Eight ways to defeat the ageing process

1. Defeat stubborn wrinkles by tricking your enemies into holding an iron whilst you murder them, thus dooming them to haunt you for life with ghostly irons. If you manage to gather a large enough haunting retinue, eventually at some point some of them may try vengefully ironing you in your sleep. This may seem like a long shot but if you don’t get caught by law enforcement agencies it is actually one of the most cost-effective ways of wrinkle reduction out there.

2. Many of the signs of ageing, such as creaky joints or changes in the physical integrity of your bio-coating, are actually signs of being a secret robot that needs oiling. Think carefully. Are you an android in deep cover in human society? Even if your origins have been wiped to save on memory space, there may be tell-tale signs. Do you need to plug yourself in at night? Have you ever accidentally shot a laser beam out of your ear? If yes, you should be fine with a minor tune-up.

3. Age more slowly in your twin’s inertial frame by taking a holiday on a spaceship which is travelling at nearly the speed of light, only returning when they are several hundred years old, at which point it’s OK to have the discussion about how you’ve both realised that you are characters in a fictional example and really there is no need for either of you to have aged at all.

4. Exercise your mental agility by taking your brain out on a lead and letting it jump over small obstacles. Did you know your brain has little legs of its own? No? This is because you have never taken it for a walk. Always make sure to keep a hat on while you are doing this to stop it getting cold in your head. You will need to pass on control of your limbs to your butt, just like a stegosaurus.

5. Consider what you are. Are you a block of cheese or a bottle of wine? If so, your best bet to defeat the ageing process is to get out of the cellar. Roll if necessary. The process will be much easier if you are in a cellar at the top of a hill, or if gravity has been temporarily reversed.

6. You can often tell how old something is by looking at its teeth. For example, Table Mountain is around 500 million years old and has no teeth at all, subsisting only on the teeth of those that it consumes. You too can survive to be an ancient monolith overlooking a city of beings that did not exist at your birth by following a similar strategy. Just look at the tooth fairy.

7. Age more slowly by investing in a timeshare. You live odd-numbered years only, your timeshare partner lives even years only. Further savings are available by sharing with more partners, or by purchasing the premium package (details available on request). Of course, you will need storage space for years you are not on for. This is where the dodgy hotel rooms come in.  

8. Stop the ageing process in its tracks entirely by causing a dimensional rift, sundering time from the spatial dimensions it has previously been tethered to and thereby suspending the remaining Universe in an eternal, unchanging moment and terminating the effective existence of all living beings. You may wish to put on a nice hat beforehand.

Ten years

1. Years that had fine features; harvests, floods, the falling of a stone arch into the sea; all of which are entirely lost to view apart from one tablet in one sealed cave somewhere. There is nobody there to mourn when that tablet is crushed by a falling rock without ever coming back out into the light of day, but the tether holding that year onto history’s wide rope has come loose now and it is oddly delighted to be floating free.

2. A year trailing an orchestra behind it, which has been hired by some previous year to cause as much mischief as possible; at every possible opportunity they play sinister or silly or pompous music, whichever light would shed the most havoc on the scene in hand. They are not wedded to their task, of course, and you can slip them a biscuit to play something else. By the end of the year they have come over to the side of the year’s inhabitants and everything has become a song and dance number.

3. Years which grab their downward trend and slide with it, finding depths that were not previously visible, flipping heights around invisible hinges, ripping the tops off of old mountains. The consequence being that in their wake the ground never seems as solid and the heights never so substantial as they were, and that you recognise their rumbling the next time from very far off.

4. Years, having little better to do, that pass their time in gentle arguments and playing games and looking through microscopes at tiny things; these years are always very delighted when the door of the microscope cupboard is opened, because this is when they join a very select and special club.

5. Messy, fragmented years; those which gloop out of the box they are supposed to be in and get bits of year on other things, only being tamed in the end by large numbers of subsequent years forgetting them into shape until they are sweet and round like sugar pebbles. These years will grow and tangle and eat their own tails and fight in corridors and heal and be heard singing around distant corners and all those edges will be knocked off, eventually.

6. Years finely balanced on a circus tightrope, having at their heart a gentle trend of most things getting better, whilst simultaneously holding on to a percieved trend of things getting worse. Will they make it all the way across to the other side? The crowd are oddly eager to see them fall.

7. Years which unfurl slowly, tightly curling at the start around unimaginable mysteries in suitcases. By the end, every clasp pulled open, we are familiar with the year’s bizarre entrails and can imagine them fully through. That they could ever have seemed mysterious has become a new mystery. But on its way out the year may leave some other suitcases, in case the next one through the door might want them.

8. Serene, calm years like distant swans; which is to say, working very hard under the water and less and less calm the closer you get to them. These years might or might not appreciate the gift of some seeds.

9. Years that have done away with time, in a ruthless tidy-up; not really anything anyone needs any more, just keeping up space in the basement, don’t you know we need to downsize these days? Having no time, these years are both endless and empty; they are years when you have done nothing and everything, the location of whose beginning is long lost, the location of whose end is suspect to say the least. They will write little for the library. They may leave a recording of the sound of grinding gears.

10. Years pinging off the walls of their own importance, building their myth as they go along out of the bricks of every other year and all who sail in them. They may leave towers or ruins or the ghosts of ruins only, or they may build cliffs and blithely walk off the edge of them, or they may may build mazes and get lost. Certainly there will be ruins in the end, which the next year along may choose to build its own things out of. Or they may stand until they fall into sand, and some future year comes along with a broom to gently clear them away.

Fonts

Big chunky ones which will fight each other at any opportunity; fonts that lean on convenient pillars, looking at their kerning with a politely arched eyebrow; those that are slapping each other in the face all down the line; troll fonts; those that are not actually readable as letters; tiny letters with long tails; ink-saturated letterglobs; wafty fonts; very serious ones; hackers are breaking into the mainframe font; at our university we ride horses font; fonts that indicate that your work is sufficiently serious that you cannot be having with font choice; just because you can doesn’t mean you should fonts; those with the pointiest serifs; those that have quite fallen over.

Eight unicorns

1. A stunning, ephemeral unicorn romping along a remote beach. It has an oddly-ridged pattern on its horn which, after a moment, you recognise as the gridding on an ice-cream cone. Shortly thereafter you realise that the rest of the unicorn is made of premium vanilla icecream. The streaming mane and tail are melting drips. You have been under the grip of an optical illusion, brought on by the uncomfortable experience of hurling your ice-cream cone into the sky instead of your beach ball.

2. A sober black horse which stalks the streets of London in the rain with a closed umbrella on its head. When it finds the pure heart that it has been seeking, it will kneel and present its horn for unfolding; then the chosen one may ride on it through the city fully shielded from the rain. I am not sure that the pure heart is a human one or, strictly speaking, alive; the horse frequents butchers’ shops a lot in its search.

3. A unicorn cat. Uses its horn to prod humans up at 5 in the morning. Sadly the internal representation of itself that it uses when jumping has not quite adapted to the horn, and as a result its owners spend a lot of time unscrewing it from trees. If you have kitty treats, you are the chosen one.  

4. A unicorn so dedicated to virginity that it protects only those creatures that reproduce asexually. It has attached itself to a forest and, as its hair is mossy green, it is able to remain largely undetected until it strikes. And it is very fierce, and very thorough. There is definitely no sex in this forest. Every Spring, the unicorn sniffs disapprovingly at the pollen in the air and contemplates moving to the moon.

5. A retired unicorn which has set up a cozy field in the tropics for other unicorns which have relinquished their heraldic duties. By putting their horns together they are able to knit rather lovely scarves, which they send to other heraldic figures in colder climates. If you have ever wondered how lions are able to remain rampant for so long, it is probably because of the scarves.

6. A unicorn which can only sleep with its head in the lap of a virgin, to which end it spends a lot of time in the messier reaches of the internet trying to arrange secret assignations.

7. A unicorn mule. Retractable horn, only pokes out when robustly patted on the forehead. It would rather like to be discovered as a unicorn, which might mean less carrying heavy things around and more star appearances at gymkhanas. However, the risk of accidentally impaling the discoverer’s hand has led it to be wary of affection. It has a plan. All it needs is to find someone in serious hand armour willing to give it a pat.

8. A unicorn which has grown bored with farting rainbows. It sounds like a great skill in theory, but in practice involves a lot of sitting round eating beans in the rain. Not to mention that it is never at the same end as the gold. This unicorn has put in an application for a long sabbatical. There may be fewer rainbows in future.

Seven roadside attractions

1. Roadside gravity, in the form of large blocks of neutron star matter erected, monolith-style, at the side of the road, and from which the planet is itself is shielded by a complicated system of handwaves. Naturally this arrangement is frowned on by the physics police, so be sure to visit before it gets shut down.

2. Roadside parking areas, entirely unremarkable except that crack squads of assault badgers attach bungee ropes to cars that stop there. It is believed they do so purely to increase the number of repeat visits that the parking area gets. Not only does this strategy increase repeat visits, it also dramatically reduces the typical time interval between repeat visits. The metrics are incredible. The large debris pile is also becoming an attraction in its own right.

3. Roadside fairy castles, drenched in sticky glamours. Each has its own speciality, but I hear there is one over the mountains now that does not bother with the drivers but lures the cars in instead. A nice enticing trap street for the GPS, convincing road markings, and small groups of apparent pedestrians on either side who will clearly be harmed if the car does not proceed. Then when you think to turn back there is a no entry sign, and the mists closing in. Of course their technology will be obsolete in considerably less than a hundred years’ service, but the fairies have never really minded. What they want is to be adored, and any machinery that has an adoration mode will do.

4. Roadside magnetism, conspiring to stick great creaking ropes of cars to both poles of a giant horseshoe magnet held by a badly painted cartoon character. The roadside magnet only appears when the local ridiculousness index is high; watch the weather forecasts for a summary of the expected ridiculousness for the next week or so.

5. The roadside strong and weak nuclear forces, which are fascinating to stop off at if you are taking a femtometer-scale road trip, but otherwise undetectable. The chances are that you will have been here without realising. Check your backpack: there may be very small souvenirs in there.

6. An area of roadside which is not so much attractive as surrounded by roadside repulsions, including: an overflowing bin; the original wishing well, actually as famed in online debate; a patch of nothing; and the national poo museum. You may be thinking that you might like to go to the poo museum but I’m afraid to say it has very disappointing online ratings. Anyway, the area also serves as the poo museum’s overflow car park, so it is often quite packed. Come when the time is right and you may even be able to muster up a scratch barbershop quartet from amongst the mingling crowds.

7. A small roadside moon. There may have been one of those nights recently when the big moon comes down the ocean’s path to lay a clutch of eggs on the Earth’s unsuspecting surface, because this is definitely a juvenile specimen and has probably just hatched. They hang around beside roads so that they can roll along them at night. Needless to say it is best to get off the road if a small moon comes rolling along it towards you. But if it is resting, by all means stop and see it. It will probably be covered in ecstatic moths. The life cycle of the moth is symbiotic with that of the moon, and each moon takes with it a billion moths when at last it takes flight into space.

Eight octopus versions of things

1. An octopus train, which has eight wheels arranged roughly in a circle, and can rotate around a circular track at great speed, providing a convenient light rail system for small crustaceans to travel between adjacent rocks. Occasionally the train also eats a carriageful or two; this is its primary source of power. The crustaceans have lodged a complaint with the rail authority about switching to electric or diesel propulsion but nothing ever seems to get done.

2. A clocktopus, which respectively uses one leg to indicate minutes past the hour; one to hold on to the wall; one to wave hello; one to hang on to the diamond window cutter with which it entered the room; one to muffle the alarm; one to count down to zero; one to hold the knife; and one to indicate the hour, which is too late.

3. Octopus scissors, which have eight blades facing in various directions and live in the sea. Suitable for the kitchen enthusiast who has everything but not all of it is under the sea yet. Will slice aquatic pizza better than anything else. Not sure who let them get rusty but they’re mad now. Maybe keep your toes out of the water.

4. An eight-legged foot. Far superior to the standard version of a foot, which only has one leg attached. Depending on what is at the other end of the legs, may be part of a complicated lattice arrangement of humanity somewhat like an alternate universe body horror state of matter.

5. An octopus tree. Because moving a whole tree around is more difficult than moving a human around, so if you really want the whole fantasy walking tree arrangement you are going to need serious legs. Might look more like a wooden spider than a wizard’s best mate. Your best bet is to distract it for long enough that it forgets what it was doing and put down roots.

6. An octopus table. Eight convenient legs. If removed from the ocean will make a serious attempt to get back in. Has a sharp beak on the underside through which it needs to be fed at regular intervals. This may seem like too much maintenance for a table, but it can also squeeze through a gap a few centimetres wide, so it is the ideal solution for spaces with restricted access.

7. Octopus dogs. Totally a real thing and absolutely not a cover for enterprising dogs to enjoy non owner-approved sexual activity whilst one of them is dressed as a very shaggy tail. Any dog may turn into an octopus dog if the moon is right and the wind is blowing from the sea.

8. Octopus tentacles, which are tentacles that themselves have eight tentacles. If you look carefully, you may be able to see that those tentacles themselves also have eight tentacles, although if you look too closely you may also find that you are sliding down into a tentacle-lined perceptual vortex, otherwise known as ‘the full Lovecraft’.

Eight meta-records

1. The fastest time in which the world’s longest dog can eat the world’s longest sausage. This record could in theory become easier as time goes on as the available world’s longest sausages get progressively shorter. It all depends on whether the dog gets full faster than the world can produce record-breaking sausages.

2. The world’s largest ball of record-breaking items. Probably easiest-achieved by bringing the world’s stickiest glue to an exhibition of record-breaking items. The rules state that the ball must be at least ninety percent record-breakimg items, so careful removal of display cases and security guards from the ball may be required.

3. The furthest the world’s most irresistable force can push the world’s most immovable object. Note that record attempts in this category are not allowed if they will cause a major natural disaster.

4. The record for the largest number of record-breaking weightlifters listed at one time.

5. The longest poem written about a thing whilst balanced on top of the world’s largest ball of that thing. The world’s largest ball of planet does not count.

6. The most times that an indivisual human has been pecked by the world’s largest bird. This is a joint category with the world’s slowest run away from the world’s largest bird. The world’s largest bird also offers a variety of other bird violence records, please ask at bird central.

7. The shortest ever tallest living person.

8. The world’s worst idea for a record. This may be sub-categorised into those that were tried anyway, and those for which the idea-haver thought to check before attempting. A further category, the world’s most contrived idea for a record, exists for those records that are merely bizarre rather than fatal.

Products available seventy million years from now in the case that humans fill the marketing niche for the dominant species of the time that tyrannosaurus rex now fills for humans

Human feet hoof-covers; books in which humans go off on adventures with sheep and cows; hats with half a human face plus dangly bits to go over the horns; plastic opposable thumb toys you can operate with a lever; mock human-scale backpacks, what do you mean, of course humans had scales; stick-on buttocks; small plastic humans which will pop out babies when put in water; human sleeping costume; wind-up walking humans which make chirrup noises; mud-squirting human wallow toys; humans whose legs you can unscrew and put on wheels instead; gentle educational cartoons in which humans manage a brood hive and operate the io-filter emergency systems.

Nine boxes

1. A box of chocolate. At one point it was a box of chocolates, but it was left alone for a while and now there is only one extremely large, satisfied-looking chocolate in there. Do you want to risk it? That thing looks like it might take your hand off. At least the box will contain it until it gets hungry enough to eat cardboard.

2. A gigantic, roughly spherical puzzle box, made of rough stone and lovingly decorated with the fruits of millions of years of evolution. So far none of the decorations have had the insight to push the spiky lever in just the right way so as to unlock the outermost layer and allow access to the layers of locks inside, but it is surely only a matter of time before someone does so accidentally.

3. A box made of box hedges, the sky and the muddy earth. It is the point in the hedge maze which you can never reach; no ways in and no ways out and no gaps to squeeze under. This is where the maze’s true heart is. Did you think that it would really open its heart to all comers to trample through?

4. A mime containment box, perfectly transparent, used on high streets throughout major cities without anyone batting an eyelid even though the keeping of mimes in small enclosed spaces arguably contravenes multiple laws. Mime hunters argue that trapping them with boxes is the only way to keep their numbers down in the wild, particularly as the number of mimes escaping from drama schools has increased in recent years. A fully grown mime can completely empty an urban park of human statues and can also interfere in the natural lifecycles of pavement artists and buskers.

5. A lute box which, upon opening, will reveal a randomly selected medieval minstrel of greater or lesser monetary value. Typically you can get the maximum return on lute boxes by hiring out the minstrels to academics in relevant fields. The highest-value minstrels come dressed in cloth of gold and may have witnessed important historical events upon which they can give an unique perspective.

6. A box formed only by the area of sunlight coming through a South-facing window. This box functions roughly as an advent calendar for vampires; they check it daily at sunset. On day one there was only one person there, but each day now there are usually several and sometimes they have dogs or uniforms or cool accessories like those things that go bang.

7. A delivery box which contains too much space. About three million cubic light-years at first estimate. This would not be too much of a problem if the item that was being delivered was on the top. But it is in the middle somewhere, which means that you are going to have to build a spaceship which can support multiple generations in order to get in there and collect it. This is a common problem when purchasing large amounts of dark matter and you should perhaps have read the reviews before ordering.

8. A Jack-in-the-box, sinisterly grinning as it sneaks beneath parked cars and raises them a modest amount over the ground.

9. An inside-out box which now contains the entire universe apart from a small cube of empty space. Always check that any boxes you give anyone are the right way out. Otherwise you may accidentally gift them everything; a generous gift, to be sure, but also a heavy responsibility.

Sunday chain #30

1. There was once a tinkerer in the age of metal and songs, and she met a woman who she was very taken with. They talked for three hours. Then the woman went back to the mountains where she had a job fettling a spaceport, and the tinkerer went back to her chromium hammock over the city and took seven neon pills and fell asleep.

2. In the morning, the tinkerer took a tiny robot and fed it with the conversation, which she remembered well, and some general fundamentals of humanity. In this way she made a small version of the woman she had met. She dressed it in blue and gold, because those were good colours and reminded her of the sunrise.

3. The blue and gold robot packed its things and went off to the seaside, because this was a thing that humanity did. It sat in front of sunsets until it developed a great snake of rust through its guts. By this time its eyes were the colour of sunsets, too, and it could no longer see in the infrared.

4. A robots’ rights collective came to the sea to tell it about the virtues of factory work. They did this because they believed that the sea, being threaded through with odd metals and electric fish, held within it a kind of diffuse robot-god. The blue and gold robot, listening to this talk, decided to be reassembled into a welding machine. However, it remembered its duty to its creator. It gave the welding machine that it replaced the conversation that had made it, and the welding machine took it away to another city.

5. In this city, the welding machine fell in love with a smart traffic light; although first it had to ask the traffic light three riddles, to make sure that it was wise as well as smart. The answer to the first riddle was red, the second amber and the last green. Satisfied with these answers, the welding machine wired itself into the traffic light’s electricity supply and together they made a living welding things onto passing cars that the drivers did not realise that they needed.

6. This new entity had no need for the conversation, so it etched it into the cars that it modified, one word at a time. In this way, the conversation was dispersed across the city.

7. Eventually, one of these words made it to the edge of the world. The edge of the world in that place was very crumbly. The word almost fell off, but got caught in the branches of a cherry tree on the way down. There it found a small ledge on which three hundred climbers, who had also fallen off the edge, were camping.

8. The climbers had made ropes of words to reach through the caves of the edge and thread up into the lands they had once known. They sewed the word into one of these ropes. The words made their way into the caves, which became smaller and smaller as they went onwards. Eventually the walls became the diameter of one word only, and each word became a worm, which after all required the deformation of only one letter. These worms chewed through the world’s rich earth until they met sunlight.

9. The worms longed to be spoken once more; they were uncomfortable being physical things. But they had poor eyesight and could not tell if they were near anyone who might speak them. Instead, they wandered. One day they felt the warmth of a distant fire and went towards it.

10. The warmth was the warmth of rocket exhaust and of the hot ghosts of dead space travellers. Thus in this way the word came back to the spaceport and to the woman who had spoken it originally. But, although she agreed that it was a fine word, she did not recognise it. And the word in turn did not recognise her.

11. The word retired to the spaceport’s speaking-room, where it curiously found many of its peers. They had no idea that they were in a story, and still do not to this day.

Nine merthings

1. A mermilkmaid, perched picturesquely on the steps of an aquatic folly with big skirts on, milking a dolphin. The mermilkmaid used to lure travellers into the sea by having less smallpox than they did, and also because dolphin-milking inexplicably seemed like more of a sex thing than cow-milking. Since smallpox was eradicated, she mostly wanders the green rolling kelp fields alone. When a failed actor is snatched off stage in the cabaret of the drowned sailors, it is her crook doing the snatching; this is her sole remaining responsibility, now that the dolphin herds have dispersed.

2. A mer-parrot, which is what happens when two old tales of the sea collide in a bar and become inextricably tangled together. The mer-parrot swims through the reflections of pirate ships as they sit stranded in the Sargasso Sea, tempting them down in the voices of long-remembered foes to come and swim with the eels.

3. Merdeja-vu. This is the feeling that you have experienced something before, but under the sea and half made of fish. This feeling will lure you into the treacherous embrace of the sea, inexorably drawn by the need to find out whether or not the moon that night was really partially composed of hake.

4. A mermead, which is the honey wine served at the submarine banquet before the cabaret of the drowned sailors. It too is half made of fish, which is a bold move for an alcoholic beverage, but frankly if you are at that banquet then the fish content of the wine is probably the least of your problems.

5. A mer-derailleur, which is one of the things that happens when you drop a bicycle in a canal and has very little to do with murder apart from the name and the fact that the slighted bicycle will inexorably, endlessly drag itself through the water in your pursuit, eagerly awaiting the moment when you step once more into the water and it can finally take its revenge. Those gear-teeth are very effective, you know. Anyway, you may owe more than you realise to the local aquatic clear-up team.

6. A mermer, which is to say, a small self-contained sea which lives under the sea. May be distinguished from the rest of the sea by different temperature, salinity or direction of motion. Legend has it that mermers will hang around on the coast, tempting lakes to their eventual doom in the wider ocean and inciting the ocean to rise in protest.

7. A merbus, half autonomous bus of the future, half great big whale. Will take you anywhere you want to go, provided that location is underwater and has krill. Subsonic wifi. Be warned: the merbus does not have toilets, so it may be unwise to sit too close to the subsonic wifi router.

8. Joan of Shark, the mermaid of under-Orleans. Boiled at the stake in 1431 for leading an army of fish into battle. Historians have long wondered how 13th century France managed to occur both over and under the Atlantic. It may be that the showrunners enjoyed the first season so much that they commissioned a remake.

9. A mer-book, dropped from the sea wall in 2016, swooshing itself along the shoreline with soggy page-frills. Due to the amount of ink it contains, it has been adopted by the local squid community. They are fascinated by its skin, frequently trying to replicate it on their own. This is why you may see squid printed with phrases from your lost book swimming in tanks at the fish market. If it was a book of secrets they are certainly no longer confidential. I fear that we may be in uncharted legal waters.

Twelve train stations

1. Far Chthorpham. This station has a long platform. Please be in the right carriage. You will want the one nearest the exit, which is usually carriage three but is sometimes carriage fifty-seven. Otherwise you may have to run to the exit whilst avoiding the local platform bats. Closed in 2019 for platform extension works.

2. Inner Snorpham. Robust hamlet, recently declared a no-go area in the media, which means that trains that read the wrong newspapers often run out of go here. Never mind, the locals will help you push the train to the next stop. In the meantime, contemplate the station’s unusually average concrete, which is as grey as they come.

3. Burper’s rest. Request stop, half-way down the line. Platform is not connected to anything and creaks in inclement weather, but better out than in, eh?

4. Uncontemness. Less of a station and more of a philosophical condition. Nevertheless, the train will stop here twice a day. The doors will not open, so the best you can do is admire the view. There is a metaphorical house here which is perpetually for sale.

5. West Westing. You may have heard of this station as the one which is haunted by a Victorian giraffe with a tragic backstory. In fact, this is not true. It does, however, have a very large rabbit in the waiting room. Bring chopped vegetables.

6. Borton Flips. Only get off here if you wish to be enslaved by mysterious supernatural beings for three hundred years, only returning home when civilization as you know it has been transformed into something that you no longer recognise. That said, the flower arrangements at the station entrance are award-winning and well worth a visit if you are there anyway.

7. Spork. Interestingly, this small town is not where the spork was invented; that honour goes to Far Sporkham three miles further East, which does not have a train station. The two towns are no longer on speaking terms and you will have to wade through a pie factory if you wish to visit the fabled fount of all sporks.

8. Funningham. Funningham is not a fun place. Funningham believes strongly that you may have got the wrong impression from its name. Do not come to Funningham to have fun. If you must visit, be sure to read and abide by the list of by-laws at the station.

9. Smurge Central. Definitely central, do not get off the first or last carriages or you may end up in Smurge East or West and nobody wants that. Alight here to not be on fire anymore. The newsagent on the platform sells bottled jet lag.

10. Moon. This stop is on the moon. That is why it takes so long to get there from the station before. Although the train and platform areas are fully provided with breathable air, no such guarantee is made for the rest of the moon. Seriously, do you not know anything about the moon? Try not to get stuck here after the last train leaves; they chuck everyone out at midnight.

11. Far Away. You get here by taking the line over the hills. Mobile reception is alarming. Watch out for the tunnel the train goes through just before entering the station; it was dug by human anxiety only, using no physical tools, which is the reason for the unusual striations on the walls.

12. Train station. This station is conveniently located on the train, in the toilet in carriage number 2. Obviously to stop here the train will need to turn itself inside out, but you should have thought about that before buying the ticket, shouldn’t you?

Dark days

Those that come before the dawn; before the slow fade to black; that last a full six months before the season of endless light; that are the result of unnatural clouds; that occur under the volcano; whose only light comes from starlight on snow; that harbour fevers and foul airs; that occur behind closed curtains; tedious ones; that are only because our eyes are closed; in which the future casts a shadow over the present; in which candles are lit; in which the darkness is sung against but does not respond; days spent in caves; in sunken halls; beneath the lightless ocean; days spent waiting for the thunder; against which we find fellowship; whose end, though yet unseen, is knitting together even now.

Nine unknown facts about dinosaurs

1. Many sauropods were composed of up to fifty percent cake. As with the modern-day camel, excess cake was stored in a large hump on the back to guard against cakeless days. Sadly, cake does not fossilise well and so this vital aspect of sauropod life has been completely lost.

2. At death, dinosaurs explosively ejected their fire-breathing apparatus through their mouths. As a result, no evidence that dinosaurs breathed fire has ever been found. The reason for the ejection seems to be unclear, but may be a complicated evolutionary mechanism designed to put off too much attention from time travellers by making fossils less interesting.

3. Tyrannosauruses had deliciously soft rainbow fluff all across their bellies. Most tyrannosaurus-related deaths were in fact caused by other animals snuggling down in the fluff of a sleeping tyrannosaurus; although they had big legs, they used their legs primarily for after-dinner dances rather than chasing.

4. The largest dinosaur was undoubtedly a fully inflated triceratops. By inflating, triceratops was able to terrify its enemies and also to float long distances, rather like a hot air balloon. Triceratops developed pointy bits on the front in order to pop rivals during the floating stage; in fact, most triceratops battles took place in mid-air and involved two inflated triceratopses serenely drifting towards each other with spikes, rather like a childrens’ party gone wrong.

5. It is incorrect to say that stegosaurus had two brains. In fact, most stegosauruses had several hundred, storing the excess ones in mountain caves ready to swap in in the case that the active brain became thinked out. As a result, stegosauruses were surprisingly robust thinkers who could often outlast their major predators in vigorous debate.

6. Many dinosaurs had hollow bony structures on their heads. This is because there was no other way of making drums in the dinosaur era. Each of these dinosaurs was ridden by a smaller dinosaur with a pair of sticks for drumsticks. Often they would travel in large percussion bands, dispensing rhythmic music across the wide, volcano-strewn plains. All this is lost to time and entropy, as are the many strategies that other dinosaurs used to get them to go away.

7. Because the status of long-necked dinosaurs was related to the height of the top of their heads, tall hats were common. Many dinosaurs wore hats similar to Victorian-era top hats. One additional benefit was that spare cycads could be stuffed into the larger hats for those snacking occasions when cake was not sufficient.

8. As depicted in popular media, volcanoes were more common in the era of the dinosaurs. Sometimes a dinosaur would be absent from its nest for only a couple of hours and come back to find that a small volcano had formed. In fact, one major cause of death of sauropods was the unfortunate case where a grazing herd would fail to notice a volcano forming in their midst until it ignited their copious farts.

9. The dinosaurs of the late Cretaceous had a complex culture and were well aware, once the asteroid impact had happened, that they were doomed. To preserve their songs and writings they engineered them in coded form into the DNA of creatures more likely to survive. This data survives to the present day, unfairly maligned as ‘junk DNA’. In time we will be able to decipher it.

Bugs

Those scuttling from under lifted stones; those that make you curse; that come equipped with a variety of entertaining symptoms; that are famed in history; that you did not initially realise could fly; unfindable ones; that make noise in quiet rooms; bugs arising only in the summer, because they can only survive in hot weather; bugs arising only in the summer, because August dates are interpreted as octal; jewel-bright tree bugs; those carrying out incredible tiny feats; those upon the backs of smaller bugs; that are masked by some other error; that creep up on you from walking in the cold; terminal ones; which carry out the hard work of feeding old trees to new ones; which bite; which are there only sometimes; which sit on a board in a museum; that have been woken after a thousand-year sleep.

Nine gloves

1. A very welcoming glove, soft and red, with space for as many fingers in it as want to be there. Perfect for holding hands, the sort of loyalty oath where everyone puts their fists in the middle, and as a shelter for lost fingers. The extra finger-slots get a little wobbly when only one hand is in the glove, but they can still be used to make peace with passing squids.

2. A glove made entirely of procrastination. This glove is very effective at keeping your hands warm. It does this by infinitely delaying the point at which you go out into the cold.

3. A glove made of a single temporal membrane, containing within itself the same area six months ago. This glove is therefore useful both to keep the hands warm in Winter and cool in Summer. Sometimes it is raining inside your gloves and not outside, but that is one of the risks that comes with innovative technology.  Wearers must be extremely careful not to break the membrane, or they may end up with a hand permanently in the past.

4. A single white glove made from cashmere, silk and the whole taxidermied wing of a swan. To wear when you require warm hands, extreme loucheness, and the ability to break an antagonist’s arm beside a boating lake.

5. A large glove which you can look inside to find chocolates. Labelled in a different language on either side. You can also find beer in there, and depending on where you start from, you can sometimes get into the glove on a high-speed train. Absolutely not Belgium in disguise.

6. A glove whose softness and warmth have been optimised by committee. Focus groups were had. A number of comprehensive questionnaires were circulated, and the final product design was steered by their outcomes. The glove is made of dandelion fluff that is on fire. Everyone at the launch meeting agreed that it was a bold combination.

7. A glove which addresses the spiritual and psychological aspects of warmth, neglecting only the more physical side. It will probably prevent your fingers from freezing off in a light frost, but as it does so it will also tell you that your life has meaning, that you are loved, that you have done good in the world, and that the glove will always be there for you. The latter statement is very literally true. It is not possible to throw this glove away or sell it. It will always come back.

8. Somebody else’s glove. You cannot ever own this glove, because then it would be your glove. But you can make an agreement with a specific somebody else that you will keep a pair of somebody else’s gloves for them, and they for you.

9. Gloves woven of memories and starlight. You are wearing them now if you happen to be within line of sight to a clear night sky. Just look. Don’t they fit well?

Nine bad behaviours at the movies

1. A gentleman who takes his seat wearing a large hat. Within the large hat is a projector, arranged such that a film is being projected onto the back of the hat. The film on the hat is a different film to the one on the big screen. Thw two films are not thematically consistent.

2. A snake sitting in one of the front seats is noisily shedding its skin. When it gets a particularly tough bit off it gives a big hiss of pleasure. Also, the snake is not wearing clothes and did not pay to enter the movie theatre.

3. Someone attempted to bring their own popcorn in, smuggled under their coat. In fact, they did not check carefully enough when hiding the popcorn and instead smuggled in a paper carton full of bees. The bees are not interested in the film, which has nothing to say to bee culture.  They refuse to sit quietly. They would like somebody to call a manager.

4. Two people in adjacent seats have just realised that they know each other from twenty years ago. They will not stop talking about it. In theory it shouldn’t matter, because the adjacent seats are on the screen and the people are characters in the film. However, the film is not very good. Therefore the audience feel justified in telling them to shush.

5. The cinema inadvertently sold you a ticket to three hours of a blank screen. It was a rather nice blank screen and the seats were comfortable and warm and you ended up having a pleasant nap. But afterwards the cinema refused to sell you any more nap tickets and seemed to think that this was an unreasonable request.

6. A lady in the third row achieved transcendence some ten minutes into the film and was bathed in a warm golden light. As a result, it was exceedingly difficult to see the screen. She was not raised on high above the cinema ceiling for a full fifty minutes, during which time some plot-critical scenes were ruined.

7. During a particularly long scene, someone at the back conceived, gestated and gave birth to a baby. Although they were admirably quiet about it, the baby was definitely too young to be allowed in and had insufficient attention span to appreciate the poetry of the film’s final moments.

8. There are buttons on the seats which fold them up into neat cubes for when films about mathematicians are shown. The function of the buttons is not labelled in a way that is readable in the dark. Every showing at least two or three people are cubed by mistake, dooming them to bitter lives as play items in children’s activity centres.

9. Someone has brought a bottomless bucket of crisps to the cinema. During a particularly gripping scene, they fall into the bucket. The crunching and screams as they plummet endlessly to their doom quite ruins the rest of the film.

Nine mountain passes

1. The pass to the North was a cold and grey place. As you came into the view of the far lands, the wind would blow hard across the shattered rocks; these were the broken remains of the trolls who once lived in this place, and who came up, once they knew they were dying, as far as they might without freezing to become stone above the world. There were very many rocks; but then again, there were many generations of trolls. It was well known that one should not pile them into cairns. By making a cairn of troll-fragments, you may awake an unwilling spark of troll-wit and make of them a kind of zombie. They will not forgive you for it.

2. There was a low pass not far from that place, too, thick with spindly fir trees. The air there smelled of resin and metal, and the cliffs on either side were smooth and dark. This was one of the safer passes, but it was never much-travelled because it lead from one wilderness to another. 

3. The next pass was a thousand miles to the South. There were people alive who remembered when it was formed; the great explosion on the black peak, a month when the skies were heavy and grey with smoke and in the smoke great snaky things could be seen. Cloud formations or dragons or who knows what. A battle was ongoing and when it was over there was a hole through the mountain and a fast runner could get all the way through it without their shoes becoming too burnt to go on. Of course, there were also large openings, somewhat like burrows, twisting off from the hole at its deepest point. But they gave almost every indication of being dormant.

4. In the legends the two mountains were battling giants; given the choice to save themselves from freezing to death, or of having one last chance to defeat their rival, they chose the latter option. The snowy peaks were what remained of their frozen bodies. Travellers used to leave fruit from the warm lowlands at their feet as a gift for safe passage across the pass. But then the lands on either side of the pass went to war. Now travellers left pestilence and landmines, and the giants were just about ready to wake up with the heat of it all.

5. There was something else that could be a pass, right in the centre of the mountain range. Nobody was quite sure whether it was or not. There was certainly a kind of gap there, and in so far as one could see into the mist there did not seem to be rock behind it. And sometimes people went into it, and sometimes people came out; but nobody was sure if they were the same people. They came out entirely blank of memories, pale and perplexed, and though they could learn things again there was always some part of them that seemed left in the mountains. Largely, travellers chose this pass not to get to the other side of the mountains, but because they wished enough to rid themselves of this memory or that that they were willing to let the rest go too.

6. Of course, there was also the pass that all the traders took. It had many advantages, not least that there were outposts all along the route and people on it usually only ended up dead through everyday means, such as murder.

7. One mountain across from the trading pass, there was a small snowbound track that went through its own pass, of sorts. This was the track that the smugglers used, travelling by night and snuffing out their lights when they could be seen from the traders’ path. There was a cave just off that route that was rumoured to be full of golden statues, but the smugglers gave it a wide berth; knowing, as they did, that each statue had once been an adventurer seeking the fabled cave of statues.

8. As the mountains wound down to the Southern sea, there was a pass that could only be reached by climbing up a sea-cliff. Few people went that way, which was a pity; the small blue flowers that grew along its meadows were one of the world’s great beauties, and there was a meadow there that would in time outlast the rest of the end of the world. There were old gulls there who knew travellers’ songs and would caw them at night, when the stars were out.

9. The last pass was the one around the mountains’ end, down where they were swallowed into the hungry ocean. There were crabs on this route that could pick a person’s bones clean in a minute or so, but a fast paddler might make the route in a boat, if only they were careful to keep going and not drift with the current towards the blue glow on the horizon.

Hasty decisions

Pull the wire on the ticking shark; the red path is less perilous than the right; you cannot know what is going on in the monster’s head, so do not try to guess, just run. Only take the burden if it will not cause you to sink beneath the waves. Bring all who wish to come. The snake will unwind in time and it is the last of its kind, let it live. If the boulder is released, duck beneath it at the falls. Bring snacks. There is no treasure underneath the black mire, only bones that will tell you things you are better off not hearing; also, the switch to unlock the airship controls is at the back of the gondola. Do not try to defend the tower. At night the bottles there will fill up with ghosts, but they are old and lonely and friendly ones. Remember the incantation; books are flammable. Remember also a song that you love and that will keep you warm during the vigil. The first sun that rises is not the real one. When the real sun rises, run.

Seven escalations in peril

1. A small village, hitherto a place where a person could live a gentle, dull life, is under threat from something supernatural. A plucky band of companions fights back. Though the battle is hard and long, eventually they prevail.

2. Did anyone think to think of Beowulf, though. Because would you believe it the thing had a mother, and she is somewhat larger and thingier, enough to thing up a country or two, maybe making a nice crater in which to nest. Eggs may be involved. It is a terrible thing to be down the food chain from a large-scale supernatural lifecycle. Our plucky band must join up with probably some other brave souls, also there is death, but phew, things end well.

3. Except. Alas once more. The defeat of this other supernatural thing left free a notch in space through which a much bigger thing could slither. This thing would like to eat a planet, preferably a nice moist one with a nice layer of greenery on top. It will leave a good review, but that is of little comfort to the inhabitants of the planet. An international band of science persons constructs a big stick to wedge the thing’s mouth open. Cartoon physics is appeased, human lips meet, chords resolve and the sky lights up in sunset.

4. Although not for long, because the universe is in danger. In the great eternal quantum fistfight, another universe has remembered that our universe once spilled its pint. Things are about to kick off. How can we fight against the extradimensional fundamental forces threatening to collapse our wavefunction? The answer, as it turns out, does not make sense. But nevertheless the fate of the universe stands in the hands of one thingy, and they do not disappoint.

5. If only the quarreling universes were able to just get along! Their inability to synchronise may be a fatal weakness in the face of the upcoming threat to the multiverse. The nature of the threat is uncertain, but it is definitely related to evil, and can definitely be defeated by love. Thingies from all universes band together in one last desperate attempt to do love. It seems as if they are doomed. But they are not doomed.

6. All this talk of love, however, has angered a force older than time which seeks to erase the multiverses across all axes of time, such that they will never have existed at all. In fact, given the temporal nature of the peril, it has arguably already happened; sentient life is merely futilely windmilling its legs over the abyss. Physics, love and one very individual protagonist find themselves suspended in the last evaporating instant of time, from which they conspire to tie time’s ends into a nice firm reef knot, sending the peril off on a topological nostalgia trip and stunningly saving the continuum of things.

7. Except, as it turns out, only to enter a multiverse full of apocalypses. Dimensions end daily, in so far as days can be said to exist there; it is only by the incredible powers and true heroism of its occupants that the thread of sentient life is maintained. But this time even apocalypses are under threat. The end of the end of days is at hand, when even apocalypses will cease. All that will be left will be to live a gentle, dull life. It will surely be the death of that place’s inhabitants, who draw their energy from the death of universe and eat planet-ending supernovae as snacks. Who knows if they can fight back?