As usual, I nearly got on the first train to arrive at the platform.
Not as usual. I usually hop on it, sometimes sitting down before saying ‘oop’ loudly and getting off again.
Usually I talk to myself as I get off, explaining to myself that I’ve got on the wrong train, so people don’t think I’m a crazy person who gets on and off every train that comes in.

The getting on bit just happens.

I’m reading or something on a bench at the platform, waiting for the second or third train, and then a train arrives going to somewhere wrong. My arms put my paper away, my legs stand me up, walk me to the train, get me onboard safely, my mouth says thankyou or excuse me as required, then it’s usually my ears that hear the unfamiliar destination on the tanoy and they take control of my legs and send me mumbling back onto the platform.

Sometimes there’s no announcement it’s another trigger, a small humunculous inside my skull runs to the front and with a tiny, squeaky voice says excuse me! excuse me! until my lumbering frontal cortex turns and booms ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT OH MY GOD THIS ISN’T MY TRAIN’

The boy sits and watches the swans. He watches for a long while. The tide goes out and he sees that when it gets low enough the swans can stretch their necks just far enough to reach the plants that grow on the bed of the river. They tear them up and fight over the loose strands that hang from their bills and create a frenzy of feathers and foam and spray, not unlike the piranhas he has seen working at a stray cow in the museum.

Watching the swans he wonders if they realize that the tide has gone out. After-all, there is no reason they shouldn’t think, that it is the river-bed itself that rises and falls periodically.

‘Perhaps’, he concludes, legs dangling above the murky spray, ‘perhaps swans don’t really think anything – at all.’ The arrogant little boy.

The locals picked through the wreckage of the alien craft, giggling like the children they ressembled, though they were a lot older than they looked. Millions of years older.

The crust had already started forming on the wreckage, in greens and greys and deep purples, even as it sunk into the soft silt that formed the entirity of this small planets surface. It spooled out in little patterns, decorating the edges of the framework, or hanging down towards the planets surface in stalagtites, as it does on anything that sits still for long enough.

The crust squeaked and foamed slightly as it was drawn down and smothered in the horizontal sludge that is itself made up of the ground skeletons of the tiny creatures that made up the crust. The ship was sinking.

Bits of space suit and sail cloth hung limply in jolly colours from bits of the frame and the giggling creatures pulled bits off and whacked each other over the head with them, without much thought to what they meant and what they had once been.

That was unlikely to endear them to the riders of the massive  platform framework that had, a few hours before, broken through into the large watery atmosphere from the chill of outer space, and now loomed over the wreckage, hoovering, massive. They were watching with some distain as the child like inhabitants of the small beachy world slapped each other in the face with the soggy remains of their collegues, ducking and weaving and giggling, like the children they weren’t.

*

Normally this thing corrects spolling mistakes. Nevermind.

Here is some artwork from the show and something a visitor left for us sometime near Christmas.

The final frontier.

There now follows a series of pictures from our Grand Exhibition.

“Ms. R from County Antrim has just won £2.00!”

I’ve mucked up the site a bit… maybe I can get the heading up again…ahhh

In the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

(A lecture, foaming at the mouth)

“…An infinite universe doesn’t just mean that there are other planets, distant from ours, in which everything happens just the same, throughout the whole of history and forever into the future.

Or that there are other planets where everything is exactly the same bar a single event- you dropped a peanut, instead of eating the peanut.

And a Multi-verse of parallel Universes doesn’t just mean other universes peeling off every time an event with various probabilities occurs- you might eat a peanut, instead of dropping it- whoosh, there’s another universe to accommodate that.

“
No no. not just that. It means that there is a world, or a universe, for every variety of slight difference of cellular decay in each of the cells in my arm. And your arm, but let’s stick with my arm for now.

And it means an infinite number of worlds that are exactly the same as this world. And an infinite number of worlds only slightly different. That’s what an infinite universe means.

You see, I can cope with an infinite number of different planets, full of different things each with their special meanings, but an infinite number of planets with only one mundane atoms difference and the whole of the rest of the planet EXACTLY THE SAME is too much.

Knowledge has moved away from everything revolving around us, either as replicants of the Divine or as the center of the solar system. An infinite number of universes makes a cell in my arm a central difference between here and at least an infinite number of other planets, and that I find hard to accept.

Nature just isn’t that inefficient.

Thank you for your kind attention…”