Listing to Port

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!

1. There was a creature called an Offaphoffilus, which had fifteen legs and the face of a grumpy sloth. It had never quite found a comfortable home, because these were usually built for creatures with fewer legs. But one day it met an elderly leg collector and managed to negotiate a custom-made beachfront villa in exchange for the bequest of seven legs on the occasion of its death.

2. In later years, the villa served as a guesthouse for the nearby leg museum. It was famous for its cakes, which visitors were best advised to avoid because they always had an aftertaste of chicken and petrol. The cakes arrived every day on a small cart and no-one knew where they came from.

3. The arrival of the cakes was not in fact a mystery but an official classified Secret. As part of a project to bioengineer the ultimate soldier, a secretive Russian laboratory had developed a donkey who shat cake. It eventually graduated from the programme with a D grade and become the lab pet.  However, since it also turned out to have an enormous appetite, they needed an outlet for excess cake. This the guesthouse fortunately provided.

4. For companionship, the lab purchased the Donkey a horse. As it turned out, this horse used to belong to the Queen of Bonk, but was demoted for unhorselike behaviour. It had once eaten a whole grocer and the local fruit community lived in terror of it going back for seconds. Interestingly, it was also the first horse in the world to work in web development, and had once licked Caligula.

5. There was an orchard nearby which felt in need of protection, so they called in an alchemist (all the nearby bouncers being busy). The alchemist did not succeed in keeping out the horse, but he did accidentally grow a tree on which each apple was made of a different element. Sadly, the gold apple was followed in relatively short order by the plutonium apple, and the orchard was evacuated. The irate fruit-growers put the alchemist in a pair of lead boots and dropped him into the Seine.

6. Three years later, a pair of golden boots came up at auction in North Carolina, but failed to sell due to their unattractive design. Eventually, they were melted down and turned into a small gold bar, which served gin to inebriated mice.

7. Seven mice who had escaped from a rather dull zoo fell asleep on a wandering cloud of gin fumes and had a dream. In it, there was a creature called an offaphoffilus, which had fifteen legs and the face of a grumpy warthog. The mice were fired from the story for refusing to behave. Since the story could not hire anyone else at such short notice, it had to stop.

1. As a child he always wanted to eat a whole cake. But it was never allowed. He planned the supreme act of rebellion: a cake a metre on a side, cooked in a kiln, filled with chocolate AND cream AND custard. He vowed to eat the whole thing in one go. He failed. And in addition felt quite unwell. And in addition a wandering cat inspector took a photo of him lying in the cake’s huge remains and posted it on Twitter, where it became a meme in a way that continually popped up and shamed him throughout his life. After that point, he knew his anxiety was justified, and that the worst would always find a way to happen; and he never tried very hard at anything again.

2. Instead of sending Henry the fifth tennis balls, the French sent cake. All was forgiven. It was great cake and Agincourt never happened. In the alternate future thus spawned, humanity was 99.7% wiped out by a virulent plague in 1870 when a precursor of the ebola virus and the common cold met and fell in love in some stray cream during the annual Anglo-French cake festival. The remaining 0.3% lived brutal and pointless existences in regions of the world that were not able to sustain creameries.

3. She made a point of bringing her perfectionism to everything she did. When it was time to organise a hen night, she knew exactly what was needed; a huge hollow cake with a buff gentleman ready to leap out of it and swing his thong. The cake needed to be convincing. She made it herself. There were no cracks or hinges or anything uncakelike visible. In fact, it was superb. Any remaining imperfections were covered over on the night with a layer of marzipan. When the time came, the excited bride-to be cut into the cake to a gust of stale, exhausted air and revealed the pallid, lifeless leg of the hidden gentleman, who had suffocated.

4. As a marketing stunt, they decided to make a whole planet out of cake. It was the largest-scale replicator use to date and the ad team was very excited. A number of major scientists had been lured on board with the promise of limitless Battenburg. A spot between Mars and the asteroid belt had been identified, and the initial replicator array was scheduled to launch in three days. The next day, the rocket fell over and accidentally set off the replicator array in Baikonur instead. Rather than using chemically-uninteresting asteroids as fuel, the replicators used planet Earth. Within four days the entire planet was made of cake and nearly all sentient life had died.