Listing to Port

3290 Musical Instruments
 -3290.1 Those that go parp
    –3290.11 Those that are supposed to go parp
       —3290.111 Those that can be played by melodramatic villains or their invisible henchpersons
       —3290.112 Those that do have other uses beside accompanying the purchase of the kitsch of their country of origin, honestly
    –3290.12 Those which are supposed to go parp, but not quite at that point
    –3290.13 Those out of which any parp at all is a surprise
    –3290.14 Those which would not have parped if they had had a more moderate lunch
 -3290.2 Those that go tinkle
    –3290.21 Those that can additionally be modified to launch small mice into space
    –3290.22 Those that can be played by fleeing animals
 -3290.3 Those that go eee-aw-eee-aw
    –3290.31 Those containing one or more donkeys
       —3290.311 Those in which donkeys are intentionally part of the musical apparatus
       —3290.312 Those which are intended to be powered by the effort of silent donkeys, but the donkeys had other ideas
    –3290.32 Those being practiced by small children
 -3290.4 Those that go squeak
    –3290.41 Instruments that are very small
       —3290.411 The legit world’s smallest violin
       —3290.412 Mouse choirs
    –3290.42 Instruments that are very full of helium
       —3290.421 Those that are being used to transport an insect orchestra to or from the Albert Hall
    –3290.43 Instruments that are very scared
       —3290.431 Those that have stage fright
       —3290.432 Those that are made of vegetables or ice and are about to be consumed by the audience that initially seemed so welcoming
 -3290.5 Those that go bong bong bong
    –3290.51 Those that can be lived in when not in musical use
    –3290.52 Those that are part of clocks
 -3290.6 Those that go twaaaang
    –3290.61 Those that go twaang four or more times and are then mercifully silent
    –3290.62 Those that you can both fire arrows from and use as a shield during the orchestra’s last stand
    –3290.63 Those that refuse to be put into a small car
       —3290.631 Those into which a small car can be inserted
          —3290.6311 Those that sound better after the insertion of a small car
 -3290.7 Those that go thnorp-thnorp-blaaagle-waaaah-sponggg
    –3290.71 Followed by ‘Sorry’
    –3290.72 Followed by 'Oh yeahhh!’
 -3290.8 Those that can be induced to make more than one of the above noises
 -3290.9 Other (unspecified)

1. Owing to a bug in the 1974 Land Boundary Agreement between India and Bangladesh, there exists an infinitely recursive enclave 30km South of Cooch Behar: i.e., an area of Indian territory surrounding an area of Bangladeshi territory surrounding an area of Indian territory surrounding an area of Bangladeshi territory et cetera. The central few metres of this area have been repurposed to provide a temporary refuge for people who have been declared stateless, including a small centre for international law advice.
2. A 1888 attempt to stimulate patriotism by redrawing the boundaries of British counties so that each more closely resembled the letters in the phrase ‘God save the Queen’ was, surprisingly, only defeated in parliament by a single vote. This unusual happening has been attributed by historians to the flash outbreak of a food-borne fungal infection. Embarrassed legislators subsequently struck the episode from official records, although some reference to it can still be found in the newspapers of the era.
3. Portugal has never given up its claim to the entire continent of Antarctica, which dates back to the report by Henry the Navigator of having have been gifted a land in the far South by Prester John. In order that this claim not be invalidated under Portugal’s 1976 constitution, the state defines the municipality of Rio Prateado, a theoretical microcity with zero population in Adelie land. The exact location of Rio Prateado is highly classified, to avoid anyone else sticking a flag in it.
4. Under a 1630 law that has never been repealed, the summit region of any English or Welsh mountain is assumed to be part of the high seas for legal purposes. This led to the practice of holding duels on mountaintops, a practice that was still current in 1925 when Aleister Crowley was killed in a duel at the summit of Cader Idris and subsequently had to be resurrected by his Thelemite seconds. In order to perform the resurrection, they were obliged to offer Crowley’s digestive system as a home for lost ghosts, leaving him plagued with supernatural indigestion for the rest of his days.
5. As part of an abandoned weapons program in the mid-1980s, the entire island of Saint Helena was fitted with rockets, enabling it to take off from the South Atlantic, fly North and East, and land on Moscow, should the need arise. These rockets were never removed. Owing to the danger of accidental firings resulting from loud noises or strong vibration, every resident of Saint Helena is required to sign an agreement prohibiting them from playing music above a given volume. This is also the real reason that the recently constructed airport has been indefinitely put out of use.

*because they are not true

Avocado and gelatine truffles, caramelised seagull, conceptual art enrobed in light milk, wrigglers in butter, chocolate-suffocated bears, brexit on a stick, office coffee creme, salty silky caramel infused with the desperate longing for some filling other than salty silky caramel, dog hair delight, novelty chocolate support network, lamb ganache, cave-aged bat guano, creamy helium spheres, milk slap, the full 2016.

1. To the hedgehog of truth, and all who pull the litter of lies from its bristles.
2. To draining our glasses, lining them with soft wool, offering them to adorable baby animals as beds and posting the results on the internet.
3. To the wandering and lost: may there be a lantern and a hearth for them, and a welcoming door open in the darkness.
4. To the calm of the ocean after the storm, and the first sunrise after the clouds have cleared.
5. To time, which no wall can endure.
6. To the construction and maintenance of an efficient fuck supply chain, such that we may give a fuck when it is needed but not otherwise have fuck silos overflowing with excess fucks.  
7. To the tide that is ebbing, but will one day turn again.
8. To the passing of months and the change of seasons.
9. To the toast in the kitchen of uncertain times: may it fuel us for the work that is to come.
10. To people: may they never forget that other people are also people.

Getting your socks wet with salt water, having to wait several hours outside Calais due to a French dockworkers’ strike, ship’s cat hates you, the realisation that there are not plenty more fish in your specific case, getting stranded on a desert island and having to fend off crabs with a stick, vomiting into an oncoming wind, the ship’s mess running out of cocoa, precision-aimed seagull shit, when the mutineers need your cabin for plotting in and they leave it in a state, when the size of your beard is insufficient for the size of your submarine, attacks by pirates, an excess of shanties, seals that are not quite as cute as expected, having to scrub the deck, the sudden realisation that you are a shark, when the toilet is blocked and also rocking from side to side, when you’re not quite sure what the sun is supposed to be doing relative to the yardarm but you’re fairly sure that you’re at a latitude where it’s not going to do it, no mobile phone signal, mermaids who point and laugh, everyone saying ‘Arrr’ long after it has ceased to be funny, being caught between mating krakens, incorrect splicing of the mainbrace.

1. There was once a letter that found itself in a word, and that word was part of a sentence, and the sentence was a lie. The letter was not happy about this. Now, the Global Semantics Act 831 expressly forbids a letter to leave its post for any reason, but it was late and it may be that the sentence had been left in a bar, because the letter could smell gin, and that made it bold. The letter pulled itself free from its word and inched across the shiny icesheet of its smooth white page.
2. It happened that the page had a black border, somewhat like a crevasse with very regular edges. The letter, not having the benefit of literal eyes, fell right in. At the bottom of the crevasse the letter slid through into that one great black inky ocean, full of other things that had pulled themselves loose over the past thousand years and stayed there, growing and changing. The letter found itself caught up in the coils of a beast with a thousand serifs, slithering around a columnar oceancave where tiny glints of gilt that had rubbed off illuminated manuscripts were roosting across the ceiling.  
3. Now, unlike other letters, the letter o is always made in the ocean. And it so happened that our letter was eventually deposited beside an o vent that was happily pooting out newly hatched o’s to float to the surface, where they could be scooped up by pens and printers’ nets. The o’s were very welcoming, even though our letter was rather distant in the alphabet from them. They took it to their undersea tearoom and infused it with brown ink.
4. The letter was just starting to warm up again when it felt a tap on its dimple. It was most surprised to find that a representative of the lie had tracked it down. The representative was exceedingly polite. It explained that under the Hopes and Dreams Act of 2016, the Powers That Be had moved from their old strategy, of acting so as to help make things they wanted to be true to be true, towards a new strategy of simply redefining whatever people they to be true at the time to be the truth. No statement was therefore ever officially a lie any more, and the letter was guilty of a gross misrepresentation. Also, if it would care to come back up to the page, that would be very helpful, since the lie had become mildly humorous without the letter and was attracting the sort of mocking that reduced its effectiveness.  
5. The letter inquired as to what happened when different viewers wished different things to be true. The representative replied that well-mannered statements made sure to address themselves only where they were required; they disliked being tied in a knot and would go to great lengths to avoid this.
6. Just them, some irate facts showed up and ejected everyone from the tearoom. The letter was fortunate in being able to spot a variant spelling in one of them which it could lever itself into. The facts were mollified by a packet of undersea biscuits, and grumpily slithered back onto their pages. Unfortunately it turned out that, due to the deluge of newly liberated taking advantage of the liberal fact taxation regime, several of them had had to be designated lies themselves to avoid decimating the public finances.
7. By this time, however, our letter was asleep, and immune to the scent of gin.

1. Dragons live a long time, and there have never been very many of them. When a dragon is dying, other dragons - maybe most of the dragons that there are, these days - will travel to their cave and set up a vigil, purring low tunes through the day and night to ease their passage from this world. They live in fear of untimely death. Therefore the news of the dragon’s slaying - by one of the little creatures, no less - was greeted with shock and dismay by his community. That year the snow stayed on the mountains for much longer than usual, because the great grey dragons of the North were lying at the snowline and weeping and turning their cold breath up the slopes.
2. The remnants of the dark lord’s army made their way home, bitter in defeat, picked off from all sides by raiding parties from the victorious side. There was talk from the armies of good of marching on their lands and cleansing them of evil. They knew the end of the journey would not be a warm homecoming, but the telling of the bad news to their families. Then packing in the night and flight East, out to the wilderness where, with luck, they might never be found.
3. The kingdom was convulsed with joy at the marriage of the prince and princess. And if it turned out, a few months later, that the web of narrative and enchantment was not enough - that they did not really like each other, that a few heady days of adventure and revolution had not been a good preparation to make a life together - well. With the demise of the evil queen their advisors had worked hard to restore morality to the land. What sort of a message would it send to separate?
4. ‘Fucking fucksakes,’ said the farmer, 'how does that fox even eat so many birds at once?’
5. After the death of the witch, the gingerbread cottage began to rot. Soon there was nothing left but a pile of soggy cakestuff in a clearing, heaving with maggots. It was perhaps one rainstorm from being completely gone when the other members of the witch’s coven came to look. 'Did you know?’ they asked each other. 'Did she really do that? Will they believe us when we say we didn’t know? Are they going to come for us, too?’

1. Travel between timelines is possible due to areas of unique stretchiness (technically termed the Einstein Boing Points). Interestingly, these temporal stretchiness qualities combined with five-dimensional topology mean that it is possible to tie a timeline in a multidimensional analogue of a bow. Those caught in the ‘loops’ of the bow will often find themselves repeating days, leading to intense feelings of deja vu.

2. One of the seven secrets of time travel is thought to concern the harnessing of timeline boinginess in order to catapult the traveller some unspecified distance into the future. As timeline physics is surprisingly similar to trampoline physics, travellers often prepare by a highly concentrated regime of bouncing. Indeed, a surprisingly high proportion of time travellers are ex-Olympic gymnasts.

3. The unofficial ranking of timeline hostility and/or effort required to blend in is known as the Finkenwerder Scale, after Ernestine Finkenwerder, an early time traveller who met an unknown fate whilst exploring a selection of unusually difficult timelines as part of a research project on historical manipulation. A Finkenwerder 1 timeline presents few if any constraints to travellers. Finkenwerder 10 timelines are often largely devoid of population, radioactive or carry a nonzero risk of being eaten.

4. Even relatively small perturbations when travelling between stretched timelines can carry the risk of one or both timelines splitting. In 1976-3b, a group of time tourists in passage from 2123-7an, having consumed a bad batch of curried gelatine, were responsible for a large release of hydrogen sulphide whilst in transit home. The resulting chain reaction created timelines 1976-3bg, 1976-3bn and 1976-3bz. Today, 1976-bz is one of the most-visited timelines because of the unusual beauty of its sunsets and the ferocity of its music.

5. Whilst most animals are unable to travel between timelines or are uninterested in doing so, crabs have been shown to migrate to less difficult timelines at points of significant population or environmental stress. The unusual influx of red king crabs into the Barents seas of at least 12 different 2004s was the result of a nuclear accident in the region in timeline 2004-fg2, leading to large numbers of crabs taking this unusual escape route.

6. If you find yourself stranded in the wrong timeline, do not panic unless in immediate danger. Often timelines are only wrong temporarily and will eventually realign themselves with lower-Finkenwerder historical pathways eventually. It may be necessary to coordinate with other stranded travellers to give the realignment a push start.

The sunrise, singing angry or hopeful songs with friends, the fact that cats’ paw pads look a little bit like beans, having a really good swear, the sound of the rain on the roof when you are snuggled up and warm, baby hedgehogs whose bristles are still a bit soft, the turquoise of lakes high in the mountains, people who are kind for the sake of kindness, arranging fallen leaves by order of colour, mooncake, putting numbers together on a way that works, the sound of a gentle breeze making its way through a forest, surveying the road at the start of a journey to somewhere you like, chocolate, finding new good art, mutually agreed hugging, air guitar, the sight of distant hills, dogs who think everyone is the best person ever and you are the best best person isn’t that amazing, when you learn something new and it makes other things make sense.

1. On the seats round the back of the chapel which are inexplicably piled high with lost gloves
2. In the cupboard at the back of that shop that sells the thing, you know that thing, you can’t imagine why anyone would want it but maybe you need to be rich to understand
3. In your own private jet that has a four-poster bed in it
4. Sitting bolt upright but sleeping via some form of spooky projection within the dreams of the cabin crew as they snatch some rest in the local hotels
5. In the tunnel that the mole people are digging under the runway in preparation for the great earthy uprising of 2017
6. In a cave hollowed out in the vast lost suitcase mountain left over from the last time people were sleeping in this airport
7. In a silent cargo box lined with otter fur, somewhere out in the hold of a half-forgotten aircraft whose owner has long-since gone bankrupt, out in the furthest hangar
8. Under the warm tongue of the giant monster that is the reason that everyone is trapped here
9. Stretched out between the access road and the first runway, in the case that you are a giant monster and do not mind squashing a fence or two