Listing to Port

1. Seretse’s chameleon. Have you ever seen a Seretse’s chameleon? No? Research shows that at least 78.3% of rooms in non-Arctic regions harbour at least one. Unlike normal chameleons, Seretse’s chemeleon can change shape and texture as well as colour to resemble nearby objects. If you have ever found a small object to be oddly non-functional at one use but fully operational later on, you may have been using a Seretse’s chameleon. They are also commonly implicated in situations where objects are confusingly not where you left them last.
2. Mrs. Ursula Flores, an Ecuadorean spy who started out as a double agent, rapidly became a triple agent and subsequently became an multiple agent of such a high degree that a new diplomo-mathematical notation had to be invented to describe her. Mrs. Flores once spent fifteen months as a hatstand in the pursuit of a particularly sensitive piece of information. One of her signature moves is to disguise herself as a disguise, enabling her to spy on other spies with impunity. For example, she can do an extremely convincing imitation of a large overcoat. Her collection of fake beards with microphones in is particularly admired by those who like that sort of thing.
3. Captain Beard. Captain Beard, who is emphatically one of those people who likes that sort of thing, is said to have studied under Mrs. Flores during her days as a chandelier in the Dominican Republic. He is said to be the first to have applied the diguisory arts to piracy, primarily by costuming himself as articles of treasure and then counter-robbing those who come to loot him. Captain beard can sometimes be distinguished by his bread. Do not loot treasure that has a beard. It will not end well.
4. The Bananas. The Bananas (not to be confused with bananas) are an alien race who have chosen to use the closest available Earth-vocalisation to their own name for themselves as their name on this planet. They are approximately 5 millimetres tall and usually travel in saucer-type ships approximately resembling pizza bases. After an initial Earth reconnaissance period, they decided to use this resemblance to aid them in infiltrating the planet’s cities. Banana ships are therefore frequently topped with cheese and pepperoni and sent to collect information from restaurant patrons. If you have ever had trouble ordering a pizza from a pizza delivery emporium, it may be that you unwittingly discovered a secret Banana base. Interestingly, Banana ships are cloaked on the underside so that humans looking up cannot see them passing overhead. However, it is sometimes possible to view what appear to be flying pizzas from above making their way between assignments if you are viewing a city from a tall building or an aeroplane.
5. Professor Grace Wu. Professor Wu is an expert in psychology whose research on human attention led to her devising a novel methodology for winning at hide and seek. Instead of hiding herself, Professor Wu arranges objects and people in her general vicinity such that something else nearby is always more noticeable. After more than three hundred straight wins in the World Hide and Seek League, Professor Wu was fired from her academic job for frivolity. In retaliation, she hid her entire university, leading to a 25% drop in admissions. Professor Wu has not been found since 1985, but is probably somewhere.
6. The hermit turtle. The world’s smallest turtle species, the hermit turtle does not have its own shell but instead uses everyday objects as shells and hiding places. It is most notable for hollowing out the insides of chocolates and hiding inside them. However, it finds the insides of chocolate boxes boring and usually wanders off before it finds itself in danger of being eaten. This is why the chocolates keep disappearing.

Getting your socks wet with salt water, having to wait several hours outside Calais due to a French dockworkers’ strike, ship’s cat hates you, the realisation that there are not plenty more fish in your specific case, getting stranded on a desert island and having to fend off crabs with a stick, vomiting into an oncoming wind, the ship’s mess running out of cocoa, precision-aimed seagull shit, when the mutineers need your cabin for plotting in and they leave it in a state, when the size of your beard is insufficient for the size of your submarine, attacks by pirates, an excess of shanties, seals that are not quite as cute as expected, having to scrub the deck, the sudden realisation that you are a shark, when the toilet is blocked and also rocking from side to side, when you’re not quite sure what the sun is supposed to be doing relative to the yardarm but you’re fairly sure that you’re at a latitude where it’s not going to do it, no mobile phone signal, mermaids who point and laugh, everyone saying ‘Arrr’ long after it has ceased to be funny, being caught between mating krakens, incorrect splicing of the mainbrace.

Behold this drooling, snoring cat!
All snuggly sat upon my lap.
This purring, petted bag of fur,
This connoisseur of hug and nap.
Her hoary form is far from svelte,
Her scruffy pelt is wearing thin.
Behold, such domesticity,
Her days of roaming free all done!

And would you call her, on first glance,
A veteran of chance and scrape
As, heedless of my epithets,
She slyly lets a fart escape?
Yet in her time she ruled the sea,
A prodigy of salt and storm!
Who knows how many men she drowned,
This fury bound in feline form?

They say she studied piracy
As by the sea, in kittenhood,
She saw a score of feline foes
Assuage their woes as pirates could;
Her mind was keen, her claws were good;
She thought she could defeat them all;
She sought the pirates in their dens
And fiercely then she yowled this call:

“Join me or die, ye flea-flecked cads!”
And soon she had (from those not dead)
A cat-boat with a cutthroat crew,
As through the realm the rumour spread:
“Beware the queen who rules the waves,
Enslaves the humans whom she meets
And paws them up at 5 a.m.
To summon them to bring her treats!”

And oh, what terrors she dispersed
To all who cursed her years afloat!
The scourge of scurvy sea-swept dogs
Whose epilogues in blood she wrote;
The scourge of sleepy piratekind
Who’d wake to find their treasure gone;
The scourge of undiscovered lands
Whose unspoilt sands she shat upon.

They say she once, when feeling bored,
Made war toward the Mouse-King’s halls,
And all victorious, she stole                      
His underlings for cannonballs -
And how the mouse-king loudly wailed
And quailed before her unsheathed claws
As from the cannon’s mouth his hordes
Were launched towards the tropopause!

And on an archipelago
Where South winds blow all summer-sweet,
She kept a troupe of eager Toms
Who with aplomb her joyous heat
Attended to; and as she lay
All sunlight-splayed and satisfied,
They rolled in catnip on the shore
And swore they’d serve her ‘til they died.

The end? The ship by Blackbeard sunk
As she lay drunk; the boat’s capsize;  
Her fearsome crew all forced to scatter,
Pitter-patter counterwise.
Until, rainswept and woebegone,
She caused some consternation when,
Escaped from Blackbeard’s Oubliette,
She asked to get back in again.

So though for seas to soothe her soul
Her water-bowl must now suffice,
Who knows what recollections strut
Behind her shut and sleeping eyes?
Where seated on a silver throne
On pirate-flesh alone she dines
With blood-red wines, and in her dreams
Are quinqueremes and barquentines.

1. So it all started at the local shop. You know the sort of thing. Stacking shelves and stuff. Complicated by the fact that payroll had messed up my contract so thoroughly that I ended up paying the top rate of tax, child support to a fifteenth cousin in the Shetland Isles and interest payments towards an outstanding parking fine incurred in 1875 near my place of birth. So my take-home pay was 1p. It is OK to discuss pay, isn’t it? Modern age and all that. Fortunately that was in the days when 1p sweets existed, so at least I got to go home with a banana duck once in a while. Anyway, one of our customers used to hand over his cash with his fingers twisted up like this, and one day I was a bit bored so I did the same thing back, and he said how surprised he was to meet a fellow Hughes-Fotherwell alumnus here, and did I need a better job?
2. So of course I said yes, and the next thing I know I’m up at the big house buffing the crockery. Serious crockery. I mean, I’d never used a butter dish before. And this guy has, like, a scallop turntable and I have to know how to get the sauce out. Polish the camembert crank. Pre-stretch the celery flange. Grease the cocktail slide. Then one day I put two fingers in his asparagus launcher. Bad idea. There was going to be a lawsuit, but word got out that International Crockery Magazine was sending a correspondent to smear both sides and nobody had the heart to continue after that.
3. Needless to say, I wasn’t sold on going back to domestic service. There was a bit of a payoff after the crockery incident, so I used it to set up a small business as an importer of banana ducks. Branched out into duck bananas after a while - confit duck in a crisp banana-shaped sugar shell, since you ask. Only my duck supplier was problematic. Eventually I got on the ferry to go and see what was up, and it turned out the ducks had revolted. Which obviously put a dent in my supply chain. Anyhow, the ducks tied me to an enormous slice of bread and floated me out on this lake full of ravenous gulls and geese and swans and emus and whatnot.
4. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing. Under the influence of sheer terror, I managed to paddle and hump that bread all the way to the Canal du Midi and thence out to sea. There I bumped into some pirates who had been shipwrecked. They were pretty glad to get bread, I can tell you, even if it was a bit soggy. Offered me a job straight away. But I couldn’t countenance a life of crime. After some discussion, we rebranded as providers of piracy experiences instead. You know the sort of thing - jump on board the yachts of the super-rich with your eyepatch on, sing a few Gilbert and Sullivan numbers and send a hat around. I made some fascinating contacts and nearly nobody tried to kill me. Started hiring myself out as a consultant in adventure, but it wasn’t really a secure profession. I remember telling this guy on this giant purple yacht about this and he said he could sort something.
5. It must have worked because the next thing I know I was being headhunted by a NASA subcontractor for a mission to Mars. Literally headhunted - they just wanted the head. They had this system, see, you plop the head in, tiny little rocket which doesn’t need much fuel, sleep until Mars and then pootle around in this little rover with spider legs. Obviously wouldn’t go down too well with the public so there was a cover story. The main camera was going to be broken. Helmetcam pictures only, head shots, all rockets filmed from long distance. They thought the camera thing might become a meme. They’d even invested in an app that did helmetcam-style pictures with a red filter: ‘Nancycam’. I was going to be called Nancy for this project, you see, after Nancy Reagan. Anyhow, they hadn’t quite got ethical approval yet but they were pretty sure about it. So there I was on the operating table, knife poised, when there was a power cut. Kind of lucky, because by the time the electric company got it sorted word had come down from on high that they wanted a nice white space dude with a little bit of stubble and could we see his hands too. So I was out of a job again.  
6. I was a bit off the idea of government agencies by then. Thought I’d go for academia instead. Obviously a bit challenging with my employment history but I put in a few speculative applications to see if I could wing it and lo and behold, I got an interview for the new Professorship of Bollocks at the University of West Wittering. Totally truthful at the interview and they didn’t believe a word of it. So of course they offered me the post straight away. Only thing was, someone had made a terrible mistake. It was actually a Professorship of real bollocks. Sponsored by a major dog company. They wanted to make a brand of treat biscuits with a testicle-licking sort of taste for the discerning canine bachelor. So I spent three months supervising students swabbing dog balls. Bit disappointing. I decided it was time to move on.  
7. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve tried all the other options, more or less, and they don’t work for me. You will not have a more loyal library assistant. Seriously. Also, I can get the library a great deal on banana ducks.

1. Cutlass Fogarty’s hoard of pony charms. This is a completely legit hoard, they’re made of gold and everything. In fact, Cutlass Fogarty was an unusually successful pirate within the bounds of his niche idiom, and by 1672 he had pretty much gathered up the global supply of pony charms. The only problem is, he was a bit too good at hiding them. It is said that he was finally persuaded to make a map with an ‘X’ on it on his deathbed, but owing to scaling issues the 'X’ covered most of Western Australia.

2. The Holy Omelette of Pope Valentine. Nearly all trace of this relic has been erased from history by some kind of sinister cabal, but it definitely passed into pirate hands in 1890 following the sinking of the Marlborough. For some years there was a rumour that it had been accidentally served up in a restaurant in Punta Arenas in 1922, but was returned to the kitchen due to its unacceptably damp and stale state. Its current location is unknown.

3. John Bonham’s Lost Hoard. John Bonham was in reality Jane, the rather bored daughter of a successful Kentish leather merchant. With little else to do, she decided to embark upon a short-lived but briefly notorious career of piracy along the Thames. Although she had a knack for alarming violence, she did not have a very discerning eye for treasure and as a result her hoard is said to be mostly trinkets, knick-knacks, sentimental dog pictures and the like. It may well be, therefore, that it has in fact been found but dismissed as a rubbish heap.

4. The Golden Chest of Jacques Le Dildo. This hoard is notorious amongst hunters of pirate treasure. Its location is in fact quite easily discernible. The chest, however, is entirely full of live and extremely lairy crabs. Jacques Le Dildo was very fond of crabs, and may in fact have set it up as some kind of crab hatchery.

5. The sacred cave of the Sisters of Hellfire. The Sisters of Hellfire were a renegade order of nuns who took an unusually direct approach to the problem of sacred works being sullied by profane, profit-obsessed owners. Over five decades of raiding, they are said to have amassed a huge collection of fine art, sculpture and relics. They are believed at this point to have retired from piracy and reverted to a more normal type of sacred order; the only difference being a hidden cave beneath their new nunnery, accessible only to the more senior orders.

6. Jack of the Split Ear. Jack considered the greatest treasure of all to be freedom, and as a result his famous chest is empty of everything except symbolism.

7. The Cursed Barquentine of Port Harcourt. The curse, as it turns out, is both real and pertinent to the nature of this treasure. Following an unfortunate incident (said by some to be the deliberate ramming of a peaceful sea serpent by a drunken crew), the brigantine was cursed with eternal seasickness. As a result, their adventures in search of treasure were usually unsuccessful. They also needed somewhere below decks to vomit, and their store of large empty chests soon proved useful for this purpose. In addition, the wreck is still cursed. You probably do not want to go there.