Listing to Port

1. Looking for a traditional stocking filler? Try legs! Best of all, they are completely free. You may even have some lying around the house yourself!
2. Each litre of seawater contains about 13 billionths of a gram of gold (on average), making it the prefect present for the homeopath who has it all.
3. Piss off a fairy and give them the name and address of a relative. Voila! A truly authentic mystical curse experience for all the family, for minimal outlay.
4. Repackage a selection of dog toys in smart boxes to make a quirky range of objets d'art and sex toys for the non dog-owners in your life.
5. Some people believe that all humans should have basic rights, such as the rights to equality, freedom from slavery, or the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Do you? If not, why not give basic human rights as a Christmas gift? If you are feeling particularly generous, you could even give them to everyone on Earth.
6. Let someone know you are thinking of them by telling them that you are thinking of them. No gift required!

1. That house that’s just down the road from you and there’s nothing particularly unusual about it, but somehow as the years go by it will manage to avoid routine knockings-down and bombings and the ivy wreckers of creeping abandonment long beyond the others of its type. And eventually it will end up in a time where people notice and celebrate it. There will be tours. It will be lovingly furnished with replica flatpack, and the guides will tell the tourists that this is where David Bowie wrote the punk ballad ‘Candle in the Wind’, and there will be a gift shop where one can buy kale oreos. Occasionally, on Revolution Sunday, actors dressed as Queen Elizabeth II in a range of rainbow replica outputs will perform a medley from popular twenty-first century musicals. But on a quiet day you could stand in front of that house now and almost be in the future.
2. The Eiffel Tower. Oddly enough, the Eiffel Tower will be one of the longest-lived of the current generation of landmarks, surviving both the second and third Dark Ages relatively unscathed. Even after the war of 9851, the tower’s twisted base will remain, at which point it will be mainly used as a memorial for the remaining three thousand years of its existence. By this point, there will be little to no material remaining that has not been replaced during one of the Tower’s many restoration projects, however. To recreate the experience of being in the future, stand facing the tower on a quiet, foggy night in summertime, wearing knee-length galoshes, brown sunglasses and a stick of cinnamon.
3. Central Johannesburg. Although the city will be largely deserted and partially buried by the year 4000, the buried portions will be excavated and lovingly restored around 6500 under the influence of the First Contact movement. Taking as their starting point the fragmentary footage remaining from the 2009 film District 9, First Contact believe that Johannesburg is situated at the planet’s zero reference point in Galactic co-ordinates, making it the obvious point of landing for any alien civilisations hoping to make contact. The 6500 reconstruction aimed to restore the physical city as closely as possible to its representation in the film. Owing to the mass migrations of the 3300s and 6100s, the future population of Johannesburg will be substantially different to its current one, so your best bet to experience the future now will be to find a time when nobody is around.
4. Amundsen-Scott polar research base, South Pole. Admittedly, in 9290 it will be a luxury hotel for the super-rich looking to experience real ice away from Antarctica’s overcrowded coastline. However, above ground it will be a fairly faithful replica of the original. Go outside on a day with poor visibility and you might never know the difference.

1. Are your cups nice and warm? You will need warm cups. This method of making tea is quite time-consuming, but well worth the wait. So you will need some method of keeping your cups warm for a long time, such as training up a dynasty of ducks to perpetually roost on them, using them for an alternative hot beverage whilst you wait, or keeping them in your bottom.
2. Now, invade or otherwise subdue a country where you can actually grow tea. If you come from such a country, it is acceptable to invade yourself. It is allowable to bring cake in such a circumstance. Historically, people invading countries other than their own have tended to bring guns. Guns do not go very well with tea. Cake is much better.
3. Next you will need to grow the tea. The right variety of tea is really important. You may wish to breed a few different strains of tea together to get the optimal variety. If you like your tea smoky, you could try introducing some dragon genes into the mix. Alternatively, waft your tea over the smoking remains of a nearby civilization, your own if necessary.
4. Pick the leaves. But not like that. That’s disgusting. Tell you what, why don’t you get someone else to do it?  
5. If you like your tea dry, dry the leaves. If you like your tea wet, wet them. If you like your tea a particular colour, now is the time to paint the leaves that colour. Personally, I like to bubble a civet fart or two through the water at this point. It’s what the Queen does when entertaining ambassadors, and never fails to give your brew an entertaining tingle.
6. The right cup is really important. Sorry, I should have mentioned that earlier, shouldn’t I? Never mind. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry, eh? Anyway, get your cup out from under your duck or wherever and fill it with leaves.
7. Heat your water to the correct temperature for the latitude, time of day and atmospheric pressure. You can test the temperature by travelling twenty minutes into the future and bathing a baby in the water. If the baby is too hot or too cold, you will need to adjust the initial temperature and restart.
8. Add the water and wait one bob and a jiffy. The tea will be ready when it turns the exact brown of a zombie’s teeth. It may be best to have a zombie in the room with you to check, but make sure to keep it away from the baby.
9. Do you like milk in your tea? If so, carefully lactate into your cup. If you like sugar, you will need to find the sugar nozzle. On most models of human, this is located behind the bellybutton and will become evident when the bellybutton is inverted. Consult your manual for further instructions.
10. Relax and enjoy your tea!

The Undergardener, the Nine Generals of the Owl Battalions, my Lord High Tweaker of Noses, the Knight of the Night of the Deep Ocean, the Knight of the Proof, the Guardian of the Number Three Bus, the Auditor of Dreams Lost, Madame Igniter, the Hat-Enchanter of the Privy Chamber, the Keeper of the Fairy Fruit, the Lord High Befuddler-in Chief, my Lady Shuts-Doors, the Burrower-of-Hollows, the Chief Whisperer, the Baronet of Solace to Joyful Souls, the Knight of Withered-Cities, the Keeper of the Red Bell, the Hope-Winder First Class, the Shepherd of Purples, the Mouth of the Moon-Emperors

1. This year, fewer than 1.7 million people were snatched from the planet’s beaches by batrachian squidbeasts and launched defencelessly into the horrific void of space. Last year, fewer than 2 million people suffered this fate, so I think we can all agree that we are travelling in the right direction.

2. Humans still mostly have noses, for now.

3. Those giant space whales who are aiming a giant meteor at Earth have been routing through alcohol nebulae all the way since Sagittarius B2. They are so drunk they will almost certainly miss.

4. Science has shown that people who are being eaten by velociraptors find the whole experience 32% less distressing if they are in a thankful frame of mind.

5. You are still alive at the moment, unless you aren’t, in which case no worries, 2017 is shaping up to be an awesome year for the undead.

1. When you dive into the core of a nuclear reactor because it seemed like a good idea at the time and emerge as the newly undead champion of people who do really stupid shit for no discernable reason.
2. When you accidentally steal a megalorry full of plastic skeletons instead of that other megalorry full of fine art that you were planning on stealing and whilst you are hanging out with the skeletons in hiding you end up making them into a giant automated plastic bonespider and using it to navigate the sewers where it scares off various of the city’s supervillians, leading to your coronation in the local media as some kind of mystery urban bonespider benefactor.  
3. When you travel so far into the depths of the internet that you emerge out the other side, blinking and slightly shit-smeared, into a shining land of future mysteries where you are transformed into pure and delicate data, routed seven times around the world, and remade into a superhuman with near-unimaginable powers apart from when the wifi is down.
4. When you have so many cats that eventually they forget that you are not a cat and initiate you into the secret midnight rituals of cats which involve fusing together into a giant furry catsuit twelve metres tall and rampaging about the city kicking bins over and you vow to use that knowledge to fight refuse-related misdeeds in your neighborhood like putting the wrong stuff in the recycling and so on.
5. When the dark speaks to you and you speak back to the dark and eventually you get to know it and it’s actually kind of nice and sometimes it will let you ride on its back through the glowing cities of the world and you can ask it to stop so you can hop off and right any injustices that you happen to see in passing and sometimes the dark will even punch people for you, it’s not fussy about that kind of thing.
6. When there is a dramatic global decline in imagination due to some kind of carbohydrate-borne virus making it quite easy to become more powerful than any given person can possibly imagine, so superheroes are ten a penny and they all have origin stories where they tripped over a doorstep and became more powerful than you could possibly imagine, or sneezed unusually hard and became more powerful than you could possibly imagine, or suchlike.

Tiny blue and speckled eggs, freckled eggs, lost eggs rolling far from home, half-domes of eggshell drying in the sun, squeggs, eggs with legs, eggs within eggs within eggs, blasted grey eggs done rainy side up, used eggs reversed in the eggcup, eggs to be bought in sixes from anarchist supermarkets for the throwing of at politicians, mathematical eggs with infinite subdivisions, the egg of the fake kangaroo and the other egg that was found behind it, an egg with an ocean inside it, ann egg with the outside inside it, the egg-shaped burns on the hands of those who have tried to steal the egg of the Phoenix and which in their turn will hatch in time, those sinister eggs that are almost indistinguishable from gravel at the moment but they will not be for long, other eggs too that are biding their time and some of those eggs might be in your kitchen just to warn you, eggs that one may trap sounds in until the whole world is silent, tiny red spider eggs, eggs that have been scrambled around a military obstacle course and back again, eggs that have been poached from poachers but then the poachers have poached them back, newly laid eggs still warm and straw-nestled.

1. A pie approximately the size and shape of a pie shop, having a rather convincing false shopfront and a well-hidden pastry lid; the point of which being to lure in unsuspecting hopeful pie-eaters and trap them inside, so that they can be released on the ceremonial cutting of the pie rather like the four-and-twenty blackbirds in the nursery rhyme.
2. A pie that has no bottom. Not one that has no pastry bottom: there are plenty of those. I mean a pie that literally has no bottom, you break through the top and find yourself looking down into a horrifying abyss.
3. A pie containing a smaller pie containing another smaller pie, for pastry lovers everywhere.
4. A giant space pie constructed by aliens around a star, the intent being to harness the entire energy of that star to gently cook the pastry over some billion years or so; the gastronomical version of the Dyson Sphere. There are in fact three of these currently detectable with current telescope technology, but it will take science a few years to come round to the correct explanation of what we are seeing.
5. The lifesaving pie suits of the Cornish pixie folk, which inflate around their owners in times of trouble to provide a convincing facsimile of a particularly unappetising Cornish Pasty; the intent being that, rather than throwing a wobbly about having discovered a pixie, the offending human will instead consign the suspect pasty to a local bin, from whence the pixie can later crawl under cover of darkness and escape.
6. Nautical pies which can be eaten if necessary but which will also stay afloat for long enough that you can paddle all the way to that distant island with your large spoon, provided you are OK with sitting in gravy.
7. Your pie, made precisely for you in just the way that you like best; there is only one of it so exactly correct, and after you have eaten it you will feel oddly content, but you will never go out seeking pie again and perhaps there will be less of a sparkle in your eye for the rest of your days.

1. A comprehensive atlas of the Territories to the North, newly annotated with suggested trade routes and cultural footnotes, for the benefit and education of interested travellers.
2. A moderately comprehensive atlas of the Territories to the North-East, including annotated outbound routes by ship, return routes on foot, and places to avoid leaving your ship.
3. When and how I ate my shoes: true tales from the godforsaken, desolate Northlands.
4. The art and practice of slow cooking: how to work miracles on the toughest of meats.
5. Never be bored again: more activities than you could even need to fill those dreary hours waiting for things to finish.
6. When inspiration fails: what to do when you have run out of stuff to do.
7. The day the lambs withdrew their shanks: a true history of the rise of the Faster Fast Food Movement and the Great Stew Revolt.
8. In defence of going very fast.
9. A vision for a fairer and more equitable legal system.
10. A comprehensive atlas of the territories to the North: their nooks, crannies and hiding places.

1. When you fully automate your award-winning lawn flamingo production line, right down to the roving robots scavenging organic material for plastics production to reduce costs and environmental impact, only it turns out nobody thought to inform the robots that people are not a valid source of organic material and everybody ends up being recycled into lawn flamingos.
2. When scientists ingeniously engineer a virus capable of wiping out humanity, resulting in a highly-cited paper and, after a series of hilarious vial mix-ups, cross-contamination episodes and doors propped open by cleaners, the wiping out of humanity.
3. When it turns out Venus is in fact a far-future planet Earth which was sent back through time and space by the final few remaining humans as a last-ditch attempt to convince the twenty-first century to stop with the global warming stuff already, but nobody figures out the distinctive temporal and mass-related signatures of planetary time travel until significantly too late.
4. When humanity decides to distract itself with a giant outbreak of memes mocking bears, and the bears decide they’ve had enough and beam up en masse to Pluto to establish an undersea-forest city in the planet’s core. It turns out that bear shit was a vital part of the planet’s ecosystem and, with no bears shitting in the woods, the woods stop working and nobody has any oxygen any more.
5. When a normal volcano gets upgraded to a megavolcano as part of a marketing exercise, decides it enjoys the attention, and puts in the work and planning needed to become a gigavolcano. Humanity sure is impressed.  
6. When enthusiastic but short-sighted aliens bent on making first contact before anyone else accidentally reverse their moon-sized spaceship into Sweden.