Listing to Port

1. Have you ever been eaten by an elephant? It happened to me. That is, the elephant was actually a taxi and I was able to get out again at the other end of the journey, but in all other vital respects it was exactly the same. Anyway, that’s the start of the story. The second part of the story is that I left my hat in the taxi, which is a bit like part of me getting stuck in the elephant and requiring the attention of a vet.
2. Anyway, I called the vet, who due to a misunderstanding laid me out on the table and began a fevered but unsuccessful search for the ether. Caught up in the occasion, I suggested phoning it to see if it would ring. We tried this. Alas, we had a wrong number. Instead of finding the ether, we had accidentally called North Korea and arranged a custom missile strike for the next day. This was obviously a problem. For a start, I was completely unsure how to break it to my employers, whose premises we were on at the time.
3. When one is in trouble, I find it helpful to sit back and have a little something. Fortunately, there was a something takeaway just down the road. I ordered a thing and a whatnot for myself and a doodah for the vet, should she ever come back (I think I neglected to mention that she had made her excuses). Imagine my surprise when I found that the thing had a beetle cooked right through the centre. Well, no right-thinking person could stand for that. Missile strike or no, I needed to set the record straight.
4. If I may, I find it helps immeasurably in explaining the next part to take a brief excursion into numismatics - specifically, the history of the threepenny bit. Let us cast our minds back to the reign of good Queen Anne. Unfortunately I cast my mind back a little too far, unsettled as I was by the events of the day. I ended up with my body in the present day and my mind somewhere South of the Great Fire of London. Worse yet, my mind was stuck up a tree being stared at by hungry squirrels. Meanwhile, overjoyed at finding a vacant body, a family of beavers set up home in my navel.
5. I find that being wedged in time concentrates the liver marvellously, and right on cue, my liver took control of the situation. We agreed to split the difference, add the remainder and copy the rest, with the somewhat predictable result that all my constituent parts were hastily reunited. I believe the beavers may have been launched through time at a hitherto unprecedented velocity for a semiaquatic rodent. I hope that the folk of the far future will be grateful for this intervention, but you never can tell. Anyway, we ended up on Shit Creek. Interestingly, this is a real place, with its own fascinating ecosystem based on the shit cycle.
6. You may have noticed that I always have a paddle on me. Well, that time was no exception. You will appreciate that I am not at liberty to disclose the location of Shit Creek until the various papers that I have in preparation are published. Nonetheless, I hope you will believe me when I say that the outlet of the creek lies not more than thirty minute gentle stroll from a major centre of civilization. In defiance of all probability, I found myself within reach of home. All I needed was the ability to charter a modest charabanc or some such device.
7. Now, as it happened, a taxi was passing. Hailing it with my one remaining flipper, I was astonished to find that it was the very taxi I had left not twenty minutes earlier. And there, resplendent in inky felt on the back seat, was my hat! I was filled with that peculiar joy that comes from fate’s occasional acts of outrageous serendipity. For some reason, the taxi driver failed to share my effervscent joy, although she did pat me on the back a few times and perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. In any case, I found myself chewing down on a Happy Ending, so I shall leave it here too for you to have a bite. Enjoy!

1. There was a creature called an Offaphoffilus, which had fifteen legs and the face of a grumpy sloth. It had never quite found a comfortable home, because these were usually built for creatures with fewer legs. But one day it met an elderly leg collector and managed to negotiate a custom-made beachfront villa in exchange for the bequest of seven legs on the occasion of its death.

2. In later years, the villa served as a guesthouse for the nearby leg museum. It was famous for its cakes, which visitors were best advised to avoid because they always had an aftertaste of chicken and petrol. The cakes arrived every day on a small cart and no-one knew where they came from.

3. The arrival of the cakes was not in fact a mystery but an official classified Secret. As part of a project to bioengineer the ultimate soldier, a secretive Russian laboratory had developed a donkey who shat cake. It eventually graduated from the programme with a D grade and become the lab pet.  However, since it also turned out to have an enormous appetite, they needed an outlet for excess cake. This the guesthouse fortunately provided.

4. For companionship, the lab purchased the Donkey a horse. As it turned out, this horse used to belong to the Queen of Bonk, but was demoted for unhorselike behaviour. It had once eaten a whole grocer and the local fruit community lived in terror of it going back for seconds. Interestingly, it was also the first horse in the world to work in web development, and had once licked Caligula.

5. There was an orchard nearby which felt in need of protection, so they called in an alchemist (all the nearby bouncers being busy). The alchemist did not succeed in keeping out the horse, but he did accidentally grow a tree on which each apple was made of a different element. Sadly, the gold apple was followed in relatively short order by the plutonium apple, and the orchard was evacuated. The irate fruit-growers put the alchemist in a pair of lead boots and dropped him into the Seine.

6. Three years later, a pair of golden boots came up at auction in North Carolina, but failed to sell due to their unattractive design. Eventually, they were melted down and turned into a small gold bar, which served gin to inebriated mice.

7. Seven mice who had escaped from a rather dull zoo fell asleep on a wandering cloud of gin fumes and had a dream. In it, there was a creature called an offaphoffilus, which had fifteen legs and the face of a grumpy warthog. The mice were fired from the story for refusing to behave. Since the story could not hire anyone else at such short notice, it had to stop.