Listing to Port

1. The clouds are low and thick near to the edge of the world, and a determined person may climb up into them and squelch around (although it is very wet up there and there is not much of a view). There are several species of trees that grow upside-down, reaching roots into the air in the hope of snaring a passing cloud.

2. The houses at the edge of the world are low and made of light wood, and when the wind rolls in from the edge they sometimes lift up and float; a stout rope being required to make sure that they do not blow away. They say the people who live there have light bones, like birds, and their skin is very dark.

3. Some days the forests catch all the clouds, and on these days the sun is bright and low and fierce and burning, and the beaches and deserts of the edge-world are a syrupy pinky-gold in the light and too hot to walk on.

3. There are birds who fly out to the edge of the world and keep on going, as if they have set their compass by a distant star. These birds never come back, but fortunately there are enough birds in the world to bear their loss.

4. There is an ancient postal service there which uses trained turtles to carry letters. In theory, I believe, one could send a postcard to the edge of the world and back, although it would need a sequence of addresses to make it though all the postal systems in between.

5. The mountains out there, such as they are, lean away from the edge. They have the appearance of low and worn teeth. Sometimes, when the edge-wind blows particularly strongly, rocks roll up their slopes and launch into the air from their summits.

6. Sometimes the earth creaks on its unnatural axis, out by the edge, and the sound is deafening. Great flocks of tawny gulls rise up from the beaches when this happens, and circle over the edge-waters (which are shallow and fast-running) for a day or more until they feel it is safe to land again.

1. Aethelbert’s Torr. This is a negative tower, that is to say, it reaches down into the earth rather than up into the sky, and it is of great antiquity. It is most often encountered in dreams, in various forms. The most common is the dream-trope of a familiar building with extra structures, in this case the extension of a staircase or lift shaft down into the earth beyond its usual limits. Aethelbert’s Torr is thought to have originally been associated with dreams of barrows and mortuary houses, but has diversified into many other forms over the many years of its existence. However, there generally remains a suggestion that something dead may be in its unusual depths.  
2. The Tower of Dornock’s Drift. This otherwise-unremarkable tower has been noted as standing on cliffs overlooking the sea in several old chronicles. When cross-referenced, however, it is notable that at least ten different cliffs are mentioned; and no tower, or remains, are visible at any of those locations. There also remains a curious account of a hermit at Beachy Head that the tower was seen to rise into the sky on a pillar of flame on New Year’s Eve, but had returned the next day.
3. The Necessity Lighthouse. The necessity lighthouse is an odd enigma. It only appears in moments of uttermost darkness; although some of its features seem to suggests that it was intended to appear to those on states of deep spiritual or emotional trouble, it has only been observed in literal states of lightlessness. Thus those in trouble in caves, shuttered rooms at night, or in some cases out on very cloudly nights have occasionally seen its distant beams. Its appearance has also been reproduced in the laboratory in a specially-designed light-free chamber. There are thus some who hypothesise that the necessity lighthouse is in fact just an illusion caused by the eye’s reaction to complete darkness. Less well known is that the subject of the lighthouse experiment claimed to have been able to approach the lighthouse and walk round it, noting the phrase ‘You can do this’ in purple paint around its lower levels. The subject was not observed to move during the experiment.
4. Many examples of clocks featuring elaborate automata, donated by Western emissaries during the Qing dynasty, may be seen in the hall of Clocks in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Less well-known is the Clockwork Tower, a somewhat over-elaborate but fully-inhabitable mechanical tower with many fascinating automatic features. It is thought to have been a gift from a rather over-enthusiastic Venetian noble in 1760. As well as extending, in a not-at-all-phallic way, from three stories to seven at the push of a button, the clockwork tower was also able to scuttle sideways on ten mechanical legs. Observers described it as looking a little like a top-heavy crab. Unfortunately, one day it managed to scuttle right out of beijing and was never seen again. One assumes it must be hiding out somewhere in the Chinese countryside.

1. Consider a perfectly spherical cow of 1 metre diameter and uniform density. This cow needs milking. How are you going to do it?

2. I am pointing a 15 MW laser at the back of your head right now. No, don’t turn around. I’m not asking you to solve this problem, I’m just suggesting that you do have a problem here and asking you to acknowledge it. I probably won’t turn the laser on.

3. Derive Maxwell’s equations. To do this, you will need to use the fundamental constants pi and c. Note: both of these constants are hungry and one of them needs a wee. Your derivation will probably proceed much more smoothly if you can sort out their needs first.  

4. Consider two trains of mass m speeding towards each other. Train 1 is travelling at 50% of the speed of light, and train 2 at 20% of the speed of light. You are a passenger on train 2. Roughly how much energy will be released when they crash, and don’t you think you’d better find a way to get off before answering this question?

5. You are in a Hollywood film in which Love is postulated as the fifth fundamental force. Derive a plausible extension of the Standard Model of particle physics to include the Love Force, based on its observed effects at a macro level (flushed cheeks, hormonal release, last-minute assignations in airports, etc.).

1. Doris Fnorling-Burteley, 1811 - 1920, is mainly known as the first person to explore Woking. Admittedly many people were there living there first, but this did not stop Doris, whose single-minded devotion to surveying the town resulted in a gorgeous compilation of charts, anthropological studies and illustrative plates known to scholars as the Woking Chronicles. A small plaque near Woking Crematorium celebrates her life and works.
2. Sir Audsley Stephenson, 1820 - 2980 (non-consecutive). Sir Audsley is a curious figure, thought to have been inducted into the secrets of time travel by an inter-temporal jewel thief who he caught and seduced in the act of trying to steal his ancestral opals. Although a keen reader of traveller’s tales, Sir Audsley was an almost obsessive refuser of spatial travel. Some have speculated that he experienced motion sickness of unusual severity. Instead, Air Audsley explored his West London mansion and grounds through time, initial concentrating on a single temporal dimension but subsequently making excursions in several others. Unfortunately, nearly all of his works are classified documents and many are considered too pornographic for general consumption. After his death, a selection of monographs were declassified under the strict understanding that they must not be transported back in time. A small detatchment of the neo-Venusian time police in 3011 was dedicated to shadowing Sir Audsley and his works and eradicating the many paradoxes his careless time travel created.
3. Jane Cook, 1831 - 1871. Mrs. Cook was an otherwise unremarkable Victorian housewife who dedicated her life to exploring maps; that is to say, many hours of her time were spent with a magnifying glass, paper and pencil, obsessively documenting the minute ridges, furrows and flaws across her well-worn map of central York to create a new map at double-scale. Subsequently, she mapped her double-scale map and the resulting quadruple-scale map, returning to this exercise another five times before being crushed by a mound of stray paper at age 40.
4. John ‘Cartophage’ Russell-Johnson, 1837-1920. If his tales are to be believed, John Russell-Johnson single-handedly accomplished many of the greatest feats of exploration of the Victorian era, including navigating the Northwest passage, reaching the North Pole, and the discovery of a lost city in the Amazon rainforest.  Sadly, however, his persistent habit of eating his maps, documents and usually shoes when faced with adversity on the return journey means that no documentation or proof of his exploits is available.

1. Think of a number, any number. Add four, and multiply by two. Subtract six. Divide by two. Subtract the number you started with. Now, what do you end up with?
2. There was a number that was caught in a maze, very like the one just constructed, and had to eat its way out. It was a dangerous process, costing an amateur mathematician three fingers and a chunk of thigh meat.
3. The mathematician was stitched up by a doctor at the tallest hospital in the world, which had just been constructed. It was twice as tall as any other building in the world, and one could look down from its upper floors at clouds passing by. All the staff at the hospital were new and none of them knew their way around.
4. The doctor got lost on his way home and had to sleep in a broom cupboard in the kidney department. He had a dream about being served a meal of purple food by a mysterious veiled woman. It would have been such a good dream, if only boiled beets, candied violets, red cabbage, blackcurrants, roast aubergines and plums had had some kind of joint flavour affinity.
5. The woman closed the door of the dream and took off her veil. Then she poled her boat along the river to the next dream she was contracted to appear in and put on a great cloak of peacock feathers. It was a dream for an aging judge, who was to be bent double in a box and whispered to.
6. The judge, however, was late for her dream, because it was snowing that night and the traffic around London had tied itself into a historic knot. It was the sort of knot that one gets in sewing thread, requiring only gentle pulling (or in this case, the movement of a single, unremarkable car) to undo. But nobody had the wider perspective to see this, so it remained in place all night until a squadron of police officers painstakingly cut and unravelled the thread elsewhere.  
7. The road’s four lanes became a silent, black-and-white maze of snowy vehicles, navigated by blanket-wrapped figures. The driver of the car at the heart of the knot spent the night with twenty other drivers who had decamped to a nearby lorry with a heating system. They played cards all night and thought up increasingly ridiculous terms for snow. Hey, said the lorry driver, as dawn began to break. Think of a number.

Heart’s Ease, 1596

A pair of twins, Diana and Francisca, are separated at birth when the ship they are travelling in is wrecked. Diana is found on the shore by Antonio, a servant to the Duke of Milan, and is brought up in the Ducal household. Here she attracts the eye of Lorenzo, the Duke’s heir. To flee his unwelcome attentions, she dresses as a boy and rides out to the country, where she enters the service of Silvio, a mysterious gentleman who is searching for treasure. Meanwhile, Francisca is brought up as a shepherdess by Balthazar, a humorous shepherd. Antonio heads after Diana, but is forced by a storm to lodge with Balthazar overnight. Francisca spies on Lorenzo from the hayloft and, in a famous speech, waxes lyrical on his manly beauty. The next day, Lorenzo catches up with Diana and observes her new-found devotion to Silvio. Catching her alone, Lorenzo threatens to reveal Diana’s disguise to Silvio unless she sleeps with him. Weeping, Diana flees out onto the moor where she falls into a pit. Francisca, who is out rescuing sheep that have been stranded by the storm, rescues Diana. To maintain her disguise, Diana flirts awkwardly with Francisca, but Francisca confesses that she is already in love with Silvio and cannot love another. Diana tells Francisca that she can arrange for her to marry Silvio, despite her low birth. Then she goes to Silvio and tells him that she will sleep with him, but they must be married first, and that due to her extreme modesty she must be veiled during the marriage and couple in darkness. Needless to say, Francisca is substituted during the event. Meanwhile, Silvio encounters Balthazar on the moor and is intensely irritated by the shepherd’s weak puns. When Balthazar  mentions that he found Francisca in a shipwreck, Silvio realises that Francisca may be one of the long-lost daughters of his master, the Duke of Florence, and that the treasure he seeks may be in the shipwreck. Both daughters, he says, shared a star-shaped mark on their upper arm. Diana, realising that she is Francisca’s lost twin, reveals her disguise and origins. Francisca and Lorenzo arrive and it is confirmed that Francisca also shares the mark. Silvio and Diana return to Florence to be married, whilst Balthazar delives a final humorous monologue about love.

Richard I, 1596

A heavily-fictionalised account the life of Richard I. The first act covers his conquest of Cyprus, ending with his marriage to Berengaria of Navarre. In the second and third acts a rather brief account of the Third Crusade is given, with Saladon as the main antagonist. The rest of the play covers Richard’s shipwreck at Aquileia, capture by Leopold V, ransom and eventual release. The play is mainly notable for a lengthy speech by a random soothsayer, foretelling the ascent to the throne of Elizabeth I and prophesying that she will be basically the best ruler ever.

Pastime with Good Company, 1611

Three sets of twins arrive in Venice at the start of the Carnival season. Lucio and Roderigo have entered into a drunken bet that they will dress as women; both will try to win the hearts of carnival-goers, and they will meet at the end of the day to judge who has been most successful. Meanwhile, Helena and Maria have dressed as each other in order to circumvent some rather complicated legalese related to an inheritance. Unfortunately, since they are identical twins, no-one has yet noticed. Meanwhile Claudio, who is the rightful Duke of Padua in disguise, and Lucetta, his twin sister, are fleeing the usurpation of the Dukedom by Liono. Arriving in Venice, Claudio sees Roderigo dressed as a girl and pretends to be immediately smitten, although in reality he wishes to woo her in order to keep an eye on Lucio, who he suspects of being Liono’s maidservant. Roderigo, playing along with the conceit, agrees to wed Claudio and preparations are made for a wedding banquet that evening.  Claudio orders Maria, who he believes to be a local baker, to construct an enormous cake. Helena, who has dressed as Maria dressed as a boy in the hope of attracting notice to her disguise, is approached by Lucetta, who suggests that, given her dainty resemblance to a girl, she should dress as one to mess with Claudio. Meanwhile, Maria pretends to have taken poison and dies, for no readily apparent reason. Roderigo, who is distraught at this happenstance, having fallen in love with her when they shared a brief exchange of puns earlier, attempts to fling himself from the Campanile. However, he is inexplicably saved by falling into Claudio’s enormous cake, which is passing by underneath on its way to be delivered. Meanwhile, Liono, who has also ridden to Venice, delivers a passionate speech about his decision to abandon the other Thundercats for a life of evil, whereupon Maria punches him and he falls in the canal. After a scene of heated discussion, everyone agrees that this is all so confusing they should just go for a beer, pick lots as to who marries who, and then go home.

Thy Mother, 1587

Little is known about this early comedy, which is probably for the best.

0092 Geometry of food
  -0092.1 Simple blob forms
    –0092.11 Spherical
      —0092.111 Meatballs
      —0092.111 Berries
        —-0092.1131 Edible
        —-0092.1131 Used to poison the diner
      —0092.113 Assorted spherical items of gastrowankery
        —-0092.1131 Pearls
        —-0092.1131 Ravioles
        —-0092.1131 Spherical plates which have to be broken to access the food
        —-0092.1131 Room-size sugar spheres in which the diner is imprisoned
    –0092.42 One long dimension, two short
      —0092.421 Sausages
      —0092.422 Eggs
      —0092.423 Chips
      —0092.424 Beans
    –0092.43 Two long dimensions, one short
      —0092.431 Burgers
    –0092.44 Other
      —0092.441 Deliberately contrary meat products
  -0092.2 Triangular forms
    –0092.21 Sandwiches
    –0092.22 Triangular eggs
    –0092.23 Other food shaped into triangles, for the dedicated and persistent eater of triangles
  -0092.3 Square, rectangular and cuboid forms
    –0092.31 Sandwiches (unsliced)
    –0092.32 Custard creams and similar biscuits
    –0092.33 Melons that have been grown in glass cubes
    –0092.33 Fudge, gajar halwa, flapjack and other sliced things
  -0092.4 Food of irregular shape
    –0092.41 Steak
    –0092.42 Broccoli
    –0092.42 Other
  -0092.5 Food of uncertain or amorphous shape
    –0092.51 Jelly
    –0092.52 Mists and foams
       —0092.521 Indistinguishable from actual weather
  -0092.6 Complex or architectural shapes
    –0092.61 Food sculptures
       —0092.611 Little people made of butter
       —0092.612 Little people made of sugar
          —0092.6121 Perched awkwardly on top of cakes
    –0092.62 3D printed forms
    –0092.63 Edible chairs
    –0092.63 Edible hats

1. Twattorama, 10:20 - 11:00, Channel 4. Each week, a random member of the public is chosen from the electoral rolls. The program proceeds to make the case, via a series of leading interview questions, selective editing and dubious use of statistics, that their subject is the worst person alive. Twattorama is the subject of a number of pending lawsuits, but remains inexplicably popular amongst people who are sure that they are not the worst person alive.  
2. Polar souffle, 10:00-10:50, BBC2. A group of experts in different fields are locked in a room with a random selection of equipment. They have 50 minutes to prove the existence of the Arctic before the floor drops open and they are deposited in a bath of blue gunge. Note: the floor opens whether they are successful or not; this is a scripted part of the show.
3. MetaChallenge, 9:20 - 10:00, Channel 4. Teams compete to devise a new reality show concept. Each week they face a new challenge: coming up with the idea, pitching it to TV executives, recruiting subjects for a pilot episode, etc. Viewers vote for the concept they would most like to succeed. At the end of the show, the most successful idea is commissioned.
4. The Great British TV Dinner Cookoff and Jigsaw Puzzle Challenge, ITV, 8:00 - 10:00. Participants compete on a number of Saturday night-themed activities, including: cooking a meal for a family of four to eat on the sofa; finishing a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle; getting the washing put away before bedtime; putting toddlers to bed in time to watch the program; etc. Anyone may compete. Indeed, the filming is almost entirely automated and one may choose the activities and participants one wishes to watch (there being many, many participants at one time) as well as acting as judges to rate their activities. As such, the program is something between reality TV and a really, really judgmental social network.

1. Socks that have been used as sleeping bags for adorable baby animals; particularly where one only finds out about this happenstance by plunging one’s toes into adorable baby animal shit.
2. Socks to be worn over other socks in a recursive manner, for when the weather is particularly cold and/or when one wishes to have spherical feet.
3. Socks that look like cocks, available only in larger sizes, for the less secure gentleman who really, really wishes people to be aware of what they say about people with large feet.
4. Socks which are marked out as limited-use by slogans such as 18 Today, or Happy New Year!, or suchlike, but which are nevertheless worn for general use.
5. Socks full of fabulous treasures, hung out in the mountains for dragons on the eve of the migration season. One may become amazingly rich or amazingly dead in the mountains on such nights.
6. Socks woven out of pasta. Typically capellini, although spaghetti can also be used. The frugal-minded may therefore either eat or wear them, depending on their current need. One may also wear them to futurist conventions, where I am sure they would cause a stir; or to go bathing in tomato sauce, where they would merely be moderately ridiculous.
7. Socks that will in fact annihilate in a deadly burst of energy if paired with a matching sock, and must therefore always be worn odd.

1. There is a mountain that has been entirely hollowed out by ants, but it is far enough away that no large creature has walked on it since. It is ready to crack like an egg, but maybe it never will.
2. Near the top of another mountain there is a damp meadow covered in coarse grass and a deep, clear tarn. It extends down into the rock, and the bottom is not visible because it is too dark down there, not because of any murkiness in the water. Somewhere far down and shimmering through the tiny ripples raised by the mountain winds one can see a sheep skeleton when the light is good.
3. There is a peak over which the clouds make faces and the sky is a staticy mess of visions. Although it is not high, one can never quite trust one’s senses up there. The world below looks rather flat, as if it were missing a dimension in the haze.
4. There is a pass where one can see down into a steep, stony valley that does not lead anywhere in particular. It would be folly to go down there, really; the way back up is steep and icy and there are sharp stones in the scree. But if you look at the far end it always seems that you can see someone running down there. Running and running, back towards the valley’s entrance, but never moving any closer, as if they were somehow disjoint from the physical world.
5. There is a high lonely moor and, in those months of the year when it is not covered in ice, one can see grassy lumps rising out if the boggy earth. If you were to look closer, you would see that they are old buildings; and that there are many of them, and some are the rotten stumps of great towers. But there is no record of any city having been there.
6. There is a black peak, but sometimes at dusk the birds rise off it and you can see that it is actually silver.  
7. Another mountain lies in a hot part of the world and there are seven lakes around its summit which are the most perfect turquoise. At the height of summer, great lilies grow on the lakes and the air is alive with tiny green butterflies. From a distance, however, all one can see on the mountain’s slopes is a forest of dead trees bleached white by the sun. It is not known what killed the trees and, as a consequence, the lakes are rarely visited.  
8. There is a mountain that extends up into the sky beyond the normal limits of the atmosphere to sustain life; I am not sure if it is on this or another planet. There were five explorers who climbed it and saw some kind of vision near the peak. I do not know what kind of vision. They discarded their life support equipment and formed their bodies into a kind of structure, where they promptly froze to death. Although other explorers have since ventured up there, it is unwise to go near the structure, which now consists of some thirty bodies: the original five, and a further twenty-five who got too close.  Observations from a distance suggest it is starting to look like some kind of temple.