always thought he must have a tremendous secret, waiting and gestating somewhere inside him. But as the years went by he realised that the real secret was that he didn’t have one. What is your secret, a fan would ask. I can’t tell you, he would say. And then he’d tell the magpie story.
6. Here is the fan’s secret. She didn’t want to go to bed with the actor, though she sensed that he might ask her, and that she might even accept. What she wanted was to be him. Under her leather jacket she had his tattoos, and sometimes she went for walks out in the flat fields, under the huge skies of her home lands, with her breasts bound. Twenty, thirty, forty miles. And when she came home she went into shops she didn’t know and imagined she was the actor, incognito.
7. Here is the secret of the shop assistant: she knew. She always knew. Somehow she was very good at knowing, when people came in, the things that they were not going to tell her. At first, she would slip these things into conversation in a smug way. By and by she came to know that most of the customers were not comforted by this, and so she stopped. But one day a man came into the shop and she could not tell his secret at all. It was as if it was missing.
1. What’s in the lorry? The point of this game is to speculate as to the contents of the nearest lorry (excluding those with visible loads). As there is no way of knowing if you are right, no points are awarded.
2. Murder mystery. Someone has committed a murder and is even now in their getaway vehicle, on the road with you! Possibly. Your job is to observe your fellow travellers (either in your vehicle or other vehicles) and deduce the guilty party and the details of the murder.
3. Red car stack. How many red cars can you see in a row? You win that number of points.
4. Traffic news bingo. For this you will need a list of your favourite congestion and accident hotspots and a radio with travel news reports.
5. Apocalypse now. The point of this game is to speculate what would happen if an apocalypse of your favoured type (zombie, massive earthquake, asteroid strike, plague etc.) were to start right at this moment. Where would you go? What would you do? How quickly would the road snarl up? Etc.
6. Make a banana. A banana is when you see a yellow car next to a brown car, or, better yet, several cars of each colour together. Alternatively, you can also score a point if you see an actual banana. Pictures of bananas on lorries count as well. Banana.
7. Roadkill or shipping container. You score a point if you correctly guess what you’re going to see on the road next: a dead animal or a shipping container. Entities already visible at the time of the guess do not count.
8. Where’s the letter Y gone? Participants endeavour to keep a letter Y outside the car visible for as long as possible, primarily by looking at numberplates.
9. Count your toes. A fun game for fans of repetition.
10. Road stories. Pick a passing car whose inhabitants and contents are visible. Where do you think they are going, and for how long? What is that dog in the car thinking about? Why the red canoe? Etc.
11. Lorry driver’s elbow. Next time you go past a lorry, note the size of the driver’s visible elbow. Will the next lorry driver elbow you see be bigger or smaller? Score a point if you are right.
12. Placename stories. Your job is to deliberately misinterpret placenames that you pass to make them into parts of a story (e.g. ‘Maida Vale’ -> 'Made of Ale’; 'Loughton Court’ -> 'Lout un-caught’ etc.). Score one point per un-forced happy ending.
4421 Trees
-4421.1 Seeds, saplings and young trees
–4421.11 Those that are unfortunately eaten by squirrels
—4421.111 Those that eventually grow from a mound of squirrel shit
–4421.12 Those that have fallen from famous and notorious trees, and as a consequence are spread around the world by seekers of curious souvenirs
–4421.13 Spindly saplings in deep shade
–4421.14 Those that grow up plastic poles on the side of new roads
–4421.15 Those that have found their own good place
-4421.2 Mature trees
–4421.21 Those that provide shade in a thunderstorm
—4421.211 Trees that a thousand teenagers have kissed beneath and carved their names on
–4421.22 Great old oak trees in the middle of cornfields
–4421.23 Those that are the joyous haunt of birds
–4421.24 Those grow at jagged angles on cliffs
-4421.3 Living trees of great antiquity
–4421.33 Merged together with treehouses of great complexity
–4421.33 Those that have fallen into the arms of younger trees
–4421.34 Those containing a startling array of snails
-4421.4 Dead trees
–4421.41 Hollow trunks with great beetle-y cavities within
–4421.42 Fallen logs
–4421.43 Carved into statues, poles or similar
–4421.44 Carved into masks
–4421.45 As planks and boards
—4421.451 Treehouses
–4421.46 As paper and cardboard
—4421.461 The paper in books about trees
—-4421.4611 The paper in books about books about trees
-4421.5 Trees only existing in story, myth or legend
–4421.51 Those that walk at night
–4421.52 Those that eat people
–4421.53 Those that steal books
—4421.531 Those that steal books to mourn their relatives buried therein
—4421.532 Those that steal books and casually read them
–4421.54 Those that have fruit of peculiar potency
-4421.6 Secret or mysterious trees
–4421.61 Those that have treasure hidden beneath
–4421.62 Those containing the hearts of ancient witches
-4421.7 Trees existing partly or wholly outside our plane of existance
–4421.71 Trees whose only human-perceptible part is the root
-4421.8 Trees not covered by the previous categories
1. There was once a small public library in Dorking which had a book that one could get lost in. Many books are said to have this property; however, this book had it to an unusual and somewhat dangerous degree. The average time lost in the book was approximately three days, after which point readers would emerge hungry, thirsty and glad that they had not left the gas on. After a number of deaths were attributed to the volume, it was thrown into a locked strongbox by a courageous librarian and dropped from a ferry into the North Sea. It is not recorded exactly which book it was, though I believe it was shelved with the large print doctor-nurse romance section.
2. In the private library of the Duke of Norfolk, for some years, there existed a set of small, yellow books entitled ‘The Trap, Volumes 1-10’. In this case, the title was entirely appropriate, since the books were engineered to violently snap shut on readers’ fingers. Their origin is unknown, but perhaps was some kind of practical joke. In any case, they no longer exist, having been added to a compost pile in 1872. One of the metal frames was preserved as a curiosity and may be viewed in the library to this day.
3. There was a book once that was banned from a bar at the request of its owner, who was tired of having the book come home mysteriously soaked in gin. It is possible that the book had help in its drinking exploits but if so then the real culprit seems to have gotten off scot-free. I believe this book still exists, but it smells a little and some of the pages are stuck together.
4. A Concise Atlas of Eastern Nevada, 1872. Possibly the world’s most pornographic atlas, owing to the unfortunate habit of its compiler, Fred Carson, of doodling various scenes of copulation in the blanker bits of maps. When challenged in court, Fred claimed that, firstly, doodling in the blank bits is an ancient map-making tradition and, secondly, he only ever drew things he had actually seen occurring at each location. These were not accepted as excuses by the court, which did its level best to eradicate all copies. However, it is believed that some issues still remain in the collections of local connoisseurs of that kind of thing.
5. Sidthorpe’s Comprehensive Encyclopaedia of Moles. Only a hundred copies of this tome were ever printed, the publishers rightly assuming that its audience would be limited. However, something peculiar must have happened during the printing process, because owners of the Comprehensive Encyclopaedia soon began complaining that the book would occasionally open by itself. Worse yet, if nobody was about a small grungy kind of goblin-thing would lean out of the book and unleash a thin stream of goblin-piss onto the nearest flat surface. All copies were pulped at the request of the book’s mortified author, one Mrs. Elizabeth Jane Sidthorpe. In later years she came to believe that the incident was punishment for pissing in a fairy ring as a small child.
1. There was a time that all the bats of the world and all the owls of the world gathered together, somewhere near Marrakesh. They brought with them a great host of white moths, who covered the trees like snowfall until the moon came up, at which point they all whirled into the sky. I am not entirely sure what the bats and owls intended to do together, but in the event they spent the night eating moths and singing mournful songs part-way out of human hearing.
2. As every time traveller knows, there is an awesome party in the late Cretaceous. Nobody is invited to this one; you have to gatecrash or not go at all. Nobody is entirely sure how it started.
3. There was a night when all the people were asleep, even those who were supposed to be working, though they had particularly vivid dreams. That night, London and New York and Tokyo lifted up their built-up skirts and crawled on hundreds of legs to central Siberia, trailing their metro systems behind them. They drank snowmelt water and whispered some of the secrets of great cities between themselves, before trying each other’s landmarks on. Later, Lhasa and Luanda crashed the party and led the cities in a game or two of ‘I have never’. Two of the cities kissed, but I am not telling you which. Many of you did go to this one, of course. You were just asleep. By morning they were back in place, although they left some curious marks across Greenland if you know where to look.
4. Once all the letters had a party and when they woke up they were totally in your favourite book. Except they were in the wrong places; in places where letters aren’t supposed to be. So they waited until the hour before dawn and then ran off across the floor, and they didn’t stop running until they reached a pile of pizza delivery leaflets, where they were able to assume a disguise as typos.
5. There was that party at Anxiety’s place. You know Anxiety? Great guy, hangs around with Insecurity a lot. Anyway, all your friends were invited! But not you. Don’t worry, nobody noticed at all. Until later on in the evening when your name came up and everyone laughed at your badly-hidden flaws.