Listing to Port

Heart’s Ease, 1596

A pair of twins, Diana and Francisca, are separated at birth when the ship they are travelling in is wrecked. Diana is found on the shore by Antonio, a servant to the Duke of Milan, and is brought up in the Ducal household. Here she attracts the eye of Lorenzo, the Duke’s heir. To flee his unwelcome attentions, she dresses as a boy and rides out to the country, where she enters the service of Silvio, a mysterious gentleman who is searching for treasure. Meanwhile, Francisca is brought up as a shepherdess by Balthazar, a humorous shepherd. Antonio heads after Diana, but is forced by a storm to lodge with Balthazar overnight. Francisca spies on Lorenzo from the hayloft and, in a famous speech, waxes lyrical on his manly beauty. The next day, Lorenzo catches up with Diana and observes her new-found devotion to Silvio. Catching her alone, Lorenzo threatens to reveal Diana’s disguise to Silvio unless she sleeps with him. Weeping, Diana flees out onto the moor where she falls into a pit. Francisca, who is out rescuing sheep that have been stranded by the storm, rescues Diana. To maintain her disguise, Diana flirts awkwardly with Francisca, but Francisca confesses that she is already in love with Silvio and cannot love another. Diana tells Francisca that she can arrange for her to marry Silvio, despite her low birth. Then she goes to Silvio and tells him that she will sleep with him, but they must be married first, and that due to her extreme modesty she must be veiled during the marriage and couple in darkness. Needless to say, Francisca is substituted during the event. Meanwhile, Silvio encounters Balthazar on the moor and is intensely irritated by the shepherd’s weak puns. When Balthazar  mentions that he found Francisca in a shipwreck, Silvio realises that Francisca may be one of the long-lost daughters of his master, the Duke of Florence, and that the treasure he seeks may be in the shipwreck. Both daughters, he says, shared a star-shaped mark on their upper arm. Diana, realising that she is Francisca’s lost twin, reveals her disguise and origins. Francisca and Lorenzo arrive and it is confirmed that Francisca also shares the mark. Silvio and Diana return to Florence to be married, whilst Balthazar delives a final humorous monologue about love.

Richard I, 1596

A heavily-fictionalised account the life of Richard I. The first act covers his conquest of Cyprus, ending with his marriage to Berengaria of Navarre. In the second and third acts a rather brief account of the Third Crusade is given, with Saladon as the main antagonist. The rest of the play covers Richard’s shipwreck at Aquileia, capture by Leopold V, ransom and eventual release. The play is mainly notable for a lengthy speech by a random soothsayer, foretelling the ascent to the throne of Elizabeth I and prophesying that she will be basically the best ruler ever.

Pastime with Good Company, 1611

Three sets of twins arrive in Venice at the start of the Carnival season. Lucio and Roderigo have entered into a drunken bet that they will dress as women; both will try to win the hearts of carnival-goers, and they will meet at the end of the day to judge who has been most successful. Meanwhile, Helena and Maria have dressed as each other in order to circumvent some rather complicated legalese related to an inheritance. Unfortunately, since they are identical twins, no-one has yet noticed. Meanwhile Claudio, who is the rightful Duke of Padua in disguise, and Lucetta, his twin sister, are fleeing the usurpation of the Dukedom by Liono. Arriving in Venice, Claudio sees Roderigo dressed as a girl and pretends to be immediately smitten, although in reality he wishes to woo her in order to keep an eye on Lucio, who he suspects of being Liono’s maidservant. Roderigo, playing along with the conceit, agrees to wed Claudio and preparations are made for a wedding banquet that evening.  Claudio orders Maria, who he believes to be a local baker, to construct an enormous cake. Helena, who has dressed as Maria dressed as a boy in the hope of attracting notice to her disguise, is approached by Lucetta, who suggests that, given her dainty resemblance to a girl, she should dress as one to mess with Claudio. Meanwhile, Maria pretends to have taken poison and dies, for no readily apparent reason. Roderigo, who is distraught at this happenstance, having fallen in love with her when they shared a brief exchange of puns earlier, attempts to fling himself from the Campanile. However, he is inexplicably saved by falling into Claudio’s enormous cake, which is passing by underneath on its way to be delivered. Meanwhile, Liono, who has also ridden to Venice, delivers a passionate speech about his decision to abandon the other Thundercats for a life of evil, whereupon Maria punches him and he falls in the canal. After a scene of heated discussion, everyone agrees that this is all so confusing they should just go for a beer, pick lots as to who marries who, and then go home.

Thy Mother, 1587

Little is known about this early comedy, which is probably for the best.

0092 Geometry of food
  -0092.1 Simple blob forms
    –0092.11 Spherical
      —0092.111 Meatballs
      —0092.111 Berries
        —-0092.1131 Edible
        —-0092.1131 Used to poison the diner
      —0092.113 Assorted spherical items of gastrowankery
        —-0092.1131 Pearls
        —-0092.1131 Ravioles
        —-0092.1131 Spherical plates which have to be broken to access the food
        —-0092.1131 Room-size sugar spheres in which the diner is imprisoned
    –0092.42 One long dimension, two short
      —0092.421 Sausages
      —0092.422 Eggs
      —0092.423 Chips
      —0092.424 Beans
    –0092.43 Two long dimensions, one short
      —0092.431 Burgers
    –0092.44 Other
      —0092.441 Deliberately contrary meat products
  -0092.2 Triangular forms
    –0092.21 Sandwiches
    –0092.22 Triangular eggs
    –0092.23 Other food shaped into triangles, for the dedicated and persistent eater of triangles
  -0092.3 Square, rectangular and cuboid forms
    –0092.31 Sandwiches (unsliced)
    –0092.32 Custard creams and similar biscuits
    –0092.33 Melons that have been grown in glass cubes
    –0092.33 Fudge, gajar halwa, flapjack and other sliced things
  -0092.4 Food of irregular shape
    –0092.41 Steak
    –0092.42 Broccoli
    –0092.42 Other
  -0092.5 Food of uncertain or amorphous shape
    –0092.51 Jelly
    –0092.52 Mists and foams
       —0092.521 Indistinguishable from actual weather
  -0092.6 Complex or architectural shapes
    –0092.61 Food sculptures
       —0092.611 Little people made of butter
       —0092.612 Little people made of sugar
          —0092.6121 Perched awkwardly on top of cakes
    –0092.62 3D printed forms
    –0092.63 Edible chairs
    –0092.63 Edible hats

1. Twattorama, 10:20 - 11:00, Channel 4. Each week, a random member of the public is chosen from the electoral rolls. The program proceeds to make the case, via a series of leading interview questions, selective editing and dubious use of statistics, that their subject is the worst person alive. Twattorama is the subject of a number of pending lawsuits, but remains inexplicably popular amongst people who are sure that they are not the worst person alive.  
2. Polar souffle, 10:00-10:50, BBC2. A group of experts in different fields are locked in a room with a random selection of equipment. They have 50 minutes to prove the existence of the Arctic before the floor drops open and they are deposited in a bath of blue gunge. Note: the floor opens whether they are successful or not; this is a scripted part of the show.
3. MetaChallenge, 9:20 - 10:00, Channel 4. Teams compete to devise a new reality show concept. Each week they face a new challenge: coming up with the idea, pitching it to TV executives, recruiting subjects for a pilot episode, etc. Viewers vote for the concept they would most like to succeed. At the end of the show, the most successful idea is commissioned.
4. The Great British TV Dinner Cookoff and Jigsaw Puzzle Challenge, ITV, 8:00 - 10:00. Participants compete on a number of Saturday night-themed activities, including: cooking a meal for a family of four to eat on the sofa; finishing a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle; getting the washing put away before bedtime; putting toddlers to bed in time to watch the program; etc. Anyone may compete. Indeed, the filming is almost entirely automated and one may choose the activities and participants one wishes to watch (there being many, many participants at one time) as well as acting as judges to rate their activities. As such, the program is something between reality TV and a really, really judgmental social network.

1. Socks that have been used as sleeping bags for adorable baby animals; particularly where one only finds out about this happenstance by plunging one’s toes into adorable baby animal shit.
2. Socks to be worn over other socks in a recursive manner, for when the weather is particularly cold and/or when one wishes to have spherical feet.
3. Socks that look like cocks, available only in larger sizes, for the less secure gentleman who really, really wishes people to be aware of what they say about people with large feet.
4. Socks which are marked out as limited-use by slogans such as 18 Today, or Happy New Year!, or suchlike, but which are nevertheless worn for general use.
5. Socks full of fabulous treasures, hung out in the mountains for dragons on the eve of the migration season. One may become amazingly rich or amazingly dead in the mountains on such nights.
6. Socks woven out of pasta. Typically capellini, although spaghetti can also be used. The frugal-minded may therefore either eat or wear them, depending on their current need. One may also wear them to futurist conventions, where I am sure they would cause a stir; or to go bathing in tomato sauce, where they would merely be moderately ridiculous.
7. Socks that will in fact annihilate in a deadly burst of energy if paired with a matching sock, and must therefore always be worn odd.

1. There is a mountain that has been entirely hollowed out by ants, but it is far enough away that no large creature has walked on it since. It is ready to crack like an egg, but maybe it never will.
2. Near the top of another mountain there is a damp meadow covered in coarse grass and a deep, clear tarn. It extends down into the rock, and the bottom is not visible because it is too dark down there, not because of any murkiness in the water. Somewhere far down and shimmering through the tiny ripples raised by the mountain winds one can see a sheep skeleton when the light is good.
3. There is a peak over which the clouds make faces and the sky is a staticy mess of visions. Although it is not high, one can never quite trust one’s senses up there. The world below looks rather flat, as if it were missing a dimension in the haze.
4. There is a pass where one can see down into a steep, stony valley that does not lead anywhere in particular. It would be folly to go down there, really; the way back up is steep and icy and there are sharp stones in the scree. But if you look at the far end it always seems that you can see someone running down there. Running and running, back towards the valley’s entrance, but never moving any closer, as if they were somehow disjoint from the physical world.
5. There is a high lonely moor and, in those months of the year when it is not covered in ice, one can see grassy lumps rising out if the boggy earth. If you were to look closer, you would see that they are old buildings; and that there are many of them, and some are the rotten stumps of great towers. But there is no record of any city having been there.
6. There is a black peak, but sometimes at dusk the birds rise off it and you can see that it is actually silver.  
7. Another mountain lies in a hot part of the world and there are seven lakes around its summit which are the most perfect turquoise. At the height of summer, great lilies grow on the lakes and the air is alive with tiny green butterflies. From a distance, however, all one can see on the mountain’s slopes is a forest of dead trees bleached white by the sun. It is not known what killed the trees and, as a consequence, the lakes are rarely visited.  
8. There is a mountain that extends up into the sky beyond the normal limits of the atmosphere to sustain life; I am not sure if it is on this or another planet. There were five explorers who climbed it and saw some kind of vision near the peak. I do not know what kind of vision. They discarded their life support equipment and formed their bodies into a kind of structure, where they promptly froze to death. Although other explorers have since ventured up there, it is unwise to go near the structure, which now consists of some thirty bodies: the original five, and a further twenty-five who got too close.  Observations from a distance suggest it is starting to look like some kind of temple.

1. The smell of rain on warm stone.
2. Dappled sunlight.
3. The brief buzz of a bee going past.
4. That one can be too warm.
5. The rustle of wind through new leaves.
6. The sudden burst of smell as one passes a sun-warmed herb bush.
7. Drifts of cherry blossom blowing across car parks.
8. Distant constellations of birdsong in the hour before dawn.

1. There was once an assassin, although she didn’t think of herself that way. Really, she was just doing what she had to do. The war, when it came, was someone else’s fault entirely and would have happened sooner or later in any case. Better to pull the thorn and start it now, rather than hanging around basking in the growing bad-feeling. Not only that, but it was more or less an accident that anyone died anyway. To be sure, she was there with the gun and the grenades. She had phoned in the bomb threat that left the cavalcade stuck on the old road. But she had more or less decided not to do it when an acorn fell on her head. Everything happens for a reason, you know. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. The acorn, unregarded, fell into a patch of soft earth.

2. They say that the lifespan of an oak tree is three hundred years growing, three hundred years living and three hundred years dying. The acorn’s questing shoots had no idea of this saying, or that it was not normally true. The earth went round the sun once, then once again. The war was still far off. It became a sapling, then a mature tree. The woodland flourished for four hundred years, basking in steamy, sap-smelling summers and sitting through mild, damp winters. Someone seeded the ground with landmines then, a hundred years later, robots came to dig them up. The tree survived. Beetles ate out its heart, but it remained standing. A small town grew up in the greenwood beside it. Two hundred years later, twenty thousand refugees came to stay, and the town stretched out its limbs into the woody valleys around and became a city. Nine hundred years later, the husk of the old oak, surrounded by black tulips, lay at the centre of a genteel square.

3. At the death of the old year (which was in those days in the yellow height of summer), a parade of swimmers hung black ribbons on the oak as they processed down through the steep streets to the lake. Perhaps this year there were more ribbons than usual; it was a very hot summer. In any case, the last remaining branch of the oak snapped free and fell down over the road. A group of teenage girls came down from the silent houses on the square and stripped it of bark, which they used to make masks.

4. The masks hung in the silent houses for a hundred years more. A kind and gentle age came over the land.  People ventured out across the borders again. One could walk in the mountains without having to watch for drones. There were people digging in the black moorlands of the old cities, and finding old technologies, and bringing their secrets back to life. The silent houses found themselves full of families who could not help but laugh from time to time.

5. There were five children who grew up on the square, and they were all writers. It was a good time for writers, because now the war was over there was finally time to twist its stories into something beautiful or strange enough to hang an audience’s attention on. They thought that they would travel to the mountains and live on ice water and berries and dried meat, and that each of them would write a play, and they would come back to the city on a glorious wave of Art and be some kind of famous Set or other. And perhaps when they were setting out their minds were wandering further, oh further! on to the days when they would attend academic seminars about their journey, but in thrilling disguise.

6. In any case, it did not go quite as they expected. They made it to a remote valley, where they were only moderately hungry.  On the third day they caught a wild pig, which they drained of blood in the hope of making black pudding. Someone brought out a bottle of a thin green herbal spirit. They wore the masks and made a forest out of twigs set in the earth to act out a scene someone else had written that morning. There were refugees, and a bear. Two hours later, the fifth of the travellers went for a scenic piss on a cliff edge and did not come back. In a panic, the others scrambled down the cliff half-way to where they could see a pale shape in the darkness below; then they fell too. A warm rainstorm washed out the river valley two days later, leaving no trace. In time, the empty campsite was found, with its masks and blood and bundles of twigs, and formed an enduring mystery that captured the attention of the age. Someone even wrote a play about it.

7. A bottle and some bones and a packet of verses were swept with the floods down into the caves below the mountains, where they meandered through various ghastly sumps and narrow caverns. Eventually, they made it to the sea, washed up into the open door of an old lighthouse. Someone must have been living there then, although I am not sure how. They took the drifting objects and put them three floors up, near the lamp. In those days the lighthouse ran on energy from the decay of radioactive isotopes, because the land around it was not deemed habitable. But this was a generous age, and for a further hundred years the light gradually wound down, and travellers came to live again in the old villages by the sea.  

8. At some point they found the verses, but they could not read them. These travellers had a story, which was that they were the first brave pioneers to come back to this area after the dark age; and so they believed that they had found some great long-lost relic. They made a wooden town and painted it in many colours, and it had a blue tower that one could see for three miles along the coast. Here they kept their relics. In time it, too became a city, and the blue tower sat incongruously in its busy docklands. Scholars came from all around to look at the lost verses. But they threw away the bottle, believing it to be litter.

1. There was a letter d, and it was entirely bored of being the final letter in the word ‘and’ in a rather miscellaneous sentence. So one day it swivelled its serifs by ninety degrees and tunnelled out of the book. The hard covers caused it some problems, but finally it was able to slip out from under them and drop silently to the floor of the library. Letters move slowly, and it was two hundred years since it had started to burrow. That is why more letters do not escape. Two days later, a maid left the window open to air out the room and the letter d was blown into the garden, where it stuck to some clover and later mated with a bee. I mention this story merely because, should you encounter an unusual bee or two in Shropshire, it may explain matters.
2. The letter y at the end of Aleister Crowley’s name had become entirely suffused with wickedness during his lifetime, wickedness being the sort of thing that sloshes through a name and gathers in great gloopy puddles at the far end. After his death, it devoured the other letters and became enormously fat. Indeed it was hardly recognisable as a letter y and no font would accept it. Instead, it started its own font which consisted entirely of the letter y; having charmed a number of upper-case Y’s who it persuaded to join. If you should find a book set in this font, I recommend closing it and stepping away carefully.
3. There is a place in a distant galaxy, right in its star-dense heart, where one can look up and see a perfect letter Q written in stars across the sky. It is what is known as an asterism, or stars that are unrelated save that they happen to line up. And no being who has anything like a concept of the letter Q has ever lived in that galaxy. Nevertheless, it is there.  
4. There is a kind of a viral bug that can be passed between different instances of the letter e. It gives affected letters the raging shits which, since letter turds are often mistaken for full stops, is not always noticeable to the careless reader. One may discern an affected sentence, paragraph or book by its apparent overuse of ellipsis.
5. In particularly severe infestations, the letters may crap on the line below like gastroenteritical birds on a wire, leaving smears down the page. These types of outbreak may be identified by their apparent overuse of exclamation marks.
6. There was a king whose ambition was to be a letter, and he thought maybe it would be a letter x. In later years he slept in a hollow in a huge book, which three servants would close over him at dusk. As a result, when the revolution came, he was quite hidden. A rather more equitable form of government was installed and the king’s book ended up in the national library, where the ex-monarch survived on bookworm corpses and by inserting a surreptitious straw from his book’s breathing holes into the discarded coffee cups of the adventurous browsers who came that deep. For some reason, nobody ever opened the book.  
7. There was a letter q that was known for its bad temper. No other letter would come near it. It often found itself confined to the margins of books, scowling and grumbling at stray punctuation marks. One day a book burned down and, unaccountably, the letter u grabbed the letter q between its uprights and hauled it to safety. After that day, that letter q was a much more trusting beast and could often be persuaded to curl up and sleep next to other letters, whereupon it was often mistaken for a letter o. Whilst I would like this to be the reason that q is often found next to u, it is not. In fact, that particular letter q was always rather shy about approaching any letter u thereafter.
8. There was a letter g that swallowed its own tail by mistake, leading to a hole in the page that led nowhere in particular. This was a godsend to the local research institute, which was chock-full of experts in nowhere in particular. They sent a number of tiny probes into the hole and wrote sixteen research papers which were all published in prestigious journals. Later, the tiny probes wrote their own paper but, since none of them had a research track record, they had trouble getting it accepted.  
9. There is a font which is entirely unexceptional, except that the letter o is represented by the rings of the planet Saturn, available only at actual size. As a result, only one letter o is settable in this font at any one time, and even this is rather impractical to use. In consequence, most users omit the letter o from their correspondence.

6750 The common cold
 -6750.1 General
    –6750.11 Phlegmy sort
        –6750.112 Productive of bright green phlegm
        –6750.113 Productive of bright orange phlegm
        –6750.113 Productive of clouds of dandelion fluff
    –6750.14 More of a cough, really
        –6750.141 The sort that keeps one up at night
        –6750.112 Sounds like a bark
    –6750.15 Mainly of the lost voice sort
        –6750.151 Striking just before one has to sing
    –6750.16 Gentle little cold that wanders around the back of throat and glands without ever really doing much
 -6750.2 Obtained via miscellaneous and/or unknown means
    –6750.21 Obtained while on mission from MI5
 -6750.3 Obtained via contact with children
    –6750.31 Via nursery
         –6750.311 First cold in a row acquired from nursery
         –6750.312 Second or more cold in a row acquired from nursery
 -6750.4 Obtained via recreational activity
    –6750.41 Recreational activity that was definitely worth it
    –6750.42 Recreational activity that wasn’t
 -6750.5 Obtained via mode of transport
    –6750.51 On an aeroplane
        –6750.511 At the start of a holiday that would be really great without a cold
        –6750.512 By the return journey, able to share cold with a whole new group of people
    –6750.59 First documented case of donkey-human transmission
 -6750.8 The uncommon cold
    –6750.81 Productive of rainbow glitter phlegm
    –6750.82 Sneezing up tiny unicorns
    –6750.83 Sinuses colonised by tiny kittens
    –6750.84 World’s best viral party going on in eustachian tubes, invitation extended to local bacteria, entrance queue goes all the way down throat and back

Ptork P. Snang, Penelope Sudo-Nimming, Lady Esperanza Buttocks, Sir Themistocles Zammit, Blackbird Beasley, Cornelius Q. Face the Third, Professor Flora Maria Pausewang, Robert Robert Robert, John Twice-Toast Smith, Ellifer Pingnose, Helen Wellington Kenno-Lost, Spamanda Andara, Jay the Pickle Caperque, Lara Fellowes-Driftwood, Timebob Snorres, Alice Quack.

[NB. Two of these are actual real notable people who have stuff named after them]