Listing to Port

1. Morning cup of coffee was slightly purple, wasted eleven minutes in futile investigation why.
2. Struck suddenly immobile by the beauty and wonder and terror of the world upon the first glimpse of spring trees in the sunlight, being only brought back to reality by distant birdsong some time later.
3. There was that closed door that you always walked past on the way here, the small black one, and today someone slipped out of it and you realised from the smoke and flames and the pitchfork that fell out that it was actually a door into hell, and you felt the need to inform the police that there was a door into hell on their local beat, and the nice gentleman on the phone did not seem to be taking the peril seriously so you had to argue for a while and that’s why you’re late.
4. Very realistic dream about getting here on time interrupted by alarm clock. Resulting false sense of security led to insufficient hurrying.
5. Delayed train.
6. After much study, you have determined that twelve minutes were mysteriously omitted from 1387, possibly the fault of the Cathars. Not many people know this. Have decided to stick to the correct calendar, i.e. with the twelve minutes added.
7. No excuse given, other than mysterious look.
8. Oh god, the fish!
9. Morning toast unexpectedly turned into a council of war with the Butter People, necessitating the making of more toast spread only with marmalade.
10. On the way here spotted a pair of capybaras having tea down a back alley. Had to investigate. Discovered a capybara cafe. Amazing! Here’s the address, you should try it.
11. Overslept.
12. Catastrophic dislocation in time leading to three frantic years attempting to get back to the present day while being chased throughout the ages by an irate crustacean named Jim. However, your sense of obligation to the current appointment was sufficiently strong that you managed to make it back here within twelve minutes of the scheduled time despite the personal and societal costs of doing so, including the impending consequences of selling your grandparents to mountain pirates in Laos, the introduction of a cocoa-destroying virus to Patagonia in 1200 likely leading to the elimination of chocolate from the world, and the notification of three alien species to the existence of Earth in the 21st century as a source of dental supplies. Nice to meet you, can I have a chocolate before they cease to exist?

Ranked in order of satisfactoriness
10. The crackly paper one finds filling the spaces within exceptionally large boxes which have been used to deliver much smaller items.
9. The scratchy, non-absorbent material, vaguely reminiscent of grease-proof paper, which was provided in British schools in the 1980’s for the wiping of the arse; to be stolen from a museum of historical bogroll, a vague and rambling ransom note being left in its place.
8. A page from any one of the ten billion sequential catalogues delivered to the door after the one-off purchase of a small item from the catalogue website; particularly if there is seemingly no way to cancel them.
7. An origami crane constructed from one of the many free newspapers remaining in the final carriage of a subway train in some major city, after it reaches the end of the line.
6. A slice of hand-slapped rye bread, served on a flat slab with some pate in a flowerpot.
5. The enormously expensive prototype version of a bendy, flexible and absorbent smartphone, to be launched in 2017 with great fanfare by some technology giant or other.
4. An artisanal, chemical-free, vitamin-enriched, nourishing washcloth, woven to an ancient pattern by Yorkshire peasants using flax and yak fluff from officially certified International Bathing Society sources, to be purchased from a high-end supermarket.
3. Rabelais’ list of things to wipe the arse with, printed on soft, absorbent paper by some online printing service or other.
2. A cloth woven from the fur of an outrageously cute kitten, the event itself being memorialised on the internet under the headline ‘This tiny kitten had all its fur cut off… what happened next will astonish you!’.
1. The silk sleeve of a billionaire’s slightly stained pyjamas, extracted from a London penthouse in the dead hours of the afternoon by a crack team of trained pigeons, said pigeons having also extracted a gold-plated bog-brush and a traumatised pug, leaving only a smattering of pieon-shit in their wake.

1. There was a Roman trading vessel that became gloriously, giddily lost; lost enough that it rounded Cape Bojador by accident and set off down the African coast in the vain hope of finding some sort of channel that would lead it home. Many of the crew jumped ship near what is now the border between Angola and Namibia. Those remaining, seized with a kind of wrong-headed fervour, sailed the ship on a direct course for Antarctica. Improbably, they made it; the ship froze tight in the Antarctic pack ice and, owing to the vagaries of the local currents, drifted until it was wedged between an ice flow coming down from the continent and a small island. In short order it was completely entombed in ice. The hold was full of clay jars of garum, which shattered by and by. A small, salty under-ice lake of garum formed, complete with its own garum ecosystem. Over time, things evolved there that had never been seen anywhere else. These days one may find the location by a small brown stain in the ice, if one knows where to look. Eventually the glacier will spit the ship out again into the unwelcoming sea, and the seals, all unknowing, will have a Roman banquet.  
2. There was a bus that began its service somewhere on the Atlantic coast of France; perhaps it was La Rochelle, I am not quite sure. Eventually it was sold a number of times, always to the East. It was if it had acquired a kind if travelling destiny. Purchasers began noticing and passing on this information, in initially flippant tones: you might want to keep this bus for a year and then sell it Eastwards, because that’s what all the other owners have done. It was seen in Vienna, then Bucharest, then Krasnodar; it spent a couple of years in the service of a private owner near Samarkand. Eventually the bus, which was increasingly decrepit, found itself operating a shuttle service between the small towns East of Vladivostok, right against Russia’s Pacific coast. Someone had painted the bus’s destiny in large cyrillic letters on the side: This Bus Goes East. But by this time no-one wanted to buy it, East or West. The owners, taking a kind of pity on the bus, drove it to a remote sea cliff, set their backs to the East, and pushed it off to finish its journey on its own. However, being a bus and not a living creature, it sank. I believe, however, that it has become a habitat for a number of fascinating sea stars.
3. There was an aeroplane that was bought by the lesser sort of billionaire, and he did not have any real use for it other than as a status symbol. Shortly after its purchase, indeed, he took his billions and retired to a small Caribbean island, where he mostly stayed inside and received massages. After a few years of this the billionaire developed extremely squidgy muscles and as a result became quite unhinged. Observing that massages are uncomfortable when one has sunburn, he set the aircraft to circling round the island with the hope of drumming up extra cloud cover, or at least a contrail or two. Eventually, he ordered the aircraft to stay up a little too long and it ran out of fuel and crashed. The records were falsified, of course; the paper trail leads to an empty spot in the Arizona desert. Some say that this has happened more than once, and that there is an island with a reef of dead aircraft around it, an island with a perpetual exhaust haze and the lingering smell of Jet A. These people are probably masseurs and you should give them an extra-large tip.
4. It is a little-known fact that there were dinosaurs who sent a probe into space; unfortunately, being a tiny nation obsessed with recycling, reusing and generally cleaning up after themselves, they left no fossils or anything else that could trouble the theories of palaeontologists. Indeed, the probe is all that remains. The cleanliness-obsessed dinosaurs invested its design with near-endless reusability. Eventually, after a good explore, it came to rest on Mars. From Mars, it watched the Earth convulse in the aftermath of a meteor strike; from Mars, it heard the last communication from its masters; and thereafter, from Mars, it sat and observed the silent Earth. Occasionally it slept for a few thousand years, or trundled about to find suitable minerals to mine to replace its aging components. I think at the moment it may be sleeping. Who knows what it will find when it wakes?

1. Gravity is a lie, a pernicious myth brought on by eating too many bad apples. The real reason the river flows to the sea is far more complex and more interesting. This is how it happens: there is a rumour among the dead that they can be set free by a Word. Perhaps the Word is the name of God, or a concept so large that all other concepts are knocked loose, perhaps only a sequence that undoes the lazy electricity of ghost-thoughts through the air. It is not a word that anyone knows as yet, but after all there are only so many words that can ever exist. The flow of water is a numerological experiment on a grand scale. If you could but see them! The billion ghosts of the world, hunched over the water with their fingers clicking out permutations, hastening the water down to its final end, where the long slow voice of the sea speaks the litany of discovered words out loud.  
2. In a way, it is odd that they do this. You see, mathematics is a lie, a lullaby of a clockwork cosmos sung to soothe our sleeping fears. The Knights Templar knew something of this in their mysteries, though it was never spoken aloud. Maybe it is just that ghosts have spent too long sleeping. In any case the ocean cannot speak. The tragedy of the ocean is that its thoughts cannot be expressed; and if it could it would have no equal to express them to. The only thing the ocean can do is a kind of wordless singing. But the songs of the ocean are outside human hearing. Sometimes, when the sun is bright, one may see them rising up like white wisps of mist from the water’s surface.
3. There is a great conspiracy that says that matter can change, and those who have this disease say that it is not songs at all, but water made into air. It is a rumour spread by physicists and fools. They say that clouds are water grown thick in the air. If they had but seen the clouds! As civilisations age, they become lighter, until they rise up from the earth. The clouds are the homes of the ones who came before us, but be sure that they will close the shutters when we come poking around in realms we are not supposed to be. The ones who came before them live in the moon, and it may be that they themselves have elders in the sun.
4. Biology too is full of lies, lies that slither though the ears and nestle, sated with the enormity of their deception, in the nether chambers of the heart. For be sure, there are beings that we cannot see. Beings that live at ninety degrees to humanity. Maybe we put them there with some accursed alchemy or other in the distant distant past. But being wedged at such an angle across reality, they cannot rise as the ones who came before have done; and that is why they cry when clouds pass over. There are those who can taste the bitterness of the rain, and perhaps they are the ones who come closest to knowing the plight of the displaced.
5. Alchemy is a lie, of course. It is a lie with stained fingers, which is both the best and worst kind. The ghosts of the world know this. And as time goes past and swells the ranks of the dead, the harder they work at shepherding the bitter waters down towards their great and futile engines of computation and the faster the rivers flow. The displaced watch them, and maybe they cry harder too. It is not hard to cry at the futility of the world and its great knit fabric, its mysteries and myths and conspiracies, and all of them lies.

1. Romeo and Juliet’s melancholy ghosts wandered blank-eyed and mystified through Verona until the twelfth day after their deaths, each believing themselves alone. Then a sudden shock of recognition flowed over the city as they passed through each other in the marketplace. For the next few days, the city lay sweating at night in spectral joy. The ghosts of Italy, swept up in a wave of theatrical passion, flocked to the city to fuck against the walls of their enemies and drift, sated, through their wine vats. Then Juliet’s ghost realised that Romeo’s ghost was not actually in love with her, but only with the idea of the ghost of the mystery of her; and Romeo’s ghost realised that Juliet’s ghost still picked her nose even though she was no longer capable of making snot, and was a little too fond of haunting the bedrooms of long-haired musicians; and each of them realised that the other was kind of annoying. Italy’s susceptible ghosts responded by initiating mystical punch-ups in the street and slapping dinner from tables in front of the mystified living. The season of spectral pugilism lasted for more than a month and made the city almost uninhabitable. Then Juliet’s ghost came to some agreement with the visiting phantoms of Rabelais and Chaucer, who had sensed that something literary was going on, and floated off in search of a different story. Romeo’s ghost subsequently took up with a succession of other deceased ladies. I believe that he currently haunts the toilet of a bar in Chievo, where he interrupts patrons mid-shit to grumble to them about women.
2. Chiron and Demetrius came to (in the spectral sense) in the remains of the pie that they had been baked in. Having gained some unusually intimate insights into pie and its construction, they became famed far and wide in the world of ghosts as pie experts. If one wished to haunt a pie, particularly if it was a large pie, they were the ghosts to consult.  If one wished to make a pie, they maintained a team of poltergeists to move ingredients around and light fires in the middle of the night. They are believed to be nearly entirely responsible for the season of hauntings in 1620 - 1670 which led to a sharp but temporary decline in the popularity of pie among the living. Subsequently, seeking new challenges, they moved on to haunting small pastries. These days they are often involved, when they can be raised (for they are rather old and sluggish ghosts by now) in making canapes of various sorts seem uncanny.
3. As is now well known, the ghost of Richard III ended up haunting a car park in Leicester. He was able to gain a small measure of satisfaction by manipulating susceptible drivers into clipping each other’s wing-mirrors and lying about it, but it is probably fair to say he was never truly happy about it.
4. The ghost of Othello stood pointedly in Iago’s cell, tapping his feet, until Iago was executed. Subsequently, Iago’s ghost woke to the sensation of being punched into the middle of next week. Thereafter Othello’s ghost and Iago’s ghost were separated by approximately half a week and so Othello was unable to complete his revenge. However, Iago’s ghost was plagued by nearly unendurable deja vu following his temporal dislocation and he ended up quite unable to plot any further villainy. Instead, he floats around Venice’s canals with only his nose above the water level, whimpering.
5. Hamlet’s ghost woke to find Fortinbras in charge. Having now been definitively usurped, he was not at all happy. He entered into a period of intensive vacillation, choosing a room in one of the castle towers for this purpose. The room became famous because one could not enter it without emerging, some hours later, with a vague sense that one had spent a lot of time overthinking something and failing to come to a conclusion. Several hundred years later, he emerged with a resolute look in his eye. His subsequent attempts to drop a sword on Fortinbras’s latest descendent all failed, however, as he was completely unable to interact with solid objects. In great frustration he hired Chiron and Demetrius to bake him into a pie which was served at the royal table, with the hope of thus investing the entire royal line of Denmark with extreme difficulty in making decisions. Unfortunately the pie was flipped out of the kitchen window by a careless poltergeist and eaten by dogs. The dogs of Elsinore are, to this day, unusually indecisive.

7099 Things beneath the surface of the Earth

-7099.1 Caves and their inhabitants

   –7099.11 The sandy-bottomed caves of containable peril and their gentle, bucolic tour guides

   –7099.12 Sea caves that are full of old stories washed smooth and round

   –7099.13 Those caves that have hidden depths

   –7099.14 Caves that draw you in with the siren song of one more crystalline chamber or cathedral arch or echoing shaft or treasure chest or sheaf of crumbling paper, the call of the ancient and unseen, and they never quite deliver but just enough to keep you going back and back and back and back again, and the cave sits at the back of your dreams, working your subconscious like a machine to find new ways to corkscrew round that final obstruction, and it whispers that you will die there and somehow this does not seem so bad

   –7099.15 Pale beings with wormlike fingers, counting up time with their heartbeats until they can come up

   –7099.16 It’s just a cave you guys of course we can sleep here tonight what’s the worst that could happen?

-7099.2 Basements, cellars and holes and their inhabitants.

   –7099.21 Dingy and depressing flats

   –7099.22 The secret basements of billionaires

   –7099.23 Nuclear bunkers

-7099.3 Tunnels for human use

   –7099.31 Subway systems

-7099.3 Tunnels for animal use

   –7099.31 Lairs, dens and suchlike

   –7099.32 Things that look like caves but are actually unusually large gullets

   –7099.33 Things that look like caves but are actually unusually large orifices (non-gullet)

-7099.4 Tunnels for the use of eldritch beasts

   –7099.41 Those that run beneath Washington D.C.

-7099.5 Underground lakes

   –7099.51 Those that glow with a sinister light

   –7099.52 Those into which you have just dropped your camera

-7099.6 Buried items

   –7099.61 Alive

   –7099.62 Dead

   –7099.63 Schrodinger’s zombie and its fascinating friends

   –7099.64 Treasure

   –7099.65 Cheese and butter

-7099.7 Magma and suchlike

   –7099.71 The stuff at the very centre of the Earth

1. Three mice who live in a postbox, eating postcards and scrawling ‘return to sender’ in blue biro on letters whose handwriting they dislike.

2. A mouse buzzing with conspiracy theories, lives in a distillery, puts on a tiny diving suit at night to delve into the vats where she believes some great secret is held. When the distillery office is closed she wriggles under the door and logs on to gmail to send long screeds in CAPITAL LETTERS to anyone with a likely e-mail address.

3. Some number of laboratory mice, perhaps fifty, who have, by dint of peering out of their cages at nearby computer screens, taught themselves a certain amount of biology and statistics. These mice have formed a small society, dedicated to gaming the results of mouse-based experiments; they send round tiny circulars full of instructions, such as 'turn LEFT then RIGHT then RIGHT again in the maze’, or 'wait TEN minutes, then press the button TWICE and look disappointed’. Everything is memorised and then eaten. They are believed to be the true architects beneath at least twenty peer-reviewed papers.

4. The mouse who ate Wales one night, but had fortunately left full instructions such that it could be reconstructed by the morning with most of the mountains in the right place.

5. The mouse that lived under the cat’s bowl for a giddy, perilous few weeks, emerging through a small hole at night to gorge on cat food whilst the cat slept on the bed.

6. Shakespeare’s pet mouse, name unknown. It is believed that this mouse was personally responsible for the majority of 'Two Gentlemen of Verona’. The effort required in committing pen to paper (primarily at night when the bard was asleep) so tired the mouse that he slept for more than three hundred years, before briefly waking to contribute three pages to 'Under Milk Wood’. I believe he is now asleep in a willow bower somewhere North of Wenlock Edge. He will probably not write for you, so don’t try it.

7. There was a mouse who got an exceptionally high score in Tetris, largely by wriggling under the blocks as they fell to flip them over at the last moment.

8. Twenty-nine mice who, by dint of forming a large pyramid, were able to operate a monster truck; this having been their dream for some time and their reason for becoming so proficient at mouse acrobatics. Sadly the truck was soon retrieved by the police. These mice have now moved on to a flight training school, where they peer myopically from loose simulator panels and formulate exotic dreams.

9. Two hundred and forty mice in the vicinity of Bangor, Maine, who meet on Thursdays to eat butter and refine their Theory of Everything. These mice have had exceptional trouble in keeping up with the scientific literature, but are occasionally able to get printouts of papers through the post from a rogue capybara in Peru. It is a frustrating life. Certain of their number tried travelling to Harvard to attempt to sneak into conferences, but after an incident in which three mice got overexcited and tried to punch a Professor who they felt had made inappropriate remarks about the cosmological constant, they have largely kept to their own little thicket in the woods.

1. The ability to actually herd actual cats.
2. The ability to know what other people are thinking, but only in the specific case that they are thinking about going for dessert.
3. The ability to take long road trips without needing a toilet break.
4. The ability to eat dubious and ancient leftovers from the back of the fridge without getting sick.
5. Can leap medium-size hurdles in a single bound.
6. The ability to fly and walk through walls, but only when asleep.
7. Amazing powers of detection in matters relating to euphemism, innuendo and puns.
8. Can shave yaks in record time.
9. The ability to tickle yourself.

1. Pair of (probably?) socks, approx 2m long, red wool. Found drifting in space by object cleanup.
2. Jar of long white worms, approx 80cm in height, in some kind of jelly. Strong odour. Have been informed these are a delicacy on New Titan.
3. Two pairs false teeth. First pair thirty teeth including eight of canine-type; second pair twelve teeth including four of canine-type. Seem to be matching: possibly belonging to a two-mouthed species or ceremonial parent-and-child set?
4. Small brown furry creature, approx 50cm long, with stripy tail. Very vocal. Unsure if lost property or lost property owner come to collect. Language (if it is language) unavailable in Universal Translator but have sent a picture of the creature to the developers with a request for inclusion in the next update.
5. Compete set of hypervenusian chess in four dimensions. Looks as if abandoned mid-game. Protrusion into third dimension mainly dominated by red and infrared pieces. Have requested assessment by chess expert as catastrophic dimensional energy release is possible if game left unfinished.  
6. Blue and yellow striped mitten, five fingers, probably belonging to human child. Left on wall in main lobby.
7. Basket of yellow eggs, slightly slimy. Believe these to be New Titan Crocodilian eggs, in which case leaving them in a public place is part of the life cycle and they have been incorrectly deposited here. New Titan authorities contacted for repatriation. Strong preference expressed for repatriation before hatching.
8. Portable nitrogen-sulphur atmosphere generator, approx 1m long, exterior chrome with art deco stylings. Currently sealed in isolation vault as faulty on switch is triggered by loud noises.
9. Small robotic exoskeleton, approx 90cm high, six limbs, probably belonging to one of the Kepler-442b species. Appears to be intelligent and is asking to claim asylum. Have sent request to hub legal centre regarding a) status as property or independent being, b) survivability of local conditions for likely owner without exoskeleton and c) our obligations under intergalactic quarantine law if owner is present in the shuttle hub.

1. Miss Helen Thirnwicket, London. Unlike the other librarians on this list, Miss Thirnwicket was not a natural adventurer. Rather, she was the unfortunate victim of a typo. Instead of signing on, as she thought,  as a librarian of Acton (West London) she found herself under contract to be a librarian of Action (no location specified). The local authority duly supplied her with a small mobile library and instructions to take it to perilous locations. Miss Thirnwicket dutifully hauled the library through a selection of mountains, caves, cliff faces and urban wastelands. Although she prided herself in introducing the works of the Bronte sisters to places they had not previously been, in practice very few withdrawals were made from the library, because many of her clients did not have the necessary ID on them to be issued with a library card. However her small store of Kendal Mint Cake and whisky soon became rightly famous among thrill-seekers.
2. Mr. Dalton Kingsbury, Charlotte. Mr. Kingsbury was unfortunate in inheriting a particularly rowdy library. The words would squeeze out of the books at night and gallop around the library floor, often leaving surfaces splattered with exclamation marks. Instead of wearily cleaning up the mess each morning, however, Mr. Kingsbury took a more confrontational approach. Each night he chased the wild words with a small net, often stuffing them back into the wrong books and locking them in. In later years he became famous as a word-tamer and wrote a number of extremely tightly-controlled books. He was never quite trusted by words, however. He died at age 45 after choking on a rogue ‘incarnadine’ that had somehow made it into his clam chowder.
3.  Omar of Alexandria, Egypt. That we do knot know more about Omar of Alexandria is testament to his unfortunate end. Omar was one of the last librarians to desert the Library of Alexandria before its destruction, and managed to save a number of books that had been thought lost. These included Berossus’ Babylonaica, the complete works of Hypatia, and a humorous book about cats thought to have been written by Sappho under a rather weak pseudonym. Having become obsessed with the idea that libraries were unsafe, Omar took to keeping these books under his pillow. As a result, he was unable to sleep well. Eventually he fell asleep on an elephant with the books under his arm, and both he and they fell into the Nile and were drowned.  
4. Mrs. Vera Hawthorne, Rye Central Library. Mrs. Hawthorne is famous for having gone to extraordinary lengths in chasing down a particularly obscure inter-library loan. As it turned out, the requested book’s entry in the British Library catalogue was in error, the book having been stolen by pirates in 1823. Undeterred, Mrs. Hawthorne joined a group of international literary vigilantes, tracked down the descendants of the pirates, and ascertained that the book had been abandoned when the pirates’ ship was beached on an obscure subantarctic island. After a brief course on sailing at the local marina, Mrs. Hawthorne set off to collect the book in a small dinghy, surviving due to her remarkable facility in making friends with dolphins. The book had been used as unconventional nesting material by a large colony of penguins but Mrs. Hawthorne devotedly reassembled it, before stowing away on an Antarctic Research vessel to bring the book home. Sadly, the original submitter of the loan request had passed away by this time, and the British Library declined to take the book back due to its strong odour of penguin guano. Instead, Mrs. Hawthorne took it home with the intention of reading it and possibly writing an autobiography. Nothing has been heard of her since. Interestingly, the original loan request is no longer available, so the identity of the book itself remains obscure.  
5. Dr. Loic Laplace, Paris. Dr. Laplace is the head librarian of the International Centre for Perilous Books in Paris, a combined library and safe house for books that have, through no fault of their own, been used as accesories to murder. The collection includes a number of curiousities that require particularly careful handling: books that have been treated witch contact poisons; those that are particularly large, heavy or spiky; books that have been hollowed-out to make space for weapons; and books that are highly radioactive. As a result, Dr. Laplace has been hospitalised sixteen times and is missing two fingers and half the hair on his head. It is a testament to his great love of difficult books that he perseveres. The Centre is entirely funded by donations; ten thousand euros is believed to be enough to obtain a no-questions-asked library card and certain specialised instructions from the staff.