Listing to Port

A Midnight Lunch of Antarctic Light for Hope In the Cold Winter Months
~Starter~
The murky light of eternal dusk that follows the last sunset of the Antarctic Winter, seen though a gathering snowstorm. To be served with the smell of fresh metal and lubricant, and the long slow creaking of things settling into ice.
~Main~
A selection of dim electric lights against the dark; reflected screen-light with the brightness turned down; flickering fluorescent tubes; CFL-light in the first few moments of warming up. To be served with the smell of hot dust and a low buzzing. Drinkers may request an ice core segment to suck on.
~Dessert~
The first silver, red or gold of the sun creeping over the horizon after the Antarctic Winter.  To be served with ice-cold, fishy air from the penguin colonies at Halley, and silence.

A Light Lunch for Those Who Have Made It
~Starter~
A selection of finely synchronised paparazzi camera-flashes, served with the sound of torrential rain and the smell of charred grass.
~Main~
Brittle beauty with a harshness behind it; an expertly blended mix of warm red-toned footlights taken from a gentle play starring a well-known comedian and searchlights seen through barbed wire. To be served with the smell of unusually greasy greasepaint and an uneasy silence.
~Dessert~
Midday Los Angeles sunlight, filtered through exhaust-laden air and a pair of closed red curtains. To be served with the smell of spilled gin and bleach, snoring, and the sound of a distant hoover.

A Light Feast
~Starters~
Rose-gold dawn light captured from the flank of K2 after a night spent unexpectedly at altitude. To be served with the song of larks and a blast of icy air that freezes the nostril hairs.
To be followed by:
Two minutes of the dull brownish light that precedes an enormous hailstorm. To be served with the sound of a dripping tap.
~To cleanse the palate~
Five minutes of dappled sunlight from the floor of a Norwegian pine forest. To be served with the smell of warm pine needles, peppercorns and green mango, and the gentle soughing of a light wind through thousands of trees.
~Main~
The syrupy light of an American afternoon over a huge cornfield. To be served with the smell of bruised cherries and warm leather, and the sound of drowsy bees.
~To cleanse the palate~
Five minutes of moonlight, filtered through the air of a cold, clear winter’s night; to be served with the smell of oncoming snow showers.
~Dessert~
Fifteen minutes of neon light, freshly harvested from the streets of Tokyo after dark. To be served with the smell of sugar doughnuts.

Bedlington’s Bed Bedding Day, first overcast Saturday in spring
We celebrate Bedlington’s Bed Bedding Day by spending an extra ten minutes in bed, during which time we give thanks for pillows, duvets and all the other soft enablers of lovely, lovely sleep.

Owl Day, no set date
The only certain thing about Owl Day is that it happens once a year for each person; but the day it happens for each person may be different. Nor is there any set celebration. One simply wakes up and realises that it is Owl Day. The rest of the day is slightly enlivened by the knowledge that this is a special day, though it may not be different in substance to any other day. The link to owls is not known but is thought by some to be a reference to Athena.

Permission Day, June 5
Celebrants of this festival treat the 5th of June as if they had been given a set of permission slips from the Universe for the following activities: dressing up when there is no need, dancing like an idiot when someone might see, singing along to the radio, scratching their arses in public, and audibly farting.

Book smell day, August 2
On this day, participants attempt to get a good sniff of the oldest, whiffiest, crumbliest old book that they can. If your nostrils are not actually grey with old book dust, you have not celebrated book smell day properly. Likewise, if there is not an impending lawsuit on your head for breaking and entering and archivist bootmarks on your rear end, you have not really been trying. Some consider the ultimate achievement to be actually grinding down priceless manuscripts and snorting them in their entirety. Needless to say, book smell day has fallen out of favour with librarians and health professionals.

The Feast of the Teacup, November 16 (if rainy) or the first rainy day thereafter
This feast is usually celebrated by offering someone a cup of tea. At a pinch, you may offer yourself a cup of tea. If you do not like tea, you do not have to accept it. You do not even have to have tea in the house, really. The offering is the important part. Some celebrants consider the ritual instead to be the offering of the letter T, which is then drawn on some accessible part of the body. Once the letter T has been offered, the offerer should refrain from using it for the remainder of the day.

Contrariwise day, March 12
In recognition of all futile and ill-thought through acts of rebellion, we celebrate contrariwise day by turning all the toilet rolls we encounter to dispense in the other direction.

1. Horse Well, New Mexico. Always good to begin a trip out in the wild a little. Do look after that horse, by the way. I’m rather fond of her. When you’re done sightseeing (I hear there are some interesting caves neaby?), get on I-25 N in San Miguel County from NM-137 N, US-285 N and US-84 W. Continue to Lockwood, then take exit 452 from I-90 W. You did feed the horse, didn’t you? I forgot to say - this is a trip of just over three days by car if you don’t stop, so it may be a while on horseback. Get onto I-15 N/US-89 N in Cascade County from MT-3 N, US-191 N and US-87 N and carry on until MT-44 W/Valier Hwy in Pondera County. Take exit 348 from I-15 N. Carry on along MT-44 to US-2 W, in…

2. Hungry Horse, Montana. Very scenic around here, isn’t it? Also, you should be able to get some food for that horse. Now take US-2, State Hwy 464 and AB-2 N to AB-20 N in Red Deer County, Canada, continuing to AB-22. There take AB-43 N and Alaska Ave until you reach…

3. Whitehorse, Yukon. Taken a turn for the chilly, I think you’ll find. You do know that horse wasn’t that colour when you got it, right? That’s snow. I don’t think the horse likes it. You should maybe brush it off. When you’re ready to go, get back on Alaska Hwy/YT-2 N/Yukon 1 W, taking AK-2 W to AK-11 N/N Slope Haul Rd in Livengood, United States. Follow AK-11 N/N Slope Haul Rd until you run out of land, at which point you will be in:

4. Deadhorse, Alaska. What did I tell you about looking after that horse? I hope you have some alternative method of getting home.

1. You join what you think is a queue, but it is in fact a group of people standing around somewhere behind the real queue. Or a second variant; a queue forms with two forks on either side of some barrier, and it is decided that the other fork is the ‘real’ one.

2.. The public toilet that someone leaves an unflushed turd in, which nobody else will flush for fear that there is something wrong with the toilet. Now it is out of use until some form of officialdom steps in.

3. The box of live and dead batteries; when you need one, you go to the box and try batteries in turn until you find a live one, and then put all the dead ones back in case there should be some need for them in the future.

4. It is painful or difficult to get up; but, not wanting to be judged for this, you think up other excuses as to why you shouldn’t. No intervention will work, and there is nothing you want to do that doesn’t involve sitting.

1. One Sunday, an old woman discovered a hole in a book. The hole was about the size of a fist and of unknown depth; it was accessible only from page 265, and there was no sign of it at all on page 266. The sides were rough with something like dirt or rust. The woman, who had no particular remaining responsibilities, determined to set off on an expedition to explore the hole; the only problem being that it was too small. So she set off to the print shop to photocopy the page and get the hole enlarged to a size she could crawl into.

2. On the way to the print shop, she dropped a packet of pins which she had been intending to take into the book (for she knew that there was often an unmet need for pins on adventures). The pins fell into the road, and were run over by the number three bus. The bus continued for three miles with a packet of pins spinning round on one of its tyres; and then it suffered a loud and spectacular puncture. The bus driver stepped off the bus, tripped on a pin and broke his jaw in three places on a passing brick.

3. The bus driver spent three months with his jaw wired up, drinking chicken soup and watching the most peculiar daytime soap operas. But when he came to open his mouth again, the bus driver found that he could say nothing but “Well.” With the help of a large PPI settlement which he had been encouraged to apply for through subliminal messaging hidden in ‘The Lonely and Desperate’, he hired the finest speech therapist in twelve countries to help him.

4. After seven weeks of intense therapy, the speech therapist managed to draw forth six other words, including 'January’, 'and’ and 'banana’. He decided to write a paper on the case, which he intended to present some months later at a conference in Cairo. However, he was in the end unable to speak at the conference as he had accidentally stuck himself to the bed in the conference hotel room with marmalade.

5. With the help of three phone calls, the speech therapist managed to detach himself in time to take the boat home. However, he found that he had left his foot behind, which was a surprise, as it had not previously been detachable. Fortunately, he had given the hotel his home address. When they found the foot, they were able to post it to him. In fact, because they sent it by airmail, it arrived home somewhat before he did. By this time, he had obtained a fine prosthetic in the port of Rotterdam and was only interested in the foot for sentimental value.

6. Later in life, when short on money, he took the foot to an alien pawnbroker. The pawnbroker paid him fifteen perfect spheres for it. He found, however, that the spheres bothered him; and nobody seemed willing to convert them into cash. So he took them to the Department of Things at the local university, where an archivist offered to assess them for admission into the Permanent Collection.

7. The archivist determined that the spheres were of no interest, as they could not be put into any of the current categorisations. She put them in the bin at the back of the department, where a dumpster-diving chemist took them home and used them to play something a bit like giant snooker-chess-tiddlywinks with the children in her back garden. Interestingly, the archivist later invented the number nine, for which she was awarded a small medal.

8. Seventy years later, the chemist died of a misremembered appendix. The children took the spheres out of the attic, but could not remember the rules of the game; instead, they brought them to family reunions and placed them on the table, where they sat, dully gleaming, amongst pints of stout at the eldest’s wake, and amongst glasses of champagne on the occasion of the youngest refusing a knighthood.

9. The middle child, who had never had occasion to summon her siblings to drinks and spheres, had a habit of stretching in the garden after breakfast. One day she stretched a little too far to the right and accidentally slapped a passing time traveller in the face. The time traveller was irate but, not wishing to interfere with human timelines, contented herself with transporting the middle child’s shed two hundred years into the past. Thereafter, no shed built in that garden would remain temporally stable, and the middle child had to keep her lawnmower in the garage.

10. There were once three second-hand booksellers who found some sheds in the woods near their home, where they lived with an irascible cat. It so happened that, the evening before, the cat had shredded a first edition of Shakespeare’s Laundry Poetry. As a consequence the booksellers were feeling particularly angry. They took it in turns to punch the sheds. which helped a little. Then (seeking a cat-proof storage solution) they took the sheds home and filled them with books. But for ever after, the books they sold were a little peculiar. This did not go down well with the punters and eventually the booksellers were forced to liquidate their remaining stock and go into haberdashery instead. One of the books was sold to an old woman…

We, the undersigned, having experienced the ebb and flow of life, believe that the architectural disciplines have for too long set store in a notion of permanence that is at best optimistic, and at worst harmful. We therefore humbly therefore present six proposals for a more transient architecture.

1. We propose a tower whose structure is partially supported by a colonnade around the perimeter; the columns themselves being discontinuous, with a gap of perhaps a metre and a half between the base and a suitably-cushioned upper portion. As built, the tower is unstable; to continue to exist without developing the most alarming cracks, each pillar must be supported by willing human volunteers, rather like live caryatids. The inhabitants of the building take it in turns to hold their home up; they are as a consequence always aware of their existence depending on the hard work of others.
As a variation, the inhabitants of the building do not provide the support themselves, but rather donate into a pot of money which anyone may win by participating in a kind of complicated tombola. The queue for the tombola winds round and supports the colonnade, holding up the building. Should the queue become short enough that part of the building is unsupported, the residents must donate more money in the hope of increasing demand. Residence in the building is a kind of status symbol, being representative of unlimited wealth.

2. A city that is made of a regular grid structure of open cubes, three metres on a side and ten cubes high, the struts of the grid being composed of some anonymous metal with plenty of attachment points. Residents may rent any given set of cubes for a period of a month only, and bring their own walls and furniture. The existence of continuous roads is a matter of common agreement and their straightness a measure of the amount of social cohesion in the city at any given time.    

3. We consider buildings these days to be maintained by a perpetual input of energy, though that energy is invisible; heating and electricity and somesuch. Therefore we propose to make the implicit explicit in the form of a perpetual motion tower, rather like an inhabited fairground ride. The tower resembles a spinning mushroom. The rate of spin we choose after careful experiments in what can be tolerated by its inhabitants, who are astronauts, athletes and the like who may benefit somehow from the constant centrifugal forces. They live rent-free and suffer the constant admiration of those who live underneath. The centrifugal forces are also necessary to keep the building together. If it were to stop, it would disintegrate. There is a substantial generator facility to guard against power cuts.

4. Observing ancient cities whose new buildings are built with the thousand-year remnants of the old, we propose a more dynamic variant. A city is built on a vast silty plain, criss-crossed with slow rivers. Initially, its honey-coloured stone is quarried from a great cliff at the edge of the plain. Once the city is well-established, a line is drawn at the base of the cliff. Every year, the line is moved ten metres further out from the cliff edge. All buildings that fall behind the line must be demolished. The stone is passed to masons, who may use it for building anew on the other side of the city - unless the city, in its slow march across the plain, has encountered a river, in which case the stone is used for building bridges. The city thus spends its years in constant metamorphosis. How changed it must be when, thousands of years hence, it reaches the sea! And will it be willing then to drown?

5. We conceive of an apartment building in the form of a great wheel or machine. Every few days, we approach the iron gears at the building’s core and give them some number of cranks. The apartments move on well-oiled tracks; here, there and everywhere. And the doors are unmarked! What chaos, then, when the residents come home from work and have to find their home once again. Who has left their door open, which key fits which lock, and whose couch to sleep on or bed to share if the correct apartment cannot be found before nightfall? And who has ended up as the penthouse, and who as the damp basement? Let us not dwell on those who were in the corridors and stairwells when the gears turned. No good will come of that.

6. Having come to terms with death, we choose to view time as a dimension in which we happen to be occupying a given location, rather than a march to an inevitable end. Our dispassionate wish then is that when we happen to occupy the furthest-along point in our time domain it have a good view and the makings of an interesting tale. And we are fortunate in that Nature is generous with spectacle! Thus we court transience in geography. We build only on the most exciting fault lines, the most piquantly tottering volcanic stacks. Nothing infuriates us like a solid foundation. Our apses span chasms, our arcades are founded on quicksand and timid masons gape at our tottering cloisters. Our fondest wish is that future generations find nothing of us in dry bones and pottery shards, nothing in tablets, no anklets, no urns and no stale mercantile notes, nothing, nothing, nothing but a raging torrent of myth and story and spectacle.

(there are no signatures)

Mysteries

9872 Mysteries
 -9872.1 Solved
    –9872.11 Using brilliant powers of deduction
       —9872.111 Everyone so impressed by brilliant powers of deduction, nobody thinks to make sure the solution makes sense
    –9872.12 Using the power of lurve
       —9872.121 Everyone so impressed by the power of lurve, nobody thinks to make sure the solution makes sense  
    –9872.18 Solution is obviously wrong in the light of late-emerging data in any case
    –9872.19 Conspiracy theories concerning the mystery are much more entertaining than the actual solution
 -9872.2 Unsolved
    –9872.21 Explanation is obvious, but nobody wishes to admit it, because an unsolved mystery is much more exciting
    –9872.25 Of or pertaining to famous libraries or lost books
    –9872.28 Of or pertaining to remote islands or the far North
    –9872.29 Of or pertaining to caves, the deep sea or volcanos
 -9871.3 Concerning serendipity
 -9871.4 That are none of your business
    –9871.41 This fact occasioning an afternoon-long research binge
 -9871.5 Solemn and ancient
 -9871.6 Whose resolution would spawn two or more new mysteries
    –9871.64 Which must not be solved for fear of the proliferation of new mysteries
 -9871.8 In which the nature of the mystery is itself a mystery

1. Hopkin’s Worm (note: this is a misclassification as Hopkin’s Worm is now thought to be an unusual crustacean). A rare example of a bellybutton-based parasite. The young of this creature resemble short, dark threads and often infest cotton-based clothing. Once it has made its way to the bellybutton, Hopkin’s Worm loses the ability to crawl and becomes entirely reliant on its host, living off the lint it gleans from the host’s clothing. Hopkin’s Worm’s hosts therefore often seem to have unusually clean bellybuttons. Interestingly, Hopkin’s Worm has no excretory facilities, instead becoming significantly larger throughout its lifespan; however, this growth is usually mistaken for middle-aged spread by the host.

2. Annifaners. These barely-visible mites live in the human ear, where they live on, in and protected by earwax. Their presence is almost undetectable by the host; however, annifaner mating is known to make a quiet rustling noise, a little like the sound of the sea far off. Since they primarily mate at night, annifaner hosts are more likely than most humans to dream of the ocean.

3. The Hammerian Hat. There is in fact only one known Hammerian Hat in existence, and it seems likely that it is the last of its kind. The Hammerian Hat in its dormant form resembles a simple cotton skullcap. If worn for any length of time (particularly if slept in) it will attempt to fuse to its host, consuming their hair and in turn growing its own pseudo-hair, as well as a set of roots with which it connects to the host’s circulatory system. The host merely notices that the hat has disappeared and that they are having a very bad hair day. The only known specimen disappeared from a research lab in the early 1920s, so it may be that the Hammerian Hat is now entirely extinct.

4. Gorlocks. These small parasitic shadows do not eat, excrete or reproduce; it is thought, in fact, that the Gorlock population on Earth has remained stable since at least the time of the dinosaurs. Their original origin is not known. They attach themselves to host entities purely to get protection from direct sunlight, which they dislike. As they overlap the host’s original shadow, Gorlocks are almost undetectable unless the host is in bright non-directional light, at which point they will attempt to hide. Gorlocks usually attach to trees but can occasionally be found on humans.

5. The Worcestershire Farter. This creature typically masquerades as someone known to the host, appearing at the door as if for a social visit with a sign requesting food and drink (typically offered with the excuse that the Farter has a very sore throat and cannot speak). Unbeknownst to the host, the Worcestershire Farter is in fact a highly-developed colony of single-celled organisms which is has taken on, chameleon-like, the appearance of a previous host. After it has been fed, the organisms produce prodigious amounts of gas through all available orifices; typically, by this point, the bodily facsimile is deteriorating and it may develop a few new orifices as well. During this phase, the Farter begins to take on the characteristics of the current host. By the time it has ejected itself from the host’s home (usually before the arrival of any ambulances) it has fully adopted the appearance of the host and typically stolen their phone or address book, ready to move on to the next host. The Worcestershire Farter can be deterred on initial presentation by asking it to remove its hat, since its clothes are part of it rather than separate garments.

6. Scumble-oybles. Small parasitic words which, once heard, stick in the back of the brain such that the host is never quite sure if they are a real word with a dictionary definition or merely a random collection of letters. Central to the Scumble-oyble survival strategy is the impression that, were they a real word, they would be such an usual and commonplace word that the host could feel justifiable embarrassment about looking them up.

Beazley Wazzock, Liz-of-the-lantern, Mr. Polite, Licketty Lurb, the Knight of the Purple Rose’s Thorn, Thousand year Alice, Fennelfur the Unclaimable, Teeth Jenkins, the Fellowship of Perpetual Energy, John Cutaneous, Thurnorpaldreddel, Jennifer Flycatcher, the Underfamiliars, McClintock’s Millions, the Snail-shell Haunts, Normal John, Suri No-Sleep, the Sisters of the Lightless Garden, Hedge Bugger.

1. So hot right now! Washemoops - that shade of greyish pink that white things go when washed with black and red things that are not quite colourfast. Pair a washemoops shirt with tracksuit bottoms and bed head for the authentic early 2016 look. 

2. We’re loving pilling on cardigans and sweaters right now.

3. Try rocking black socks with red soles for that ‘just walked on a bleachy floor’ look.

4. For the truly daring, try trousers with split seams at the groin. Guaranteed to make you friends on the underground!

5. Spilled tomato sauce on yourself and it didn’t quite wash out? Congratulations, you’ve stumbled on 2016′s hottest trend: splat chic.