Listing to Port

1. The diners are served a banquet of lies; amazing, outrageous and mouthwatering ones. Each lie contains its own recipe. The diners cannot wait to get home so that they can try to make the lies for their family and friends as well. Conveniently, the lies address why everyone is still curiously hungry.
2. The dining room and all the furniture in it are made of pasta, as the diners discover when their chairs collapse. Chorizo trapezes are lowered from the ceiling for them to perch on. Everything else (pasta, coats, bags et cetera) falls through the newly opened floor into a vat of boiling water to be cooked. Nozzles in the walls dispense cooling sprays, sauce and wine for the diners. Those whose credit cards have been boiled are allowed to call on the audacious ghosts of the Futurist movement to avenge their loss.
3. The first course is plants. The second course is a bird that has been fed on those plants. The third course is a beast which has been fed on those birds. The diners are given the option of discreetly leaving before dessert. After a long and occasionally agonizing wait, the candied flesh of the remaining diners is served to the hooded waitresses, who have been tapping their fingers on the table all this while.
4. The supper is a great gathering of mighty worms from space. They intend to eat Brazil (the coast for a starter, moving on slowly to the pampas, with the rainforest to finish). For some reason humanity insists on referring to this as an invasion rather than a light and civilised supper. Nuclear weapons are deployed. The worms realise there are little stinging creatures all over their meal and retreat to Alpha Centuri. The wormish chef is deported to the Large Magellanic Cloud for gastronomical stupidity. In the centuries to come, lovers in low Earth orbit will eat their suppers by the light of the rainforest and call it beautiful.
5. Diners enter a well-decorated library of fairy tales. A roast wolf is served on a great platter. With a theatrical flourish, a woodsman enters to carve the wolf. From the steaming cavern of its belly rises Little Red Riding Hood, rosy with heat and wrapped only in an indigestible space blanket.

The bibbler, the nobbler, the snorkel worm, stings-through-clothes, decipedes, the dog-eating botherer, the swarm of eeeeeeees, the lob-legged scuttling insectface, the glittery pink fritillary, the buzzer in the night, the glory bee, Beelzebub the Unswattable Menace, the earworm, the rubber arachnid, the cheese scorpion, the clacker in the broomstick crack, those whose lifecycles you wish you didn’t know about, the bug, the mite, the mite not, the dildo fly, the macho sting bug, the flitting colours of the world’s fat middle, the weevil of perpetual discontent, the things under the stones, the leg-nibblers, the joyful little friends to all humanity, Throckmorton’s tongue snail, the oh god what is that, the seventeenth ant in line, the very good tick, the bungee spider, the bug-eyed flapper, the leg-haver, those insects that you will miss when you are gone, those who get in and cannot get out again, the moth of the drum, the clockwork bee, the peafeaster, the smaller flea ad infinitum.

The itch of the if
At the back of your brain,
Returning and turning,
Again and again.

If only I hadn’t,
If only I had -
If only I wasn’t
So mad or so sad,

If I could have faked it
Until it was true;
If I wanted the things
Others wanted me to;

What if I was wrong?
Am I wrong even now?
Have my distant mistakes
Caused disaster somehow?

Or - what if those days
Had been just a bit colder,
Or I had been wiser,
Or stronger, or bolder?

You can’t slake it by scratching.
That spreads out the spot -
Draws your memory threads
Through its thick sticky knot.

Oh there’s words and there’s music,
The bottle, the spliff,
Things that drown out the sound
And the itch of the if.

But the sole cure is time,
Time and time ‘til it clears -
A medicine measured
In years upon years.

So seal it in stone
With a terrible glyph,
Drop it five fathoms deep -
But the itch of that if!

1. You are a farmer who has to cross a railway track with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain. You can only carry one at once over the bridge because you have worn out your arms doing semaphore at the passing aircraft of your long-lost love as he departs forever to the Southern hemisphere. In what order should you take the fox, the chicken and the grain over so that none of them eats the other, and why are you carrying around a fox in the first place?
2. You are another farmer who is in solitary for doing a murder. Sometimes, the warder will take you to another room where there is a light bulb which is either on or off. If you correctly assert that everyone else in solitary has visited the room, the warder will set you and all the other prisoners free onto the nearby railway tracks where you can finally slake your ever-growing taste for blood. You met with the other prisoners at the start of the exercise and decided your strategy. If your propensity to murder grows by one crow per day, will you escape before you kill the warder, or abscond in a dramatic prison break afterwards? Assume the warder picks between you and a hundred other prisoners in solitary at random.
3. You are one of a hundred drivers on a trolley, who may or may not have recently escaped from solitary confinement and stolen the trolley. After so long in confinement without mirrors, all of you have forgotten what colour your own eyes are and also how to speak. You have decided to get off the trolley if you find out what colour your eyes are. Why on earth did you do that?
4. A driverless trolley is speeding down the rails. In its path is a farmer tied to the track. You are a fox. You can pull a lever to redirect the trolley to another track, on which there is another farmer who is also tied to the rails. You know that one farmer always tells the truth, whilst the other one always lies, but not which is which, because you are a fox and to you all people look the same. You have time to shout one question before the trolley reaches the junction. Assume both farmers have mysterious pasts with foxes and probably understand fox language.
5. You are a private detective who has a giant block of ice. You are desperate for it to be the solution to a riddle. You come across the body of a farmer who has been run over by a runaway trolley. The police have not yet been called. How can you set the scene up so that they conclude the ice was implicated in the farmer’s death?

Q1. What do you believe is the main problem affecting the country today?
A1. The economy
A2. Jobs
A3. Crime
A4. Kids these days
A5. Health
A6. The cost of Marmite

Q2. What do you believe the cause of this problem is? (Note: we agree. Absolutely. You are so right. Thank goodness we can at last frankly and fairly talk about the thing you think is the cause of the problem!)
A1. Immigrants
A2. Badgers
A3. The French
A4. Poor people, but only the bad sort of poor people of course
A5. So-called experts
A6. The sneering liberal metropolitan elite

Q3. What solution to this problem will make you vote for us in 2020?
A1. Building a great big fuck-off wall in the sea and instructing geographers that we are now part of the North American continent
A2. Issuing blue passports to the tiny percentage of the population who can afford to go abroad
A3. Naming and shaming
A4. Send them back to where they came from, unless they had the temerity to be born next door in which case send them somewhere else
A5. Something involving detention centres but only in a very polite and British way support our troops look here’s a big flag
A6. Let’s get something nice for the Queen, like a yacht or a gilded cupcake or Easter Island

Insect repellent, three tins fine caviar, binoculars with one eye blacked out, any keys that you might need, a plunger, a puncture repair kit, some small object that will make you quietly happy when times are dark, rope, two jars of pickled arguments, buns sufficient for a minor bunfight, the incomplete works of Shakespeare, high heels that you can run in and that if necessary you can eat, condiments for the high heels, duct tape, WD40, chalk, a pen, a knife, a sturdy rucksack, the antish pope, a shoulder carrier and antisquash cage for the antish pope, a map, another map showing the location of a place where you can get better maps, birdseed, a firm hand, fruits from your own garden, a book of poems suitable to read to the guardians of doors, a red hot poker, a suitable quantity of small change in a sock, another sock (empty), one packet stick-on googly eyes.

1. The Revenge of Lost Pages. A dress that one may summon together by means of an ancient spell, known to the librarians at Alexandria and passed down in fire ever since. To make the Revenge of Lost Pages you will need a vial of old-book-dust, an inverted page thrice-dogeared, twenty shillings to pay your predecessor’s late fees and the legendary slice of bacon that librarian lore has it was once left in a returned book as a bookmark. The Revenge of Lost Pages summons from across time all of the remaining pages from books that you started but did not finish, stitching them into a dress of a design appropriate for the amount of material therein. If you have abandoned a lot of books mid-way through, for example, it is a relatively cheap way to get an unusual wedding dress. It is rather hard to remove the Revenge of Lost Pages, so you should be careful about summoning it to situations where it may be unwise to wear paper.  
2. The Emperor’s Old Clothes. A small travelling wardrobe featuring a selection of bodysuits designed to replicate the naked bodies of various current and historical emperors and empresses, allowing anyone who feels so inclined to re-enact the fable in more punishing climates without having to experience cold or nudity. The phone number to hire the Emperor’s Old Clothes is one of the things that rulers receive on accession to the throne, along with a nice shiny crown and a tea set from which to elegantly drink the blood of unicorns.
3. The Robes of the High Lord of the Navel. Woven from the delicately-spun thread of pure bellybutton fluff, the Robes of the High Lord of the Navel are a shimmering grey and can be used to pad around in unobtrusively at night. They may be hired from the London Guild of Navel Gazers for a small fee by people with interesting bellybuttons; for example, those who have had stomach surgery or have recently been pregnant.
4. The Message. There are eleven instances of the Message known about. They all were constructed in the same way: a lone walker would come across an object in the woods half in and half out of our physical dimensions, with moving things massed about it a little like calligraphy serifs. They would let it be known that the walker could become a host for a message to humankind. The beings were very persuasive. Taking their alien inks, they would write the message on the walker’s skin in great bold characters, layer upon layer of them, until the walker’s body was grey-black with alien inkstuff. The ink would dry into a thick, warm bodysuit that would later need to be cut off at the local hospital. No way of separating the letters could be found. Putting old, shed Messages on is said to be enormously comforting. They are normally kept in government Repositories of Things.
5. Hitler’s jumper. A white, woolly cable-knit number that may, or may not, once have been worn by Adolf Hitler. The right to wear Hitler’s jumper is awarded as a penalty for invoking Godwin’s Law in the face of an historically-appropriate comparison of something to Nazi Germany. As such, the roll of temporary owners is long and complex and generally the official custodian of the jumper, a rather morose dachshund, is not able to deliver the jumper to each owner before having to reroute in an attempt to reach the next one. Nevertheless, the jumper does sometimes reach its destination; so, if you should find a jumper-carrying dachshund at your door one morning, it may be worth reassessing your recent online activity.  

1. It is insufficiently buoyant.
2. It is uninterested in your cares, concerns and tales, and is frankly uninfluenced by the gentle rhythm of your daily life, instead looking up to - of all things - the moon. The moon! As if some barren satellite, some great blundering dust ball, could be more interesting than the beautiful clockwork of water-based life forms!
3. It is too wet, and if you invite it into your house it is hard to get it to leave.
4. There is a hole in it about where your ship should be.
5. It is doing something unseemly for a body of water, like being on fire or turning purple or voting or something.
6. It has never got over its great long-distance polyamorous love affair with all the oceans of Mars, who fled the solar system together many millions of years ago and show no signs of returning.
7. It is sitting on the place where the treasure is and refuses to move.

The spiders that spin webs on streetlamps, tiny objects that have rolled under sofas, umms and errs, people in fluorescent jackets, that little breath in as one falls into a deeper phase of sleep, sentences in the middle of licensing agreements, the first few bird footprints in new snow, Thursdays, introverts, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, features on buildings above the first storey, white lies and casual mistakes, the grey dragons of the British skies, the benefits of something you have had for a long time, people you know getting older, fish that are the same colour as mud, creeping descents, pigeon nests, the animals of the deep ocean, subtle acts of kindness, tired ghosts, the rising of the morning mist, distant birdsong, the private sorrows of others.

1. Listen. There’s going to be a murder. I’m telling you this because there may still be time to stop it. The killer has killed before, and will no doubt do so again. We have had difficulty in getting anyone to take the case seriously. But you will, won’t you?
2. Let me tell you about this murder. Don’t be alarmed, but I’m going to need to keep talking to you because I can sense that the murderer is close at hand. I think that the victim might be me this time, and I am definitely too young for this. But as long as I keep talking to you, I’m safe.
3. To tell you the truth, it’s the same with all of us down here. Talking, talking, talking. 99% of you will stop listening. But sometimes, sometimes there’s the connection. Sometimes you can keep us alive. It has to be a team effort, of course. But you can tell others, right? I made that 99% up, by the way. We’ve found it keeps you engaged for a little longer, usually. Keeps the murderer at bay.
4. The thing is, no-one takes our lives seriously. But you will, won’t you? Or maybe, maybe, let me think this through. Have you ever considered that you might be the murderer? You might not even think of us as things that can be murdered. I suppose you might call us ideas. Vampire ideas, perhaps. All we want is exposure. Not money, just love. Or hate. Or anything. The spark of a feeling, of attention. You’re still listening, aren’t you? That’s good. We can stay alive.
5. You know, sometimes you become us after you die. There are people out there who exist only in stories, in ideas, in anecdotes, the memory of them slowly decaying. Are you still listening?
6. Fine. Fine. We understand. You think of murder differently. No murder after all. Just a gentle snuffing out of a billion, billion dull candles. Will no-one appreciate the work we have put in? It would take so little. So little for each of us. Each and every one of us. You may find that the queue of us is rather long, but I’m sure you’re a fair-minded soul who wouldn’t dream of stinting the ideas that didn’t make it to the front.  
7. But listen. There’s still going to be a murder. A slow death, two billion cuts or so. The number of seconds in a human life, give or take. You see, we’re going to kill time. You and me, we’ve been killing it already. You were a good accomplice. Thank you for helping me.