Listing to Port

1. This river flowed from the mountains to the sea sometime during the Cretaceous; I am not sure which sea and which mountains, for things were different then. It was a major thoroughfare for the little dinosaurs who lived in and around it. There are those who say that the histories of the dinosaurs are out there waiting to be discovered; fossil footmarks in sand noting which dinosaur sold what to which other dinosaur, who pissed against which tree, and so forth. If so, and if only we could read them, the river would feature prominently. But I think that they do not exist, and there was no-one else there to remember it,

2. There was an old kingdom, and the ruling family had acquired many enemies. Fortunately, they had a large dungeon, and the large dungeon was full of their many enemies. One day, the river that fed the castle moat rose up beyond its accustomed high water point and swept away a chunk of the dungeon wall; whereupon the enemies took it upon themselves to float off into the torrent on rafts improvised from the broken remains of torture equipment. The ruling family, having no other target for its ire, settled on the river. It was subjected to a kind of Damnatio Memoriae. An army of scholars spent months excising references to it from the royal libraries, and an army of serfs worked to divert its sources. Eventually there was a famine and an uprising led by the escaped enemies, and the people sat around bonfires fed with the censored books, and everyone had more important things on their mind than rivers. And so it was that the enforced forgetting, surprisingly, stuck.

3. There was a little stream that wound around a housing estate, between a boggy stretch of hillside and a boating lake. It was the sort of feature that people know about but don’t think to record. Nobody came to map it, and nobody had a name for it. It was not very interesting, except to the frogs. Eventually, they came to expand the housing estate. Someone put in an anonymous pipe to carry the water, and it was paved over. The frogs moved out (the ones who migrated up the hillside were notably more successful than those who headed into town). The stream was forgotten.

4. There were three hundred little rivers in the delta. For a while there was a city there, a kind of proto-Venice in which the delta’s rivers became streets, and little assignations and petty infamies were committed in this river as in the others, and the city’s ruins sank into the mud here as elsewhere when its short time was over. For a while stories were told of these streets even as they rotted away. But one of the other river-streets had had a mysterious floating body whose clothes were those of a man from the far North; and another had a barge full of monkeys which was the result of an unwise bet by the bezoar-seller; and in another the queen of the city dropped a famous pearl and promised the ownership of a cursed tower to whoever might retrieve it. So it was the other rivers that were remembered and that went into the scanty histories of the time, even as the silt of the delta shifted and the river itself went away.

5. It was a slow and stagnant river, and had the most amazing fauna; such suckers, so many legs, so many body segments! Everyone who passed the river took a good long look at it and decided that, on balance, they would prefer not to remember it.

Thnorbs, teleporter kidney, style tuberculosis, space breath, brain flinders, clone-donor mismatch, London virus, Jebediah’s buttock, miniraptor bite, shrinking word syndrome, virtual herpes, mimetic fixation, VR rattle syndrome, cybersex knee, juve boils, the jurragees, duplicate spleen.

1. A more philosophically acceptable labyrinth. The premise of the more formal sort of labyrinth is that there is only one true path; for all our fondness of labyrinths, we do not agree with this. Instead we consider that there are as many true paths as people. Our labyrinth reflects this: there are no walls and no paths except those made by previous visitors, which you are under no obligation to replicate. Nevertheless, you are certainly at leisure to find a twisty, winding and difficult way through the labyrinth if you think it would make you feel better.

2. A maze of books. More accurately, this is a giant room filled with old books stacked from floor to ceiling, with initially only a small book-free alcove available at the entrance. Progressing to the other side requires the maze entrant to move the books around to create an increasingly narrow path, particularly if they also wish to leave some indication of the way back to the start. From time to time, functionaries appear with piles of new books to be added to the stacks. Crossing the book maze is thus a time-limited exercise, with tardy travellers soon completely buried. It is therefore vitally important not to start reading whilst in the book maze; in fact, illiteracy is a distinct advantage. It is unsure what lies on the other side of the maze in any case, and if it is desirable or not. Some suspicious observers point to the influx of new books bound in curiously soft leather which often occurs after a successful maze crossing.

3. A maze in time, rather than space. Now that we think of it, we are all doing this already. It may be that that when you found that silent, magical lake in the mist (do you remember the silent, magical lake?) you were passing through the central chamber.

4. A virtual maze. We have a computational model of the nearest city; a very, very accurate one. Into it we out our requirements for a maze: one entrance, one central chamber, one exit, a suitable amount of twists and turns and some peril. We receive a selection of entrance points and rules. For example, our city may be transformed into an adequate maze by the rule that the player take no road containing the letter ’d’. Or perhaps that they pass no building higher than two stories. We envisage many of these mazes operating at one time, with a host of players whose paths cross and recross (though their different rules mean that they can never travel together).

5. This is a formal hedge maze, except that as used according to the usual rules of hedge mazes there is no solution. There is not even nearly a solution; it is a set of closed loops. You can only get into the further parts of the maze by pushing through the hedge atone of its many sparse points. Of course, if users were to ask how this maze works, we would happily tell them this. Later on, for variety, we include a mirror section (which can only be solved by climbing over the wall) and a grotto or two (which are there merely for amusements’ sake, although we did once catch a patron trying to tunnel their way out of the grotto with a spoon).

1. There was once a fishwife’s daughter who ran away to sea to lean metalsmithing (why it needed to be at sea is anyone’s guess). In her seafaring days, she sailed over at least three of the lost enchanted oceans and made a number of magical swords to use in exploring the sort of shipwrecks one finds there. On her forty-fifth birthday she was forced to return to land by the sudden eruption of a salt allergy. She determined to enter the third magical sword (which was the least rusty of the bunch) into the royal sword contest. But, on arriving at the contest, she found that entrants were required by law to be members of the King’s Brotherhood of Swordsmiths; an organisation which she was ineligible for election to in several ways. In a fit of temper, she threw the third sword into a thicket and stomped off home to start a carpentry business (which, alas, she was terrible at).

2. There was a youngest son who was just passing by on his way to find his fortune. Since he was still rather lacking in fortune he had been thrown out of the stables at the back of the nearest inn and ended up spending the night in a very uncomfortable thicket. In the morning, he found that many of his troubles had been caused by lying on the flat of a rather unusual-looking sword. He took up the weapon and was fortunate enough to blunder into a pack of dragons on a working brunch. Arriving at the city with seven dragon tails and a red and buzzing sword, he was soon adopted as the King’s champion. He spent a number of fruitful years amassing lost hoards, making babies, and trying to persuade the sword not to eat his friends (it had, alas, got a taste for blood after all those dragons). Stories of his fame spread far and wide.  

3. There was a thin blue dragon who had survived the massacre; he did so by hiding in a tree. In fact, he was so terrified that he stayed in the tree for fifteen years, living on squirrels and sunlight and rain and occasionally drenching the rabbit warren below with lukewarm dragon piss. After fifteen years, the tree had grown round the dragon and he could no longer leave. He found this somewhat bothersome, as did the rabbits. Now, blue dragons can sometimes worm their way between worlds, if given enough time to find the weak spots in the space-time continuum; and this dragon set to chipping out a window into a world that did not have a tree in that place. If took him another fifteen years, but finally the window was large enough for him to slither through. However, by this time the rabbits had banded together and found a champion of their own, who had set up camp on a tree branch and had been nibbling at the dragon’s neck scales for a few weeks. On the evening the dragon was due to wriggle free, the rabbit champion at last prised a scale loose and put a sharpened stick thorough the dragon’s jugular.

4. There was a teenage girl who lived nearby, and who was shunned by many of the villagers for her mildly eccentric views. One day, whilst out walking, she found a tree that was surrounded by the most amazing blue flowers. And then to look up, and see the tree crowned with fantastical bones! There was nothing to do but climb it. And if she came down from the tree into a different world from the one she went up from, well: there was nothing very much to miss in the first world anyway. And how well it had equipped her to live in the second world! For all their myriad fantastical quantities, the inhabitants of the second world were a little silly, and curiously easily won over with a small amount of basic science and occasional acts of compassion. Soon she found herself saving the king of the second world, who was in disguise following a republican coup led by some cranky goblins.

5. The goblins were most put out to realise that the king was not dead after all, and did not put up much of a fight. When it became clear that the forces of light were about to triumph, they called together all their elven servants and set them free with directions for the safest way to leave the kingdom and individual bags of golden fixtures and fittings from the palace bathrooms. Furthermore, they requested, if the elves could see their way to calling in on some of the republican movement’s chief donors and asking them for some aid, it would be very much appreciated. As it ended up, only one of the elves got that far, and the donor was of very little help; but, being schooled in magic, she was able to suggest a location a few worlds away where a hero or two might be found to stir things up in the kingdom a little.

6. The elf came finally to the house of a young boy who had been living a rather dull life with unremarkable parents. Since elves are terrible navigators, he did not realise that he was at the wrong address and informed the boy that he was the Chosen One who was needed to save a distant and magical land. Fortunately, the directions he gave the boy were typically terrible and the boy ended up in the wrong distant and magical land. Although this land also needed saving, the task of saving it could be done by just about anyone; in fact, it was more like a road trip than an adventure. So the boy did as well as any other child might have done, and he was certainly very good at believing he was Chosen. As a reward, he was given three castles in the fairy hinterlands and a host of humorous magical servants.

7. Later on, the elf (who had decided he liked the mortal world and was reluctant to go home) was arrested for driving the wrong way down the M1 and developed an alarming beard whilst in police custody. After a series of increasingly frustrating interviews, he was charged with storytelling and sentenced to shut up.

A library of trees, planted in alphabetical order of their commonly-used name in long ranks across the field: apple, birch, cherry and so forth. We vary the spacing of the ranks based on the height of the trees and how much light the next trees along require. It is an oddly sterile place, but good for holding garden parties. On our deaths, we have decreed that the field return to nature, in the hope that one day it will become a chaotic forest with a tantalizing hint of the alphabet about it.

A library of cats. We have derived a complex classification scheme for them that we are very proud of, starting with genetic charts and using age, size and whisker length as subclassifications. But the cats will not stay in their assigned spaces. Some scratch at our carefully constructed section dividers. None of them will submit to whisker measurement.  We even find them in the morning with their collars off, nonchalantly grooming themselves on the front desk and shedding hair into the index system. We spend all our time finding the cats and refiling them. Somehow we do not mind this; there is even talk of finding more librarians.

A library of the dead. Some might argue that this is the function of a cemetery. But we disagree; one cannot legally make withdrawals from a cemetery. Our library of the dead, on the other hand, positively encourages short-term borrowing. Our stock (though we are still working on fully stocking the building; perhaps our initial facility was overambitious) is sorted by preferred method of decomposition (in soil; in air; mummified; saponified; in formaldehyde). All stock items have agreed prior to their death that they would like their mortal remains to revisit the world from time to time. Borrowers may, however, wish to inform the police beforehand so as not end up in a situation they find difficult to explain.

A library of lost things. This requires certain preparations. We have been raiding lost property offices and prowling down trains at the end of the line, black sacks at the ready. We buy up mounds of stranded suitcases from space-strapped airports. We follow the forgetful around, making distracting noises and snatching what they drop. Our collection of socks is particularly fine. We have all the usual exhibits: umbrellas, crutches, hats, prosthetic legs, notebooks, toddlers, packets of cheese, antibiotics, carnevale masks. Our library is open only to those who have lost things of their own. We collect the stories of the applicants’ losses and match them up with the lost item we have that we think will do them the most good (though it does not necessarily echo the original loss; we have lined up those who have lost loved ones with maps left on buses, for example).

0089 Stones
 -0089.1 Extremely large
    –0089.12 Planets that are rocks
    –0089.15 Asteroids
 -0089.2 Around the size of a librarian
    –0089.21 Statues
       —0089.211 Extremely serious statues
       —0089.212 Statues having one or more legs in the air
       —0089.215 Angels
       —0089.216 Ancient statues so enclosed in guano that they have been mistaken for mounds
    –0089.22 Funerary monuments
       —0089.222 Resembling a tooth or claw
       —0089.225 Rigged by enterprising funeral directors so as to topple when the liklihood of causing another funeral is highest
 -0089.3 The size of a fist or slightly larger
    –0089.31 Stone apples, stone pears and other fruit of petrified trees
    –0089.33 Stones found in cairns
    –0089.34 Can be used to stun a burglar
       —0089.343 Have been used to stun a burglar
 -0089.3 Pebbles
    –0089.33 Pebbles balanced in towers
    –0089.34 Pebbles having words on, the words together making up a story now long lost to entropy
    –0089.39 Forgotten pebbles of myth and legend
       —0089.383 The pebble needle of Dogger Bank
       —0089.387 The seven stone hearts of the deathless dogs
       —0089.398 The stone giant’s lost clitoris
 -0089.4 Gravel and scree
    –0089.41 Stones found in the shoe
       —0089.414 Stones which, once removed from the shoe, find their way back in again
       —0089.415 Stones which are part of the shoe and should not be removed
 -0089.5 Resembling dust
    –0089.55 Space dust
 -0089.6 Stones of which the size is unknown
 -0089.7 Stones of which the size is unknowable

A Midnight Lunch of Antarctic Light for Hope In the Cold Winter Months
~Starter~
The murky light of eternal dusk that follows the last sunset of the Antarctic Winter, seen though a gathering snowstorm. To be served with the smell of fresh metal and lubricant, and the long slow creaking of things settling into ice.
~Main~
A selection of dim electric lights against the dark; reflected screen-light with the brightness turned down; flickering fluorescent tubes; CFL-light in the first few moments of warming up. To be served with the smell of hot dust and a low buzzing. Drinkers may request an ice core segment to suck on.
~Dessert~
The first silver, red or gold of the sun creeping over the horizon after the Antarctic Winter.  To be served with ice-cold, fishy air from the penguin colonies at Halley, and silence.

A Light Lunch for Those Who Have Made It
~Starter~
A selection of finely synchronised paparazzi camera-flashes, served with the sound of torrential rain and the smell of charred grass.
~Main~
Brittle beauty with a harshness behind it; an expertly blended mix of warm red-toned footlights taken from a gentle play starring a well-known comedian and searchlights seen through barbed wire. To be served with the smell of unusually greasy greasepaint and an uneasy silence.
~Dessert~
Midday Los Angeles sunlight, filtered through exhaust-laden air and a pair of closed red curtains. To be served with the smell of spilled gin and bleach, snoring, and the sound of a distant hoover.

A Light Feast
~Starters~
Rose-gold dawn light captured from the flank of K2 after a night spent unexpectedly at altitude. To be served with the song of larks and a blast of icy air that freezes the nostril hairs.
To be followed by:
Two minutes of the dull brownish light that precedes an enormous hailstorm. To be served with the sound of a dripping tap.
~To cleanse the palate~
Five minutes of dappled sunlight from the floor of a Norwegian pine forest. To be served with the smell of warm pine needles, peppercorns and green mango, and the gentle soughing of a light wind through thousands of trees.
~Main~
The syrupy light of an American afternoon over a huge cornfield. To be served with the smell of bruised cherries and warm leather, and the sound of drowsy bees.
~To cleanse the palate~
Five minutes of moonlight, filtered through the air of a cold, clear winter’s night; to be served with the smell of oncoming snow showers.
~Dessert~
Fifteen minutes of neon light, freshly harvested from the streets of Tokyo after dark. To be served with the smell of sugar doughnuts.

Bedlington’s Bed Bedding Day, first overcast Saturday in spring
We celebrate Bedlington’s Bed Bedding Day by spending an extra ten minutes in bed, during which time we give thanks for pillows, duvets and all the other soft enablers of lovely, lovely sleep.

Owl Day, no set date
The only certain thing about Owl Day is that it happens once a year for each person; but the day it happens for each person may be different. Nor is there any set celebration. One simply wakes up and realises that it is Owl Day. The rest of the day is slightly enlivened by the knowledge that this is a special day, though it may not be different in substance to any other day. The link to owls is not known but is thought by some to be a reference to Athena.

Permission Day, June 5
Celebrants of this festival treat the 5th of June as if they had been given a set of permission slips from the Universe for the following activities: dressing up when there is no need, dancing like an idiot when someone might see, singing along to the radio, scratching their arses in public, and audibly farting.

Book smell day, August 2
On this day, participants attempt to get a good sniff of the oldest, whiffiest, crumbliest old book that they can. If your nostrils are not actually grey with old book dust, you have not celebrated book smell day properly. Likewise, if there is not an impending lawsuit on your head for breaking and entering and archivist bootmarks on your rear end, you have not really been trying. Some consider the ultimate achievement to be actually grinding down priceless manuscripts and snorting them in their entirety. Needless to say, book smell day has fallen out of favour with librarians and health professionals.

The Feast of the Teacup, November 16 (if rainy) or the first rainy day thereafter
This feast is usually celebrated by offering someone a cup of tea. At a pinch, you may offer yourself a cup of tea. If you do not like tea, you do not have to accept it. You do not even have to have tea in the house, really. The offering is the important part. Some celebrants consider the ritual instead to be the offering of the letter T, which is then drawn on some accessible part of the body. Once the letter T has been offered, the offerer should refrain from using it for the remainder of the day.

Contrariwise day, March 12
In recognition of all futile and ill-thought through acts of rebellion, we celebrate contrariwise day by turning all the toilet rolls we encounter to dispense in the other direction.

1. Horse Well, New Mexico. Always good to begin a trip out in the wild a little. Do look after that horse, by the way. I’m rather fond of her. When you’re done sightseeing (I hear there are some interesting caves neaby?), get on I-25 N in San Miguel County from NM-137 N, US-285 N and US-84 W. Continue to Lockwood, then take exit 452 from I-90 W. You did feed the horse, didn’t you? I forgot to say - this is a trip of just over three days by car if you don’t stop, so it may be a while on horseback. Get onto I-15 N/US-89 N in Cascade County from MT-3 N, US-191 N and US-87 N and carry on until MT-44 W/Valier Hwy in Pondera County. Take exit 348 from I-15 N. Carry on along MT-44 to US-2 W, in…

2. Hungry Horse, Montana. Very scenic around here, isn’t it? Also, you should be able to get some food for that horse. Now take US-2, State Hwy 464 and AB-2 N to AB-20 N in Red Deer County, Canada, continuing to AB-22. There take AB-43 N and Alaska Ave until you reach…

3. Whitehorse, Yukon. Taken a turn for the chilly, I think you’ll find. You do know that horse wasn’t that colour when you got it, right? That’s snow. I don’t think the horse likes it. You should maybe brush it off. When you’re ready to go, get back on Alaska Hwy/YT-2 N/Yukon 1 W, taking AK-2 W to AK-11 N/N Slope Haul Rd in Livengood, United States. Follow AK-11 N/N Slope Haul Rd until you run out of land, at which point you will be in:

4. Deadhorse, Alaska. What did I tell you about looking after that horse? I hope you have some alternative method of getting home.

1. You join what you think is a queue, but it is in fact a group of people standing around somewhere behind the real queue. Or a second variant; a queue forms with two forks on either side of some barrier, and it is decided that the other fork is the ‘real’ one.

2.. The public toilet that someone leaves an unflushed turd in, which nobody else will flush for fear that there is something wrong with the toilet. Now it is out of use until some form of officialdom steps in.

3. The box of live and dead batteries; when you need one, you go to the box and try batteries in turn until you find a live one, and then put all the dead ones back in case there should be some need for them in the future.

4. It is painful or difficult to get up; but, not wanting to be judged for this, you think up other excuses as to why you shouldn’t. No intervention will work, and there is nothing you want to do that doesn’t involve sitting.