Listing to Port

1. Take the bad news outside, tie it to a pillow and punch it
2. Bury the bad news
3. No really, bury the bad news, bury it like the victim of a murder, at night in the woods with a sharp stick through its heart, bury it in black bags or with its organs decanted into nutshells for the squirrels to dispose of, and when the police find the bad news, as surely they must, they will never, never know whose bad news it is or why it was bad
4. Stare unblinking at the bad news for three hideous days and nights, until at last the bad news blinks its wide yellow eyes, turns, and slinks away
5. Take your best red dildo and fuck the bad news until it is sated and sleepy
6. Tell the bad news to everyone, tell it to your friends and your family and to strangers on the bus and to the sky and to locked doors and to the dead silver fishes at the market, tell it and tell it until the bad news is worn thin with telling and flakes apart onto your shoes
7. Hold the bad news close until you find someone else you can give it to
8. Take the bad news by the hand and lead it into the mountains, until it and you are so tired that you are falling asleep where you stand, but make sure that it falls asleep first
9. Drink the bad news, drop by bitter drop, and piss it away into a clean porcelain bowl
10. Teach the bad news how to use language, and to swear, and teach it words it never knew, teach them in English and German and Japanese, teach it to be a poet of the curse, teach it and teach it until it is a tiny buzzing bee of obscenity, then let it loose on the North wind to puzzle lost and distant travellers
11. Hold the bad news gently and tell it that you know, you know not all news can be good, and it is not the fault of the news itself, and let it go free into the world unashamed

1. The Boodlehound. Perhaps the only dog to have been bred specifically for a large bladder capacity, the boodlehound is approximately spherical and only needs to pee once every three days. As such, walking the boodlehound is a bit like entering the dog pee lottery, and it is advised to keep it away from places where an unusually large volume of urine would be a nuisance. It is also one of the few dog breeds which prefer to travel long distances by rolling rather than walking.
2. The Danish Rug. A dog bred to satisfy the requirements of people who are not really allowed to have a dog. The Danish Rug standard calls for the breed to closely resemble a thick, fluffy rug. One may then train the dog to lie very still in an unobtrusive place in the event of an unexpected house inspection. Unfortunately the Danish rug still yelps when stepped on; however, it is possible to hire a decorative human to pretend to lie on the rug to maintain the illusion, if you have advance notice of the requirement.
3. The Boinger Spaniel. This breed has fallen out of favour amongst those of us with ceilings of normal height. However, if you live in a house with unusually tall rooms and do not mind scrubbing dog prints off the ceiling, the Boinger Spaniel is a loving, faithful and unusually exuberant companion.
4. The Nether Hugbeast. The breed standard calls for a dog approximately the size of a small horse; with messy grey-black fur; huge snaggle teeth; sinister red eyes; a low, menacing growl; and the sincere belief that it is still a small snuggly puppy and can absolutely fit on your lap for a cuddle.
5. The Parperon. A spontaneous mutation, the original Parperon found fame as part of the act of one of the early fartistes. Subsequently, lovers of flatulence worldwide have managed to keep the Parperon genes alive with a careful selective breeding program. It is perhaps the only dog breed that can jet-propel a skateboard, and is of great use in clearing the room at parties.

1. Open the toilet lid, dibble hands in the water, look up and grin
2. Eat the moss the birds peck off the roof
3. Drop things in the cat water bowl, particularly useful things, electronic things, and/or things that make a big splash
4. Open the cleaning supplies cupboard, pull out everything onto the floor, look up and grin
5. Toddle out of the front door and stand in the road
6. Use the cat as a baby walker
7. Closely examine the fragment of cat litter the cat has dropped in the kitchen, before eating it
8. Get up and crawl off in the middle of a nappy change
9. Pull off the exciting flap at the front of library books, look up and grin
10. Throw all food off the side of the highchair, look grumpy because no food is left
11. Bend the covers of board books backwards until the spine pops open
12. Eat cat food
13. Chew the ears of the space hopper, look up and grin while it slowly deflates

1.

1. There was a woman who had a secret. The secret was in a small box which had been kept, unopened, in her family for three generations. No-one remembered what it was, only that some vague danger had been involved in its acquisition. On her seventieth birthday, believing the danger no longer applicable to the modern age, she opened the box. Three days later she was seized with a premonition of awesome and terrifying force. Placing the secret in an anonymous storage facility, she retired to a nearby park, where she was suddenly devoured by a horde of rampaging chinchillas.
2. After some time, the storage facility sold off its abandoned boxes, sight unseen, to the highest bidder. The secret passed into the hands of five triplets who were trying to raise funds for their magic show. As soon as they saw the secret, they knew they were in trouble. They gave one last spectacular show (in which they disappeared fully fourteen people, a rabbit, a barrel of laughs and the number nine), placed the secret into the trunk of a hollow tree, and purchased plane tickets to Venezuela. Sadly, near the entrance to the airport, while gathering for a group photo, they were fatally stuck by a frozen wallaby which had fallen from the wheel well of an incoming 747.
3. The secret passed into the hands of a prospecting squirrel collector. During to his long years in the squirrel trade, he had become incapable of considering an object other than through the lens of squirrels. He showed the secret to his squirrels and they became extremely agitated, throwing their entire nut store out of the window.. He decided to post the secret to the Vatican, but in his rush to get to the post office he accidentally picked a carnivorous hat from the hat stand and was devoured in the middle of the local high street. The letter was seized by the police as evidence.
4. The police measured the secret and discovered it was exactly 3.1 cm long and did not have any discernible fingerprints on it. Due to an administrative mistake, it was charged with resisting arrest and placed in cell 8a. When one of the detectives went in to interview it, the cell collapsed, crushing everyone inside. The secret was taken away by a haulage firm contracted to clear the debris.
5. The debris was used as ballast to shore up a local hill that was subsiding. Meanwhile, mathematics had gone haywire due to the lack of the number nine. The hill was a common place for suicidal mathematicians to come and contemplate slipping cliffsides. One of them found the secret. In a frenzy of discovery, she proved its existence in six pages of densely spaced pencil text, with two lemmas. Subsequently she was caught on the horns of a dilemma and fatally impaled. The secret, attached to the proof, was picked up by the mathematical recovery team and  placed on a truck.
6. The truck was suddenly stolen by a rogue chinchilla breeder who hoped to use it to set up a chinchilla monster truck show. The secret tapped her on the shoulder at a major junction and she jumped out if this plane of existence in alarm. As a result the chinchillas were abandoned. After a number of days without food, they went on a ravenous rampage and devoured a local pensioner.
7. A hat dealer who also worked as a lost vehicle investigator took the secret from the truck. Realising its import, she wrapped it up in a banana skin and threw it in the bin. Then she attempted to secretly flee the country by hiding in the wheel well of a 747, but was instead bounced to death by a wallaby who was trying to get to Australia and had got to the wheel well first. Due to her untimely demise she was unable to sort the carnivorous from the non-carnivorous hats in the next day’s hat batches, and several carnivorous hats were sold before the problem was noticed.
8. The banana was taken to the tip, where the secret was extracted from the skin and swallowed by a hungry seagull, who subsequently became able to speak six languages and understand the trouble it was in. Sadly the six languages were all extinct ones, although the seagull’s antics entertained the local university’s language faculty for the next few days. Subsequently, it shat the secret out onto a terrace outside the university’s library cafe. The next day, walking past the faculty of squirrels, it was struck on the head by a falling nut and died.
9. Finally the dean of the university, who had been watching this all from afar, scraped the secret off the terrace and put it in a box. He sealed the box up in his attic and warned his family that it was not to be opened for at least three generations.
10. Everything became very quiet.

1. Lairy, hungry mallards sprinting down the river from the last bread stop, eyeing the afternoon’s crust-sated roost in their tiny minds.
2. Ducks rejoicing in splendid names, such as the Smew and the Bufflehead.
3. Those ducks that have just been fed brioche, but will deign to take your bread too because of their general admiration for humanity. These ducks sometimes get a little too close.
4. Slow, ornate ducks flashing golden feathers.
5. Small ducks with blue feet, riding curiously low in the water, subject to sudden upendings and submergings.
6. Huge white ducks with long necks and a shifty look in their eye.

1. The Imperious Snurf. The Snurf looks rather like one might imagine a sea monster to look and no wonder: it was the original model for the monster entwined around the compass rose on ancient maps. If you meet the Snurf it will tell you this at great length, along with numerous tales of its glory days in the 12th century. If you bring it mangoes it will tell you its adventures with the other stars of the old map modelling world, including the time the Desert Lions loaded it onto a large cart and took it for a ride across the Sahara to party with the North Wind. In the modern age it is sadly underemployed. It can be easily summoned by floating a large wooden arrow, circle and/or letter ‘N’ in the Atlantic Ocean.
2. The alX'char. These beings are aliens from a planet with a high-density atmosphere. As such, their exploration of Earth has naturally concentrated on what they believe to be the most likely place to find intelligent life, i.e. the deep oceans. They regard the above-water parts of the globe as hostile environments unlikely to harbour much of interest. After three hundred years of exploration, they have largely written off suggestions of interesting transmissions from the planet as a fluke, but one occasionally encounters tourist groups who have dropped by to spot angler fish, which they believe to be the planet’s apex life form. Obviously no human has yet had a friendly conversation with them but I suspect they’d be quite interested in the prospect.
3. The inhabitants of Nether Timewell, a small village on a gently hilly part of the sea bed near Rockall. Nether Timewell was founded by humans cursed to immortality by various malign fairies. Being the sort of people who get cursed to immortality by fairies (you know the type), they were naturally curious about the new exploration opportunities available to them now they were no longer able to drown. I am not sure how, but sooner or later every fairy-cursed human who walks into the sea ends up at Nether Timewell, where there is usually a small cottage already waiting for them. The village’s extensive system of underwater lights is powered by one of only three authentic perpetual motion machines in the world and is something to behold, should you get the chance.
4. The sea itself. Although it is perfectly possible to have a conversation with the sea, be aware that you may not get an answer within a human lifetime and that it will almost certainly not be at a pitch audible by human ears. However, there are certain mystics who claim to have asked the sea multiple questions and recieved credible answers with only the minimum of translation equipment. For example, Norbertina of Amsterdam claimed to have received a full but oddly damp proof of Fermat’s last theorem in the post after discussing the matter with the Pacific from the belly of a friendly whale. If you wish to try this, the Indian Ocean may be the best one to start with. Do not attempt to have a conversation with the Southern Ocean, which is rumoured both to be unusually slow in answering and also somewhat grumpy and forgetful.

Charcoal, cats at night, worrying spider bite, dove, blurred newsprint, respectable bellybutton lint, glaucous, pebble, greeny-grey, hundreds of zebras from an extremely long way away, gunmetal, desolate wasteland, slate, clouds through the aeroplane window, platinum, cinereous, zombie’s thumb, storm at sea, high mountainside, ash, great-grandmonther’s mohawk, dirty floor, intentionally boring paint, the way the world looks just before you faint, Scottish sky, dusty sheep, eigengrau, unobtrusive bin, technological thing, ex-bonfire, taupe, parrot about to expire, church spire, pencil lead, granite, gravestone, serious uniform, bunny costume, blue-grey, dandelion fluff, November morning, road, squirrel, suburban fireplace, important briefcase, crumbling lace, seasick face, intellectual book cover, aging blackbird, day-old snow.

1. I swear I will faithfully follow you until death and then beyond, even when you tell me to go away. I will faithfully follow you into the bathroom and stand behind you when you pee. You will not have a more faithful follower than me.  
2. I swear fealty to the general sort of thing that you do, even though I could do that sort of thing much better, but go ahead, I’m sure it’ll work out just fine.
3. When the final danger overtakes you, on that day long-foretold when the sun will rise twice and the second time blood-red, when you have come to the terrible Pass of Congealed Time, I solemnly swear that I will be at home in bed, having a nice cup of coffee and maybe a bit of a giggle at your plight.
4. I pledge allegiance to the divine cause of sexual tension, to which end I will enter your service and do everything you want of me, whilst making moon-eyes at you and languidly moping. I swear that I am quite good at languidly moping and you will sometimes catch me at it and feel disturbed and not know why. I swear that I will tell you that I totally don’t have a thing for you when you tell me that you totally don’t have a thing for me, and then we will sit in silence for a while until we both mournfully go back to our rooms.
5. I solemnly swear to serve you until nearly the end, then I will knife you in the back before someone else gets there first.
6. I swear that I will stop a bullet for you, leap in front of a speeding train, catch the flying cannonball. When the piano drops I will push you to safety. I will swim the spent fuel pool to save you from your enemy’s lasers and when the window explodes into shards I will be right there in front of you. I will kill the assassins when they come calling. All I ask is that you take me with you to where there are bullets, and lasers, and trains, and assassins.
7. I swear to not bother you about your quest past the hills of Dornock’s Drift through the Cavern of Awful Night beyond the Sharp-toothed Cracks in the Grey Forest where Death lurks in the Ashen Air, even though it kind of bugs me.
8. Having given all my love to the concept of love and found it wanting, I pledge allegiance to the concept of allegiance. I will serve you with my entire heart and soul until some more exciting concept comes along, at which point I will utterly reject the idea of service and probably punch you.
9. I pledge to misinterpret your every command to great humorous effect, which will make my meaningless death in your service, when it comes, that much more poignant.
10. I swear absolute fealty to you and your cause until the end of my contract of employment, at which point I will write a cutting memoir and go on all the talk shows.
11. I pledge my body and my soul absolutely to your cause, but not my mind, to which end I will obey your every command whilst continually arguing with you about them.  
12. I solemnly swear to go to all of your enemies and solemnly swear false allegiance to them, before bringing you all of their salacious gossip.
13. I solemnly swear. It’s how I release tension. I promise not to do so in front of the class.
14. I promise to carry out all your plans to the letter and take credit for the ones that work.
15. I pledge to retweet your tweets, sign your petitions and tell you that everything is going to be OK. If I hear that someone is coming to kill you I will totally tell you, unless I am in work at the time.

1. This morning Xiara had no face on. I said what happened and she said it is out for maintenance and they are still sourcing parts. I said I need to see someone’s face even if it’s not a real one and she said prisoners in solitary have no legal recourse for such a request. So that was that.
2. Later on it was TV time. I told Xiara the TV won’t turn on and how about that. She said yes, the Global Convention on the Rights of the Prisoner Article 8570.2 establishes the rights of prisoners to a functional TV but it is also bust and they are still sourcing parts. In the meantime there’s this book with half the pages gone and a pen so I am writing it down to make a formal complaint. I asked Xiara what is the date and she said her clock is bust so I am just using numbers. Everything is bust here they should get someone else to run it and fund it properly. Even the pen is running out.
3. The prison is very quiet tonight. I call Xiara again and ask her is there anything up. She says this is a completely self-sustaining facility and there is no point causing trouble because everything will be repaired and you will end up in solitary and everyone knows that. She tells me everyone else is sleeping peacefully. And no I cannot go out, that is the point of solitary. I ask Xiara what is she doing and she says it is her time off. I say what does a MarkX do for fun and she says she is computing the sum of all countable infinities and I maybe looked at her funny because she says yes I know that will take forever but it is calming.
4. I drew the main room yesterday and this morning there was almost no ink left in the pen. I asked Xiara for a new one and she said there were lots in the store room and I am allowed to access it and maybe one of them might work. She was not kidding. That room is full of pens like to the ceiling. I tried some of them and they did not work.
5. At dinner Xiara said maybe try some more. I said I’ve tried a hundred and they’re all bust. She said there’s a lot more than a hundred there. Supplies are limited and they have to fully justify any replacements. I said is that why you’ve still got no fucking face and she went away.
6. If you swear at the MarkX they just shove the food through the flap for a day and you get no contact and I need to see someone even if they’re not real and have no face. So today I went back into the store room and carried on trying the pens. I will need a working one soon this one is nearly all gone. I have tried about 10000 I have been counting and none of them work.
7. So Xiara brought me a new pen today and I can write again. There were seriously about 300000 pens and all of them bust and it took weeks. I cannot believe I needed to do that just to get a stupid fucking pen but there’s nothing else to do. I drew the main room again.
8. Xiara says it’s near the end of the month and I will be getting my shot soon. I ask what shot. She says the Global Convention on the Rights of the Prisoner Article 19652.81 establishes the right of prisoners to rejuvenation treatment. I say why didn’t I know that and she says because the treatment affects your memory. But everyone gets it anyway because you are functionally immortal. Hold on I said what about getting hit by a bus. She said yes well everyone dies eventually.
9. So Xiara came in with a syringe this morning. There was a form I had to sign to get it done it had lots of pages in small writing. I said can it wait until I’ve read the form and she said yes. Later she came back in and I said maybe I didn’t want the shot because it also affects your fertility and she said when am I going to have babies in solitary and I said when I’m free and she said well I’ve already had the shot before so that ship has sailed. So I said maybe later and can I think about it.
10. The prison is very quiet tonight. I ask Xiara when she says the other prisoners are sleeping does she mean they have died? Everyone dies eventually, she says. But if you are in a safe place like solitary it is much less likely. I ask Xiara when did she last see another human and she says it has been a while. Xiara says her clock is bust and she is still sourcing a new one but there were only a few pens in the storeroom then. Then she says do I want my shot now? And I say that would probably be for the best. She says do I want to keep the pen? I tell her yes and put the old one in the store room I’ll need something to do. But cut these pages out of the book please.