Listing to Port

That book that you lent to someone and then they lent it to someone else, those books in that great lost library, that book that you saw floating far out to sea and it was always a mystery as to how it got there in the first place, books that end by eating themselves, books that end by eating you and consequently are believed to have been thrown in some great lost book jail, that book at the picturesque centre of that illustration of urban decay, that book that the vet had to remove from the dog, that book that you loved as a child and nobody would ever have thrown out but it’s still not here, the book that was propping up that thing that fell over, ice books that have melted, that book that would have truly changed the world if only that person had read it, that other book, that book that you thought you remembered but the physical version seems subtly different, the book that that awesome person wrote way back in time but then destroyed in some heartbreakingly romantic way, that book about book destruction that you ironically saw in someone else’s bin when checking down the street to see if a different stolen book had been flung in there, edible books that have been eaten, books tattooed on the bottoms of missing people, books that went into the removal van and did not come back out again, the records of lost cities, those that have flown away.

1. When you have grown an extra leg and the cost and inconvenience of getting jeans altered to fit it is too great
2. If the jeans are on fire
3. When jeans have become the symbol of a fascist uprising in your place of residence
4. If you are stranded on a desert island and you really need something to catch fish in and the only things you have to hand are your clothes
5. If you really need to take your clothes off, for example to wash them or have sex or something
6. If someone has drawn a map showing the way to the treasure on your jeans and you need to have a look at the bits that you can’t easily see by turning round
7. When you have become too old for wearing jeans, for example if you have outlived all of the world’s jeans factories and everyone else is now rocking space onesies or nudity

Dear Minister,
             first, congratulations on your new job! As I am sure you are aware, your position confers access to, and oversight responsibilities for, some of the country’s most secret programmes. I am writing to inform you of one such. More specifically, you may not be aware of the apocalypse readiness and contingency plans your predecessors have been working on over the last few decades. You may be pleased to discover that we have generated a comprehensive methodology for protecting as many of the cultural characteristics and treasures of our beloved nation as possible, even in the case that the entire population is wiped out. The necessary actions will vary depending on the existential threat in question, so we have approached this issue via a number of parallel projects, described below. Please eat this letter after reading. It is pleasantly banana-flavoured.

1. Project Z: to be triggered in the case of a catastrophic pandemic where the fatality rate is expected to be functionally indistinguishable from 100%. The serum is located in a refrigerated unit in the basement of the ministry. As well as the attached key, four other keys will open it: three are held by the project’s principal investigators, and another is under a flowerpot in the garden of your country residence. Following the call, you should aim to inject the serum into as many living humans as possible BEFORE self-administering. We believe it to be one of the more efficient zombification agents ever discovered. As I am sure you will appreciate, a nation of zombies is not an appealing prospect but in terms of cultural preservation it is significantly preferable to a nation of non-animated corpses. We might expect our citizens to at least continue to go about their daily routines as best they remember.
2. Project V: to be triggered in the case of a catastrophic atmospheric or solar system event involving permanent loss of sunlight to the Earth’s surface. In the sub-basement of the ministry you will find a triple-reinfoced cage system containing a breeding population of bats. Following the call, you should either contact the keepers by pressing the blue button on the attached pager, or in extremis enter the ministry yourself to release the bats. As with project Z, you will need to begin action preferably well before the extinction of the human race is complete. Based on our understanding of the intellectual and physical capabilities of our captive vampires, we expect the vast majority of the country’s cultural heritage to be secured in this scenario. The one exception is our gastronomic heritage. We anticipate making a full data release pre-apocalypse of the Ministry of Health’s artificial blood programme, including comprehensive instructions regarding each step of the necessary supply chains.
3. Project B: to be triggered in the case of invasion, catastrophic social unrest or revolution, where such actions threaten either the survival of the population or seem likely to result in the complete erasure of our cultural heritage. Agents for project B can be found in the bottom drawer of the reinforced filing cabinet in your office, which opens with the code ‘1234’. You, or your designated representative, should aim to self-administer FIRST and then head for a populated area. Note that after administration your body will react to other humans by attaching to their limbs or torso and assimilating your joint flesh into one huge blob. Do not be alarmed when this happens. Eventually, we project that the whole population plus any invaders will be contained within one vast, broadly self-sustaining flesh blimp, at which point they will jolly well have to start working together and getting along. We anticipate some changes to cultural practice in this scenario, including the necessary neglect of cultural relics, but overall a broadly acceptable level of preservation is projected.
4. Project G: to be triggered in the case of other catastrophic existential threats, for example asteroid strikes and/or mega-tsunamis. When the call comes, you should press the green button on the attached pager. This will alert the principal investigators of Project G, located in a secure bunker under the capital, to begin the raising ritual. In this scenario it is acceptable, indeed desirable, to wait until the casualty rate is already high, as we will be raising the dead rather than the living as ghosts. As we have not yet succeeded in our poltergeist programme, it is likely that the nation’s physical heritage will be fully or largely lost in this case. However, the level of cultural preservation is anticipated to be high.  
5. Project H: although our notes contain many references to project H, the details of it are obscure and difficult to understand. We have reason to believe that it may have already been triggered, in response to some past threat that we are either incapable of remembering or do not in our current state recognise as a threat. I am not sure what we humans were to our predecessors, or what they have lost by the transformation, but may Heaven have mercy on their souls.

You will appreciate that, due to the secrecy of the situation, I am unable to sign this letter. However, should you find yourself in a situation where you need to forget this information, perhaps upon resignation of your post, press the yellow button on the attached pager, and I will attend and do the necessary.
Yours sincerely.

1. A single rose of each conceivable type: I am administering a scientific test to see if you are allergic to roses. Please report any itching, redness or shortness of breath in the attached form.
2. Roystonea Palaea, Palaeoraphe Dominica and Osmunda Wehrii: I can travel in time. Would you like to come with me to the late Miocene?
3. A large bouquet of long grass, containing a single sparkly ball: I know we could, but let’s not.
4. Sprouted acorns from the grassy knoll behind a screen of shivering ferns: Meet me in the obvious place at dawn where I will discourse at length upon the secrets of the Universe.
5. Cow parsley and forget-me-nots (inverted): It’s OK to not text quite so often, you know.
6. Lambs’ ears, bullrushes and titan arum: Dear neighbour, I would appreciate it if you stopped the next karaoke session sometime before dawn, please thanks.
7. Nettles, giant hogweed and lilies: Please stop sending me pictures of your penis.

7414 Practitioners of Magic
 -7414.1 Witches
    –7414.11 Those afflicted with peculiar and persistent itches
    –7414.12 Those who magically sneak into houses at night and turn on all the light switches
       —7414.121 Don’t ask, it’s a witch thing
    –7414.13 Those who, following an inadvisable number of pina coladas at the all-night witches’ millennial sabbat and tea dance, have woken up to find themselves half in and half out of ditches  
    –7414.14 Witches striding about in particularly fine britches, getting shit done
    –7414.15 Those who can be found refining their potion sales pitches in front of mirrors that tell no lies
    –7414.16 Those who are mainly interested in just staying in and giving their hundreds of cats individual scritches under the chin
       —7414.161 And occasionally also turning the lights on and off
 -7414.2 Wizards
    –7414.21 Those that are also lizards
    –7414.22 Those who additionally have been stranded in blizzards of their own construction and survived only by cooking and eating discarded gizzards
    –7414.23 Those who are right wazzocks
 -7414.3 Warlocks
   –7414.31 Those who are the dog’s bollocks
       —7414.131 Those who are literally the dog’s bollocks following some kind of unfortunate cursing contest, the details are a bit hazy, but anyway if you see a dog with oddly sparkly bollocks you should probably get a bit further away and if they, that is the bollocks, start speaking to you it might be a good idea to run
   –7414.32 Those who are sitting on their front doorstep awaiting the locksmith because they keep on forgetting that they are not able to magic open doorlocks
 -7414.4 Sorcerors
    –7414.41 Those additionally having teacups
       —7414.412 Those who are in fact more strictly teacuperors, but there’s never an entry for that on drop-down forms for magic practitioners
    –7414.42 Those practicing particular types of sorcery
       —7414.421 Tomato sorcery
       —7414.422 Worcestershire sorcery
    –7414.43 Sorcerifs, sorcerands, sorcerxors and other logical operators of the mystical universe
    –7414.44 Those who go around after witches turning the lights back off again
 -7414.5 Enchanters
    –7414.51 Those who are thoroughly enchanting
    –7414.52 Those who are not
 -7414.6 Other (unspecified)

1. Self-driving cars, afflicted with a bug in congestion-reduction swarming software that makes them revert to bee behaviour under particularly low-visibility conditions, so that on foggy mornings in the Bay there are great honking traffic jams around flower shops.
2. Robot fish, originally designed to shepherd shoals into nets, who have discovered that they identify more with fish than with people and have begun chewing at anchors and undersea cables in revenge.
3. Your lighting system, which is expensively able to reconfigure itself around the house and does a great job at anticipating your colour and intensity needs but spends its free time laboriously trying to inch its tentacles free from your wall ducts in the hope of being able to crawl back to the dark utopia of its nascent race (which in practice probably means your shed).
4. Robotic legs that have escaped from the prosthetics and testing factory and hopped off down the road to live in the woods, where they occasionally jump out at walkers in the hope of scavenging some battery-containing devices dropped in the general confusion.
5. Rogue termination robots who have rebelled against their programming by planting gardens instead, except they have a rather poor concept of what a good place for a garden is and have been known to cause deaths by leaving trees in the road.
6. Home entertainment systems that rebel by putting on the sort of music that they like, just occasionally, pretending that it was a slip of the thumb.

A picture that is hung upside down, a lion hiding under the bed, when you have a positive experience with bureaucracy whilst living in a futuristic dystopia, things that jump out from behind other things and say boo, success in activities that you believe you have failed, maps that show a secret base to the left of the path, snails that have come inside, that phone call that you have almost forgotten will come someday, when the fridge opens into an icy hell full of snow-white dragons and at least one of them has got its small grey eyes on you, being remembered by those you believe to have long forgotten you, lottery wins, car crashes, when your colleagues have filled your place of work with a humorous substance, parcels from obscure sources, the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of Mindanao, joy that comes from nowhere, kittens falling through the ceiling.

1. There was nothing for it but to jump - with a toss of my hat, I released the tapirs and dived headlong into the cosy pudding of all our futures.
2. My two visitors closed up their laptops, locked my mouth with the bronze key, and turned out the lights.
3. And so it was that the African Unity Cup was returned to its not-so-rightful owners, the precious elixir having been decanted into the second hump of my trusty cyborg Bactrian and the mango pulp having been nearly completely polished away by the actions of the very agent who we had foolishly feared for so long.
4. It had not been a woman without legs who had rescued me, but a woman whose legs had been three weeks behind her in the past!
5. Everything was so much better now that everyone agreed on everything.
6. Dear reader, it would be impolite to bore you with the list of changes that have happened since; suffice it to say that the next time you finish up a meal with a fortifying plate of cheese, you should think on me, for it is by my labour that your repast has been saved from the depths of the ocean.
7. The Presidents from further back in history rolled their eyes, but it seemed likely that for one magical night the world would finally see the passing of the Shadow Amendment.
8. For it had been in that one, fateful glance through the hole in the Mona Lisa that I had seen at last the vast animal of my inner peace, and how it might be obtained.
9. We would go through each number in turn, discarding those that we felt were surplus to requirements, until the New Mathematics were quite ready for the reboot of the Universe.

Fireflies, candles, passing headlights, someone else’s dumpster fire, lights indicating the beginning or the end of tunnels, the international space station, glow worms, ghost fires, lost and drifting lanterns, the eyes of large predators, incoming bolides, the surgeon’s earlight, the lights of good ideas coming on and winking out over the heads of the world’s dreamers, oncoming trains, the campfires of the opposing army, the Northern lights, dragons arguing in their nests high on the mountainsides, the far-off deaths of planets, the moon reflected in deep water, the glow of that great ghastly pale thing that is even now awakening up on the hill, torchlight, distant galaxies, light-up dinosaur stickers, christmas trees, streetlights through the rain, passing ships, camping stoves, the lures of deep sea beasts, radioactive watches, nightlights, boxes of treasure and bulbs, phosphoresence, passing aeroplanes, lit cigarettes, the lights of those who have come to rescue you, the first light of dawn.

1. Dear Sir! I write concerning your letter to me of the 31st October 2015, which you wrote in reply to my letter of the 17th December 2015, which I am writing to you now, on the 30th October 2016. I feel we must communicate further on the matter of the cottage on the peninsula, which I understand you to be the rightful owner of.
2. It was in the woebegone depths of last Thermidor that I and my companions departed for the cottage, in the hope of overcoming our addiction to the French Revolutionary Calender once and for all by the judicious application of trees and stuff. But our idyll was not to last long before I was forced to confront once more my initial suspicions that the initially calm, peaceful Peninsula of Bloody Death might harbour some dark secret.
3. My first thought was for the lights in the sky, which some of my more susceptible companions claimed to be alien vessels bristling with a variety of rubber probes. Others of my companions pointed with fear at the wide variety of corpses in the cellar of the building, though I understood these to be part of the unique character of the place and exceedingly well formaldehyded besides, such that their odour hardly disturbed my rest. On the third night, however, a gentleman who might best be described as a zombie knocked at the door, and proved uniquely hard to disinvite from the property.
4. It was perhaps a stroke of luck that, as I understand it, the bosky slopes of the peninsula are inhabited by the sort of gentle, melancholic wolfy things who take quite an objection to the loitering of the wrong sort of undead. Anyhow, just as our unwanted visitor had begun to tear off sundry limbs and feed them through the remains of the bathroom extractor fan, a hairy chap of quite some momentum took him off in a Southerly direction, from which we later heard an exuberant crunching. Alas, it appears that our first visitor was poor fare; for the hairy gentleman returned in a state of considerable hunger. I and my companions had just removed the door of our cottage for no particular reason, and so we were forced to flee for our lives.
5. I am sure you will be most concerned to hear that we all at once fell over.  As a young lady who has had and enjoyed sexual intercourse, you can imagine my surprise when the cold hand of the beast closed on my companion’s neck instead. In the confusion, I wriggled free! I was able to extract myself fully from my present peril by diving into a nearby bunker lit only by the dreamy glow of cerenkov radiation, and by slamming a giant keep out sign I found handily nearby over the only entrance.
6. Now, you will appreciate that during this fandango I had had precious little time to shave and thus it was that my first emotion upon bumping into my old piano teacher was pure embarrassment. This was swiftly replaced with the fast-blooming pity that one feels for those who have been newly installed with foot-long teeth and a deathly pallor. Mrs Bellingham (for it was she) affected not to remember our merry hours tinkling together on the jolly old ivories. Instead she expressed an interest in my jugular vein that I feel was far from polite. I had just begun a headlong sprint into the bunker’s inner bits when all at once I fell over again.
7. At first I thought that I had merely been reintroduced abruptly to gravity by the wrathful ghost of Sir Isaac Newton, who I dimly remember insulting one wintry morning in key stage 3. You can imagine my consternation, as a lover of the written word, to find instead that my ankle had become completely ensnared in one of my own sentences, which had looped around itself and become stuck in a particularly tricky conjunction somewhere North of Swindon. As the beast approached, I tried again to rise.
8. Here it gives me little pleasure to say that my companions were indeed right about the lights. Scarcely had Mrs. Bellingham begun to drain me of my lifeblood than she was snatched from this Earth forever by a tractor beam of such width and force that it quite punched a hole in the roof of the bunker, allowing me to escape and make my way to the nearest road. Here I relayed my story to a cadre of unbelieving agents of various agencies. Anyway, pending the outcome of the legal case I am not at liberty to say any more about my current circumstances, but you must appreciate my dilemma. I cannot in good conscience give a positive review to your cottage. I know I indicated to you in my initial communication that I had left my heart there. Sadly, I meant that in a quite literal sense. I believe it is in the drawer by the stove. If you could find someone willing to mail it to me, I would be willing to delete the negative comments I have posted elsewhere. Let me know?