Listing to Port

1. When the night has a thousand eyes but it still refuses to help you find your keys even though it can almost certainly see them somewhere.
2. When you fall into the trench from which trenchcoats are mined and although your fall is somewhat cushioned it’s been a bumper year at the trenchcoat refinery so it’s going to take you a while to climb out again and meanwhile someone is doing crime somewhere.  
3. When there has been an unfortunate mix-up between dames (female) and dames (pantomime) and as a result some slapstick comedy memes have started following you around with a tuba and it’s become nearly impossible to sneak a moody smoke on a street corner.
4. When you are trying to escape a sketchy, shady past, which is a problem because past you has a time machine and keeps on pinning up sketches and occasionally erecting sunshades around your dive bar habitat.
5. When you attempt to make the streets of this dirty old town less mean by stripping them of all meaning, leaving residents of the town confused as to why there are senselessly flat paved areas all over the place.

1. If you reach under your bathroom door, you may be able to extract a small brass handle recessed into its lower side. Closing the bathroom door and pulling the handle should enable you to open the door upwards instead of sideways, revealing a long dark chute leading down into the depths of the earth. This is the Sundries Disposal, a feature installed in most houses built after 1975 by order of the Global Mystical Court. Should mystical forces need, for whatever reason, to take over your house, the chute is intended to help them dispose of any of your fixtures and fittings that do not fit their taste or decorating requirements. We do not recommend venturing down the chute as it is our understanding that the goblins at the lower end did not agree to have avocado bathroom suites dropping on their heads at regular intervals and are somewhat irate about the matter.  
2. If you can get into the right dream, you should be able to find that door in your hallway; that is, the one that leads to the top floor of your house, the floor that is only there in dreams. The contents of this floor may vary, but do try to get in when the library is in residence. It has a fine collection of books that their authors only ever dreamed about. Sometimes that door leads to a lift instead. Do not, whatever the temptation, take the lift downwards below the bottom floor of your house.  
3. If you lever the skirting boards of your house away, you may sometimes be able to discover doors used by the little people. Whether these are readily discernible or not depends on just how little the little people in your house are, as well as how fast they are at removing doors. In some cases, doors used by the little people may also have been repurposed by use for the very little people. If you open a little people door to find a host of smaller doors behind it, it is likely that your house has very little people. Be sure to leave gin out for them in the summer, when they are in danger of evaporating.
4. Many sofas these days have vents into an alternative universe located at the far end of the crevice down the back of the seats. This is a hygienic measure, designed to save your living room from the unpleasant odours that can arise from crevice crumbs. If you take apart your sofa, you may be able to widen these vents into a passable orifice. This is one reason that sofa disassembly and recycling is usually recommended to be done by a qualified technician. The alternative universe is, however, rather nice at the time of year if you do not mind getting covered in crumbs.
5. If you remove all the doors in your house and put them in a big pile with some sexy music playing you can sometimes get them to mate. Be sure to provide any pregnant doors with a warm, safe and dark environment. Once they have whelped, the baby doors will distribute themselves around your house. Baby doors usually lead to cupboards, but you may often find one or two upstarts which open onto secret passages instead.
6. Is there a door in your house that you and all the other inhabitants and visitors have been ignoring? You know, because it leads into hell or has been enchanted by an evil fairy or is behind that elephant in your living room or something? Think really hard about this. Ignoringness is the sixteenth superpower and is tremendously hard to beat. However, if you can defeat it then you too can bask in the knowledge of the horrors lurking within the heart of your home. In fact, if you have an elephant in your living room it may well be standing there precisely so as to hide the door. Elephants do this a lot. It is part of their wider service to a world they love.

Fridge rescue, dildo hiders incorporated, the emergency kitten delivery brigade, the nee naw apparition service for the edification and delight of small toddlers, the internet extraction service, the emergency chocolate hamster brigade, the department of politically-expedient exaggeration in order to create emergencies in order to push through policy that people do not have to think about too much, the remote control location services, those providing airlift facilities for people who are standing on one leg because one boot has been sucked off by the mud, preventative services based around the concept of subliminally promoting the idea of having a nice cup of tea and a sit down before one does anything too rash, those erecting sheltered places to take an al fresco pee along distant walking routes, those releasing butterflies that have become caught in nets designed to protect cabbages, those providing last-minute cosmetic services for unexpectedly well-nibbled cabbages.

1. If you think you are having a bad day, spare a thought for the howling void which has been trying to escape from under London for more than a thousand years. No sooner does it chip a hole in the city’s fragile surface then a group of contractors with strict instructions not to look into any potholes comes along and fills up the hole with concrete. The fight against the emergence of the void is carried out by a secret division of the Home Office, often under the guise of emergency sewer works.
2. The European Society for the Kind Treatment of Voids tells the story of a void which was left tied up outside in a thunderstorm by a careless collector of holes and hollows. Its subsequent howls were heard by the entire street, which ever thereafter had a feeling of dull-eyed terror about it. The void could only be persuaded to stop howling by bringing an abyss outside for it to stare into. Subsequently, the abyss and the void eloped to Las Vegas, where they were married by Elvis Presley, who was exclusively raised from the dead for the duration of the horrifying yet delightful ceremony.
3. Howling ‘Howling Void’ Void, a howling void which controversially reached number 94 on the US pop charts in 1974 with the song 'Howling Void’, a dark wail of agony and nihilism compared by some to the sound of a void that is howling.
4. An interesting legal situation arose in India in 1902 in which a contract between a Mr. M. Singh and a Mr. R. R. Pant was accidentally declared null and howling void rather than simply null and void. This error created an area of contract law so suffused with existential terror that for over thirty years lawyers were only permitted to study it after a period of rigorous meditation on all that is good in the world.
5. More prosaically, a small void that had come up to Earth to experience the magic of Christmas carelessly stubbed its toe on the Sydney Opera House, letting out a howl that drove all the fish from Sydney harbour for a period of approximately three weeks. The displaced fish subsequently wrote a book about their experiences, but were never able to successfully publish it due to the language barrier and the unfortunate tendency of books to dissolve into mush on extended contact with seawater.

1. The minotaur was sick again today. Could there be a more miserable sight? Crouched on the deck, heaving its guts up. Truly it was never meant to be at sea. But these are the things we are driven to, in order that we might have a future. Of course, the minotaur itself doesn’t have a future any more. It is stupid, has no sea legs and is ludicrously top-heavy; all factors, I suspect, in the disappearance of its mate in the last storm. Does it realise this, somewhere at the back of its tiny brain? Maybe that is why it is so sad today.  
2. I am sad to say it is far from the only doomed beast on this ship. We are a mess. I don’t know how we thought we could ever do this. There has been storm after storm after storm. We are barely watertight. There is never enough food, and too often these days it is soaked in salt water or rotting. Maybe N. had a plan for this stage. I trusted him so much, and he was right about so much; about the rising of the waters, about what we needed to do. But he died on the second day at sea. We feed the cockatrice more carefully now.
3. Enough of this misery! The wind is rising, but it is fresh and curiously sweet. Perhaps the waters are receding, who knows.
4. Another storm. Good lord, at least I am still alive. But our losses are almost too hard to bear. There is a compartment at the back of the ship, one where we keep the creatures that do not mind getting too wet; the hippocampus and the merlion and the like. Some crates came loose at the height of the storm. The female hippocampus was impaled on a pickaxe and the male one trapped in the debris. The wives of S., H. and J. went in to free it. Something shifted, I don’t know. But they became trapped too, and when the swell broke over the ship they were drowned. If I thought too hard about what this meant for the world I would despair. Why did I not think? Why did I not tell them to stay apart? So I am clearing up. It keeps the mind busy.  
5. That fresher breeze again. J. says he has heard birds. Whatever may become of the world in the future, at least it will have birds.
6. There is land! I was almost out of hope, but no: here we are, stranded on a mud-bank, and every hour it gets a little larger, a little more populated with salt-poisoned trees and stranded shellfish. H. and J. have walked on it. The minotaur, even. I could hardly have imagined that it would survive, but here it is: squelching about on the new mud, mooing with joy.
7. The waters are still receding. I looked out of the window this morning and could not even see them. We are eating kelp and seawater and the fish the waters were kind enough to leave behind. But what a bind we are in! I am not sure how we will feed ourselves in the longer term. And maybe we will not need to. There is barely a pair of breeding animals left. All our work, for nothing! The male centaur lasted until landfall but was dead by the first morning. The manticore tore the female serpopard apart and ate it. Of course, we are done for as well. I am too old to bear children and in any case N. is dead. There are no other females among us.
8. I see that I have not written here in some time. Cautiously, carefully, I may have good news to report. Although our breeding pairs were wiped out, some of the beasts have been able to interbreed. The female centaur surprised us in May with a birth; sired, it seems, by the hippocampus. It is a little like both. A warm brown beast with four legs and the long, solemn head of its father. J. has been asking what I should call it. My reply? ‘A hippocampus-centaur, of course’. But I think that I could shorten that to 'horse’. It seems to fit.
9. The griffin and the merlion, too (J. shortens this to 'Lion’; he has been looking after the cubs, now in the second generation). I have high hopes for the union of the hippalectryon and the cockatrice. H. has been going through the lists of surviving beasts, one by one, and he claims there are several hundred potential crossbreeds. It seems we will be populating the world after all, just not quite with the creatures that we thought we were going to. And there are things growing now, and the sea is far away, and we only dream of it from time to time and do not have to see it when we wake.
10. S. asks who will write this history. We cannot cross-breed. Our days are numbered. But I think we will still have intelligent life to succeed us. I have had some success with the offspring of the centaur and the minotaur. They are scrawny little hairless things, but I have been teaching them language and they are quick to learn.
11. Of course, I will not quite tell them what happened. Let them forget the old animals, or at least put them to the back of their minds. Let N. be one of them, and let him have saved them as he saved all the new beasts. Let the new beasts have existed since the dawn of time. N. was a good soul. History deserves him to be bathed in uncomplicated glory. And so he shall be.

1. When you see a single magpie, the size of a double-decker bus, descend from a storm-dark sky above Manhattan to peck shiny stuff off the top of skyscrapers.
2. When a black cat crosses your path as you are trying to pick your way through a minefield.
3. When you break a mirror over the head of someone who was previously a good friend of yours.
4. When the lift is heading for the thirteenth floor, but the building only has ten floors and the lift is not very aerodynamic.
5. When you open an umbrella indoors because it is raining indoors because you no longer have a roof.
6. When you are eating with giant metal chopsticks during a thunderstorm and you leave them sticking upwards in the bowl.
7. When you say ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre to a genie who has just asked you which play you would like them to make your life resemble more closely.
8. When you walk under a ladder which is being used by a loose coalition of supervillains to climb into the sky and put out the sun.

When nuclear reactions begin in the heart of a collapsing protostar; when you just feel a little off for the first time; when when you watch the grainy footage of the first footfall on humanity’s new home; when a tree grows again in your environmental dystopia; when you open the paper at the start of the exam; when that fish ploips up out of the sea for an experimental walk on land; when the prison door closes; when the first geese take off for the South; the starting tick of the new clock; the first newly wrought sentence of the novel, still warm and lacking even a full stop.

1. Try turning it off and on again.
2. Place it beneath your Christmas tree and sing ‘Jingle Bells’ backwards three times over it as dusk falls on Christmas Eve. Leave overnight. Hopefully Santa will have fixed it with his magic screwdriver.
3. Maybe it doesn’t know what it needs to do. Make sure to tell it, with diagrams, just what is required of it. Be insistent, particularly if you are a non-expert in the field.
4. Wash it, then apply WD-40, duct tape and/or paint as required.
5. Cut off the burnt bits and cover the rest of it in icing. If it is still not working, it is OK to eat the icing at this point.
6. Try turning it off and on again again.
7. Go to the toilet, search on your phone for how to get it working again, then pretend that you knew this all along.
8. Keep it under your pillow until you dream of how to fix it. Alternatively, just fix it in a dream and then stay in the dream with the working version until you no longer need it.
9. Are you feeding it zeroes? It may be dividing by them. Zeroes are not very nutritious and alternative numbers are available at very low cost. Try feeding it something else.
10. Try turning everything else off and on again, including the lights, yourself, the government and the sun. Something will probably work.
11. Consider it in its current state. Is it not perfect just as it is? Do you really need the so-called functionality you seek? It is working just as the Universe intended, right now, and all you need to do is make peace with that fact.

Falling sycamore seeds, snails rocking out on record turntables, recently-stirred tea, those who have been enchanted to dance until the end of time, whirlpools, drunk frames of reference, people who have really not solved the maze but don’t want to look silly by asking for directions, skaters, crashing aircraft, water going down a plughole, bits of ears, the curves of new green ferns, doomed civilzations, the potter’s wheel, DNA, those staircases you can see through the hatch in the locked door into the tower and the ivy that grows up the tower and in some lights the smoke that rises from it, triskelions, nebulae, the eyes of cartoon characters who have been hypnotised, giddy children, abandoned space stations that are orbiting a dying star, labyrinths, the unsettled patrols of predatory birds.

1. 5:55 each day, because you can put a snake next to your digital clock and pretend that the clock is a speech bubble.
2. That period of time between the opening and the closing of a good book that you are reading for the first time.
3. 1:01 each day, because this is the only time that the clock will laugh at your jokes.
4. 88:88, because it means that you have travelled in time and space to the dimension of broken clocks.
5. That period of time made up by stitching together every time in your life that you have said the word ‘interesting’.
6. The time between the birth of twins.
7. 6:06 each day, if your name is Bob and you like to believe that your clock is thinking of you. Do check: it is possible that your secret name in Clockland is Bob. Clocks are thoughtful like that.