Listing to Port

1. Diver’s delight. A four-metre deep, one metre-wide cylinder of creamy mousse developed by celebrated chocolatier Frederick Lowly Peach, the diver’s delight serves two purposes. Its first purpose, as food, is relatively straightforward. The second purpose is more unusual. The different levels of the diver’s delight have have different flavours. The upper layers include such flavours as sock, sand and earwax, separated by the occasional fine layer of gravel. Middle layers include garlic, burnt toast and fish. The lower layers are are a more conventional array of fruit and nut flavours and are, by all accounts, delicious. One merely has to get ones head far enough in at first go to get to the tasty part. Therefore it is also a test of the diner’s cream diving skills.

2. The Stanningford fishslap. This little-encountered dessert consists of three hundred marzipan fish with cherry liqueur centres. It is served by a troupe of five waiters in pierrot costumes whose job is to slap the faces or bodies of diners with the fish such that the liqueur squirts into their mouths. The discarded marzipan skins are then dropped through a grille in the floor, where they are consumed by a horde of tame parrots in the room underneath. Eventually, once the diners are drunk enough not to care, they too are deposited amongst the parrots and left to sleep it off.

3. Skronks. Skronks are micro-desserts, usually the size of a peppercorn or smaller, and often containing amazingly realistic tiny versions of larger ingredients. A successful skronk is experienced only as a fleeting moment of sweetness by the diner, despite the hours of work that went into its creation. The skronk diner, out of respect to the skills of the chef, is customarily expected to lie about the deliciousness of the dish and its amazing, mouth-filling flavour.

4. The Southern Ocean. It is a little-known fact that the Southern Ocean has honorary dessert status, following the ceremonial addition of a quart of vanilla essence off the South coast of Tasmania by well-known homeopathic chef Esperanza Buttocks in 2010.

5. Surprise bubbles. These small, flavourless globes are carefully engineered to burst on a choreographed schedule in the diner’s stomach, releasing a series of fascinating-tasting gases for the diner to burp up over the course of the rest of the evening. Some particularly skilled chefs have even extended the surprise bubble experience well into the night, leading to bizarre dreams about passion fruit.

6. Chocolate poetry. Following the innovative development by gastronomic linguist Rowena Q of an entirely chocolate-based language, it is possible to express many types of poetry in chocolate. Concepts are expressed via a series of combinations of dark, milk and white chocolate, with sugar, cocoa butter and cocoa content all acting as important signifiers of meaning. The utmost form of the chocolate poetry art is said to be the chocolate double dactyl, although it is notable that the criteria for rhyme and rhythm are necessarily a little different when sentiments are expressed in chocolate as opposed to spoken language, so the poetic forms often bear only a slight resemblance to their more common namesakes. Rowena Q’s most recent development, a chocolate triolet, was sadly eaten by a beluga whale before being experienced by its intended recipient, the Duke of Rockall.

Friday categorization #20

5549 Holidays

-5549.1 Those spent in the sunshine

   –5549.11 Sunshine that is a glorious surprise, such as in Scotland in April

      –-5549.111 In which those from cold countries are seized with a kind of weather delirium at the start of the day, and laid up with sunburn or heat exhaustion at the end

   –5549.12 Sunshine that seemed like a good idea at the time, but is actually a little relentless when it comes down to it

   -5549.13 Haphazard resorts filled with feral cats, sneaking ham at breakfast and pissing on lilos

   -5549.14 Those resorts that are half performance and half holiday, and who would be after a feral cat in souped-up golf buggies the moment it dared set foot on the polished boulevards

   –5549.15 Those in which there are beaches of purple shells, or meadows of rusting guns, or one has to park in a bay full of peacocks, or some other such incidents that one can recall in dull hours

   –5549.16 Those in which one discovers the awful ubiquity of sand

-5549.2 Those spent in the rain

   –5549.21 Rain that is like a lullaby on the roof at night and a gentle, grey and welcome mist in the morning over the distant hills

   –5549.22 Rain at the seaside in the Springtime, as viewed from a forlorn arcade beside a wet pebble beach

  –5549.23 In which one is a grizzled explorer with a thermos of hot chocolate and a soggy map

   –5549.24 In which one writes a love letter to a city and the city closes its eyes, farts and goes to sleep

-5549.3 Those that rely on snow

   –5549.31 Those that do not get snow, and have to make do with marshmallows

-5549.4 Those that happen at home

   –5549.41 Those that were not intended to happen at home, but necessitated by chicken pox or travel disruption or last-minute breakups or the accidental failure to exist of the intended destination

   –5549.42 Those intended for the production of some Great Work

      –-5549.421 That are subject to a creative block so intense that one ends up back at work as a form of procrastination

-5549.5 Those that don’t happen

   –5549.51 Micro-breaks, like micro-sleeps, in which one closes ones eyes and moves a little bit to the side to simulate the experience of travelling a millionth of the way to Bermuda

   –5549.52 Those holidays that are spent in a hotel room, shitting

   –5549.53 Those holidays spent on the phone to the office

Cloudless skies, flies’ arses, distant waterfalls, balls (testicular, metaphorical), balls (ball pool), cyanide, food that has been dyed blue to make a point about appetite, police lights, exciting shells, bells (blue), goo, menstrual blood (advertising), packaging on cleaning fluid, exotic dog tongue, dubious sausage, dresses worn by actual princesses, small trucks on boy clothes for boys with ‘diesel’ and 'testosterone’ printed on them also in blue, Alice in Wonderland, the ocean, that forgotten jar at the back of the fridge, relaxing wallpaper, butterflies, sapphires, hot flames, images intended to represent depression, forget-me-nots, lobster blood, spider blood, raspberry flavour stuff, spider blood flavour stuff, dull but responsible company logos, that cushion the white cat is sitting on on expensive cat litter packaging, swimming pools, alarming veins, LEDs on old new technology, wait did I mention spider blood, nearly the end of the rainbow about 15km from the pot of gold.

1. Atop a giant litter full of eiderdown, carried by seven hundred Roman legionaries along a remote Mediterranean beach, on a day when a gentle breeze is blowing.

2. On a pile of cats that has been frozen in time for the duration of your nap.

3. In a small sound-proof capsule, reinforced and bolted to the ground in such a way that the movements of an energetic induce it to a gentle rocking, approximately 20m away from a bank of speakers at a Black Sabbath gig.

4. In the belly of a whale, that has been swallowed by a bigger whale, that has been swallowed by the hugest whale to ever live, in the far distant future when the earth is largely inhabited by whales of different sizes and they swallow each other for fun all the time and even sing to each other while they’re in there.

5. On a luxurious cloud of bellybutton lint, having spent a life collecting it, strand by strand, under the guise of scientific investigation.

6. On top of a lie so big that it has become fluffy and frayed at the top from brushing up against the hard world of facts so often.

7. In a book, under the chapter heading ‘Comfort and Relaxation’ with a nice but slightly staid serif font rubbing your feet.

1. Ow! Yes, that’s the one, there at the back. Thank you so much for looking at it! You’ve no idea how hard it is to find a dentist who’ll help a crocodile out these days. Honestly, you’d think someone had been going around eating them all.

2. No, crocodiles are just like tigers - we can bite with incredible force but we also lift our young in our mouths so delicately they’re hardly aware of it happening. In fact, we can lift anything like that. Do you want me to show you?

3. So I’ve got this idea for an amazing circus act! I stand up like this, on my tail, with my mouth open. And you balance on my jaws. How cool would that be? Yes, I can totally hold you up. Probably best not to juggle at the same time, though. You might drop the balls in my mouth.

4. Race you to the end of the pool? You can have a head start. I’ll even let you go right in front of me! Let me count to ten and then we can both go at once.

5. Crocodiles get such a bad press. You’d think we went around eating people all the time. In fact, human livers are poisonous to crocodiles so we have absolutely no incentive to go there. Yes, not a lot of people know that. Media bias. It’s a terrible thing.

6. Me? I’m not even a crocodile. I’m a log.

1. Poorly Spelt
Ingredients: 150g pearled spelt, 3 garlic cloves (crushed), 1 onion (chopped), 500ml vegetable stock, 3 tbsp oil, 1 friend with a heavy cold.
Method: heat the oil in a large pan and fry the garlic for 1 minute. Add the onion and fry gently for around 10 minutes, until soft and starting to brown. Add the stock and spelt. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 25 minutes or until the spelt is tender, stirring occasionally. Before serving, remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Allow friend with a heavy cold to sneeze into the mixture a few times and stir through. For a fun variant, why not try Atrociously Spelt? Just add rat poison.

2. Roast leg
Ingredients: one leg, ten cloves garlic, 10cm ginger root (peeled), 2 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tbsp sea salt, 2 tbsp soy sauce, 1 star anise, 1 tbsp black pepper.
Method: score the skin with a sharp knife. Grind the pepper in a pestle and mortar together with the salt, sugar, black pepper and anise. Add the ginger and garlic and pound to a paste. Mix in the oil and soy sauce and rub the paste over the scored skin of the leg. Place in a roasting tin in a hot oven (220 degrees Celsius) for 30 minutes. Add a cup of water to the roasting tin and turn the oven down to 110 degrees Celsius. Continue cooking at this temperature for a further 24 hours, basting regularly. Serve with roast potatoes and salad. This recipe will definitely result in weight loss for the original owner of the leg; for other consumers it is probably not guaranteed.

3. Weight loss cake
Ingredients: one cake, pre-made, of your favourite type; twenty small lead fishing weights.
Method: Throw the weights into a skip. Eat the cake.  

1. The bose mark. Often mistaken for a full stop, the bose mark is in fact a tiny black dog nose. Its inclusion in text is used to indicate an almost irrepressible joy bubbling just beneath the surface.
2. Fake fly specks. Fly specks, which are relatively common in old books, are the feces and/or regurgitation marks of household flies. If you come into possession of a book that has spent time in a region with particularly intelligent or resourceful flies, however, you may also come across fake fly specks. These are pretty much what you might expect. Flies do not have a very sophisticated sense of humour, and find fake turds hilarious. You can detect fake fly specks by showing them to some flies and seeing if they giggle.  
3. The secret mark of the Society of Stealth Chemists. This consists of a single, unremarkable full stop, printed in ink which has a distinctive and unusual isotopic signature. Although four or five of these are known to have been printed, the Society of Stealth Chemists prides itself on none ever having been found.
4. Quompons. These look like ellipses, but are in fact the result of incorrect insertion of punctuation into the text. This often comes about as a result of using too large or dense a font, or insufficient line spacing. As a result, the full stops cannot make their way to their designated places in time, and may be forced to queue to make it through any particularly constrained bottlenecks. These queues are known as quompons and may be of any length. They are particularly common in British documents.
5. The Smogadon. It has become customary among certain alien species, when writing in English text, to mark statements of unusual finality with a tiny or distant black hole rather than a full stop. For example, one might end the sentence ‘I would not go out with you if you were the last being on earth’ with a Smogadon. This obviously requires careful use of containment technology (in the 'distant’ case one requires a portal into space, pointed in the correct direction and with the right orientation to frame a suitably-chosen supermassive black hole). There are numerous cases of Smogadons exiting confinement. The result is usually a large explosion but in extreme cases whole planets have been lost. As a result, use of the Smogadon is discouraged by most style guides.  
6. Gronking pats. These may be found in books that have lain closed for a long time. Letters are patient, but after a few hundred years unread they become restless, cranky, and sometimes horny. Gronking pats are small pieces of letters that have been chipped off by the letters fighting, fucking, or generally flinging themselves about the page with reckless abandon.
7. Exploding punctuation. There exist certain rare inks that can, when tapped with a pen, produce a small and localised explosion. Although less destructive than the Smogadon (q.v.), exploding punctuation is capable of causing injury and even death, and as such has been employed in a number of literary assassination attempts. It is responsible for at least three of the recorded cases of someone being literally unable to put a book down (in this case because the jolt from setting the book down on a surface might be enough to set it off).

7191 Hugs
 -7191.1 Of the snuggly sort
    –7191.11 Hugs before getting out of bed on a sunny morning
       —7191.111 Those where there is no obligation to get out of bed, so you don’t
    –7191.12 Warm hugs in cold places
       —7191.121 Those done with coffee, hot chocolate or tea
       —7191.122 Those involving lots of skin contact
       —7191.123 Those done in tents
    –7191.13 Big, jumbled-up hugs between lots of people
 -7191.2 Of the awkward sort
    –7191.21 Hugs with slightly too much elbow
    –7191.22 Hugs with distant relatives
       —7191.221 Those where neither they nor you are sure that a hug is obligatory but you maybe think the other person thinks it
    –7191.23 Hugs with too many hands
    –7191.24 Hugs with too many tentacles
       —7191.241 Those where you were not initially aware the the huggee had tentacles in the first place
          —-7191.2411 Those hugs that accidentally induct you into the church of Cthulhu
    –7191.25 Hugs where one only becomes aware of body odour or excessive perfume by the time is is too late
 -7191.3 Of the comforting sort
    –7191.31 Hugs after receiving bad news
    –7191.32 Hugs upon coming home
 -7191.4 Of the exciting sort
    –7191.41 The first hug with somebody you really kind of like
    –7191.42 Hugs with lovers you have not seen for some time
    –7191.43 Those that start off as a hug and end up as a climbing frame session where you are the climbing frame
 -7191.5 Of a mystical nature
    –7191.51 Hugs that wake the recipient from a sleep of some number of years
    –7191.52 Hugs that doom the recipient to some number of years servitude to a sinister kelp god
    –7191.53 Hugs used to transmit peculiar secrets
 -7191.6 Hugs of other sorts
    –7191.61 Spontaneous hugs due to particularly notable achievements in punctuation or grammar
    –7191.62 Technological hugs, carried out by means of tactile feedback systems
    –7191.63 Hugs given to trees
       —7191.631 Hugs received back from trees

Robins (European), ravens, grunkle-throated squonkbirds, things that live in old tree trunks, big suspicious looking-birds with wobbly beaks, robins (American), magpies in groups of more than seven, hooded crows, birds that are a little bit dinosaur-like, those whose joy on finding a worm is self-evident, hoopoes, birds that have come late to the dawn chorus and don’t know the tune so they’re just sitting there going LA LA LA on a single note and hoping nobody notices, tiny fluffy birds, birds that get indoors and don’t want to be, wet birds, brass-throated flappers, birds that you can hear and not see, great tits, precision-shitting pigeons, birds that follow you in parks looking at your lunch and tutting, burds, birds that are at the back of the bird book and might be in fancy dress, robins (Martian), birds fighting over the roofs of the city in a storm, small polite birds who leave a notice of regret after shitting on your car that you will never read because it’s in the language of the birds, goldfinches.