The crucial difference between songs and records is that a song is an idea and a record is a thing. The clue’s in the name: a record is a record of its own creation. Even with the impact of multitrack recording and digital workstations, a record is a document of a place and a time. A fixed point. Did the singer have a cold that day? How did the instruments sound? Were the band getting along? Where were the mics placed? Did Sting accidentally sit on a piano?   “A Day in the Life”, The Beatles

If you catch the author of these words in a particularly grandiloquent mood he will argue (at tiresome length) that A Day in the Life is the high-water mark of 20^th century music – an ambitious, ambiguous masterpiece that’s as close to transcendent as pop has managed to achieve. After a rising orchestral glissando, the song climaxes with an E-major chord played simultaneously on three pianos and a harmonium. As the note rings out for forty triumphant seconds, the vibrations drifting off into the universe, Ringo Starr’s shoe squeaks as he shifts his weight in his seat. Improbably, it’s the perfect ending: an art form’s apogee, recorded over 34 hours, and in its final moments you hear Ringo fidget.

“Mack the Knife”, Ella Fitzgerald

Kurt Weill’s standard Mack the Knife has been recorded by so many artists that you probably have a version of it out there somewhere, but few iterations compare to Ella Fitzgerald’s 1960 live performance. After the first verse Fitzgerald went completely blank, but managed to style it out, singing “Oh what’s the next chorus to this song now/this is the one now/I don’t know/but it was a swinging tune and it’s a hit tune/So we tried to do Mack the Knife” and continuing to make up two further verses without missing a beat. Fitzgerald was such a pro that she – by her own in-song admission – made “a wreck” and still ended up winning two Grammies for the performance.

“Black Country Woman”, Led Zeppelin

A common childhood memory: the weather is glorious and your teacher, in a beatific mood, agrees to have class outdoors for the day. For adults, unfortunately, the insect-alluring reality rarely matches the fantasy. Led Zeppelin learned this when they decided to use the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio (like a mobile library but containing a mixing desk and drugs instead of paperbacks) to record Black Country Woman in Mick Jagger’s garden. As soon as they started taping a plane appeared overhead, but they chose to keep this in along with their discussion about keeping it in. This ended better, at least, than the other occasion they attempted recording in a garden and Robert Plant was attacked by a flock of geese.

“Labyrinth”, Grouper

“Infested with self-pity and anger” following a break-up, in 2011 Liz Harris – the artist and musician known as Grouper – accepted a residency in the small Portuguese town of Aljezur. Alone for days at a time, she would take field recordings and walk miles through the ruins of old estates. After a storm brought a power cut, she sat at a piano in the dark and played an aching instrumental called Labyrinth. A note or two from the end, something happened: the power returned, and floating across came the sound of the microwave switching back on. Harris decided to leave the song how it was; the result is perhaps the most haunting, lonely microwave beep you’ll ever hear.

“30 Hours”, Kanye West

The perfectionism of Kanye West’s music stands in contrast to his self-sabotaging public impulsiveness, which is why something seemed different about The Life of Pablo. West – a recently-married new father, preoccupied by other creative interests – continued to fiddle with the album in the months following its release, unable to get it right. He was so distracted that in the middle of an improvised verse during the song 30 Hours his phone rings and, unbelievably, he actually stops to take the call. “Yo Gabe, I’m just doing an adlib track right now”, he says, the tape still rolling, “What’s up?” While the moment amuses, it’s hard to imagine the hungry young producer of a decade earlier being diverted by anything.

“Oh Comely”, Neutral Milk Hotel

Considering the (lovely) magazine that’s named after it (but we’re biased, don’t take our word for it), Oh Comely is far darker and stranger than you might expect – eight and a half minutes of mass graves and sitting inside a stranger’s stomach and wanting to save Anne Frank in some sort of time machine and adulterous fathers who “made fetuses with flesh-licking ladies while you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park”. Jeff Mangum had been asked to sing a verse as a soundcheck, but ended up performing the entire song in a single take. As he finished, his astonished collaborator Scott Spillane, standing in the sound booth, screamed “Holy shit!”. He speaks for us all.

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Eight. Illustration by Matsuo Reiko.

The relentless electioneering of recent years has been exhausting and demoralising, but politics isn’t wholly bleak: it will always be funny, at least, when animals gain constitutional power. “Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office” may sound like a ceremonial position, but consider this: the UK employs over 100,000 cats to catch rodents on government property. If cats were people – furry, serial-killing people – they’d be our fourth largest workforce. It’s crucial in a democracy to scrutinise those in charge, even when they happen to be a goat wearing a mayoral sash.

Peter III

Felines have stalked Britain’s literal and figurative corridors of power since the 16th century, when Cardinal Wolsey’s cat attended official meetings. As tensions mounted across Europe pre-World War II, however, naming suffered: there was Peter, forced to diet due to indulgent civil servants; Peter II, killed by a car within months; and Peter III, called “Peter the Great” mostly because no-one ran him over and he stayed in shape. After keeping his patch rodent-free during that optimistic post-war idyll from 1947 to 1964, Peter’s death drew condolences from prominent pets including Etti-Cat, a cat enlisted to promote courtesy among New York subway users – in its letter, quite sweetly, Etti-Cat encloses a photo and requests one of Peter for its scrapbook.

Bosco

What’s most impressive about Boss “Bosco” Ramos becoming mayor of Sunol, California is not that he was a black labrador mix, or that he defeated two human candidates, but that he occupied the post for 13 whole years. Upon hearing of the election, the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily called Bosco’s victory “a wakeup tonic for those kind-hearted people who are naïve and ignorant and blindly worship Western democracy”; in response, the dog-mayor accompanied a group of Chinese students to a pro-democracy rally. A bronze statue of the human rights advocate/belly rub enthusiast now stands in front of Sunol’s post office. Interviewed about Bosco two decades later, local resident Dave Rodgers was unequivocal: “He was the best mayor we ever had”.

Peta

As the Home Office reeled from the loss of Peter III, a replacement was found: a Manx cat called Manninagh Katedhu, promptly renamed “Peta”. Where previous cats were donated by cleaners, Peta was a gift from the Isle of Man’s Lieutenant Governor; her salary was double that of her predecessors, but in a blow for class equality, this was because she came from a diplomatic background rather than “the industrial grades”. Unlike her illustrious forebear, Peta was decidedly not great: internal memos described her as “inordinately fat” and she got into trouble for brawling with Harold Wilson’s Siamese cat Nemo. Eventually Peta was sent away to enjoy “a break in the country”, which is surely some sort of euphemism.

Bubbles

While Bubbles never held a formal title, his role as Michael Jackson’s consort made him the world’s most famous chimpanzee. In the late 1980s the pair were inseparable, with the primate accompanying Jackson on tour and sitting in during the recording of Bad. Inevitably this couldn’t last: as an adult Bubbles became aggressive and was returned to his original owner. Thankfully such mistreatment is increasingly unacceptable, but the old tabloid stories retain their appeal: the National Enquirer once reported that Prince had attempted to interfere with Bubbles using extrasensory perception, causing Jackson to ask, “What kind of sicko would mess with a monkey?” Bubbles now lives at a sanctuary for animals rescued from the entertainment industry, free from funkadelic telepathy.

Humphrey

Having endured two conservative premierships, Chief Mouser Humphrey met his match in Cherie Blair. The barrister attempted to get Humphrey ejected from Downing Street, but this caused such outrage that a photo op had to be arranged of her holding the black-and-white cat – to make Humphrey comply, Alastair Campbell sedated him. The story gets weirder. Humphrey was finally relocated “for medical reasons”, sparking rumours of murder: MP Alan Clark commented “Humphrey is now a missing person. Unless I hear from him or he makes a public appearance, I suspect he has been shot”. This forced a second photoshoot, in a secret location, of the cat posing with that day’s newspapers. Humphrey was alive, but had apparently become a hostage.

Tama

When the Wakayama Electric Railway destaffed its Kishigawa Line stations in 2006 to cut costs, stationmasters were sought to help the struggling line. The recruit for Kishi station was Toshiko Koyama, who would bring along his tortoiseshell cat Tama to greet passengers. A year later Tama was officially hired as stationmaster, and the former stray became so popular that she added 1.1bn yen annually to the local economy. Tama ascended steadily during her eight years in charge, becoming super-stationmaster, ultra-stationmaster and eventually vice president of the rail company. In 2015 news of her death elicited nationwide mourning and 3,000 people attended the funeral. Having genuinely rescued the rural line from oblivion, Tama posthumously received one final promotion: Honourable Eternal Stationmaster.

 

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Seven. Illustrations by Jisun Lee.

I was 27 when I first learned that The Beatles is a pun. Even though I’ve known how to spell “beetle” for some time, I’d somehow never made the connection that the name evokes the Merseybeat scene from which the group initially sprang. Last month, despite having been a journalist for most of my adult life, it dawned on me that “news” is the plural of “new”, meaning that the news is a compilation of different new things that have happened. It’s possible that I am just exceedingly dim, but sometimes a piece of knowledge is so simple and self-evident that you are unable to recognise it. Such information is the nose in your field of vision: always there, unchanging, so the brain ignores it entirely. I bring this up because I’ve only recently realised that it might not be healthy to know what everyone you’ve ever met is currently doing with their lives.

The satirical American newspaper The Onion once published an article titled “Report: Everyone Starting New Exciting Stage Of Life Except You” – if, for whatever reason Mark Zuckerberg lost the rights to the name Facebook, this would be an ideal (albeit unwieldy) replacement. In an attempt to kill time while waiting for trains to arrive and kettles to boil, we have found ourselves in a sadomasochistic relationship with a gargantuan corporate entity. This entity uses the lives of people we know to make us feel bad about our own lives, and yet we cannot stop ourselves. Look at the interesting meals your former colleague has eaten. Look at the wedding of a childhood friend. Look at how many exotic countries your co-worker is visiting. Look at the house that the friend of your friend has bought. Look at your dream job being done by your university coursemate. Look at the beautiful child of your ex. It’s their birthday. They’re having cake. Social media can feel like everyone you know is at a party you’re not invited to, one you’re compelled to watch from afar. These people aren’t necessarily more content than you, but when confronted with curated glimpses of pleasure we can only reflect on our own comparative drabness: they are doing an exciting thing while we are looking at a picture, alone on the internet.

Study after study indicates that the passive consumption of online broadcasts from acquaintances increases feelings of loneliness and depression: the longer you spend visiting somewhere like Facebook or Instagram, the unhappier you become. We’re hard-wired to absorb information that is immediately available, and so we’re held captive by the stimulus around us. It isn’t just pop-up ads stealing seconds of your finite concentration and time: you hop online to quickly message a friend and before you know it you’re thumbing through the holiday snaps of someone who attended the same primary school as you, dissatisfied and obscurely glum.

The belated conclusion I came to, however, didn’t concern social media’s well-documented emotional impediments, as troubling as they can be. An equally pressing problem, I’ve found, is that we’ve inadvertently constructed a system whereby it’s possible to never lose touch with anyone ever again. Where once the default was that most people entered our lives and eventually left them again, now we have to make a deliberate decision to unfriend, unfollow or withdraw completely. Unless rigour is applied, the only people you ever conclusively disengage from are either horrible or insignificant enough to have left no impression at all. Everyone else is still there, simultaneously in our lives and not in them, their presence chiefly taking the form of random periodic reminders that they still exist. You’ve lost touch with them and yet you’re passing a spare minute by looking at photos of them attending the hen party of someone you don’t know.

At first glance, this seems like a quietly cheering innovation. So long as you don’t spend too long dwelling online, it can be heartening to see that someone who once meant something to you is doing well. If you’d been born any earlier in history you probably wouldn’t have spoken to that person from your primary school ever again, but now you get to see that they’ve become a seemingly functional adult with a job and a family and very strong opinions about car shopping. Good for them.

The mystery of what happened to people from our past isn’t more valuable than the answer, but we learn things about ourselves by moving forward, by shedding parts of our identity and taking on new elements as we go. Surely it isn’t helpful to see continual written and photographic documentation of all of the earlier strands of your life, as if they’re all still happening right now. The human condition is best served by a fading past, a vivid present and an uncertain future. There is value in drifting away from our past, in having people we know naturally fade into memory.

This isn’t about the dispiriting effect of these reminders: maybe the sight of someone you’ve been in a relationship with is acceptable on an emotional level, but how can you truly get over a person when evidence of them is presented to you by an algorithm every other time you’re waiting for public transport? How can the memory of someone from your past guide you when they still technically exist in your present? The secret to moving forward isn’t to act as if the past never happened, but it also isn’t to proceed as if it is moving along with you. For us to also become functional adults with strong opinions on car shopping then we need to keep the past exactly where it can play the most meaningful role: behind us.

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Seven. Illustration by Ana Godis.

My lack of a criminal past owes more to cowardice than an abundance of virtue. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the prospect of rebellion, which made me an unlikely candidate for the task of getting expelled from the British Museum. The plan was hatched to explore unpalatable forms of touch, namely by nuzzling different artefacts until I unleashed an ancient curse/angered someone wearing a lanyard. For my quarry, I selected possibly the most famous space of any museum in the world: Room 4 (Egyptian Sculpture). If I was going to embark on a life of crime, this seemed like a fine place to start. What follows are my notes, scribbled as I dodged tourists and the wrath of Imhotep.

Rosetta Stone (196 BC)

For those with only an hour to spare, the British Museum provides a guide of nine objects all visitors should see. The Rosetta Stone is listed first. Their crowning glory makes an obvious target for devilry, but a knock on the thick glass confirms I’m getting nowhere near it.

Obstacles: Constant crowd, glass case, monumental historical value.

Difficulty level: 9/10

 

Sarcophagus of Merymose (1380 BC)

Devoid of any advanced “glass” security, the Sarcophagus of Merymose sits in the open, its only hurdle being the Please do not touch sign. As I scope out the joint, a tourist is photographed pretending to lick Merymose’s head. I conclude that touching the sarcophagus will make me literally no different from this buffoon.

Obstacles: Reproachful sign, idiots.

Difficulty level: 6/10

 

“The Younger Memnon” (1270 BC)

The noble, haunting face of Ramesses II is one of my most-loved pieces in the museum, but rests atop a plinth taller than me. While I could theoretically use the neighbouring “Statue of Roy” to aid my ascension, Roy presumably wouldn’t be pleased.

Obstacles: Personal attachment, statue placed out of reach like a biscuit tin, Roy.

Difficulty level: 8/10

 

Stela of Ptolemy IX & Cleopatra III (115 BC)

The stela looks like a towering granite fishfinger and stands on a marble block standing on three random bits of wood, as if someone has been playing Jenga with inappropriate pieces. Surely a hearty thwack to the correct spot would topple it – with a lucky aim, I could definitely smush the sarcophagus lid of Padihorhepui, maybe even King Psamtek I’s screen slab. As I wonder whether I can file my copy from jail (do prisons have good wi-fi?), I read the accompanying text. The stela was originally larger but two thirds of it were reused as building materials. It’s suffered enough.

Obstacles: Ancient instance of recycling functioning as contemporary guilt trip.

Difficulty level: 7/10

 

Colossal scarab (399 BC – 300 BC)

It certainly is a very large scarab. “This is one of the largest representations of scarab beetles to survive”, the caption agrees. Another eye-level piece, the statue depicts the god Khepri as a dung beetle, because sure, why not, and boasts a nearby guard. The conditions are perfect – with his fluorescent tabard the guard means business – so why can’t I strike?

In my research it became clear that touching things in museums, even in the name of dubious scientific research, is foolhardy. Aside from the perils of handling old, fragile materials, when we touch objects our fingertips leave a residue of dirt, sweat, dead skin cells, and sebaceous oils that devastate over time. The British Museum receives seven million visitors’ worth of dead skin yearly.

Infractions here are common but people pet the scarab like it’s an animal. They can’t help themselves. They see something amazing and reach out to touch it. I am reminded of my 8th birthday party when my mother spent hours making an elaborate swimming pool cake. The two-tone gelatine representation of water was so realistic that my friend Oliver felt compelled to poke it, prompting my exhausted mum to instinctively whomp the poor child on the head. Confronted with an ancient statue of an ancient god we are all transformed into children excitedly defiling a swimming pool-themed birthday cake. The action is understandable – we naturally use touch to gather information – but it’s worth at least a whomp.

I retreat to a bench to watch the scarab. It looks beautiful, and I reflect that it has looked beautiful for over two thousand years. It looked beautiful in the temple of Atum in Heliopolis, it looked beautiful in Alexandria, it looked beautiful in Constantinople, and now it looks beautiful in Holborn on a damp Wednesday. If it’s cared for properly it has another few thousand years left in it. Long, long after you and I have disappeared, this absurd, miraculous scarab will be sitting in a museum somewhere, and it will still confound the heart. This is my favourite place in London, perhaps. I hope no-one kicks me out.

Obstacles: Change of mind.

Difficulty level: 10/10

 

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Seven. Illustration by Jia Dong Lin.

It’s possible to wake up one day and completely change the world. Yes! We have it within us to see something amiss in society and to find a way to set things right. It’s why tyrants eventually fall and justice ultimately prevails: as a people we possess the capacity for action, for solidarity, for transformation. For every hard-fought strike, advance in civil rights or inspiring act of progressive defiance, however, there are those other occasions when it might have been wiser to not bother at all.

Paying Weezer to quit

When it comes to our favourite groups, the best always seems to be behind us: the strange new album with its strange new songs can’t possibly compare to the one we’ve lived with for years. Indie band Weezer have suffered from a notably acute version of this phenomenon, consistently upsetting fans since around 1996. 14 years on from that early apogee, Seattle-based grouch James Burns attempted to raise $10 million to convince them to call it quits, writing in his online proposal: “I beg you, Weezer. Take our money and disappear”. The band said they’d do it for $20 million, but regrettably for James the campaign only raised a few hundred dollars. Weezer are currently working on their disappointing 11th album.

Overthrowing George II

It isn’t easy to rebel against your own government. Historically most insurrections end in bloodshed and failure, and even if you do evict your ruler there’s a reasonable chance you’ll end up as much of a despot as they were. If you’re planning sedition, then, you’d better have good reasons. Charles Edward Stuart did not. In 1745 “Bonnie Prince Charlie” challenged George II’s throne believing that it belonged to his family, but failed after making tactical errors during the Battle of Culloden. A century later Jacobitism experienced a romantic revival, but essentially it was one aristocrat trying to replace another. Defeated, Charlie fled Britain disguised as a maid called Betty Burke. People were apparently easier to fool in the 1700s.

Electing a monkey

Hartlepool has a weird thing about monkeys. During the Napoleonic Wars – so goes the exquisitely bizarre, almost certainly apocryphal story – a French warship sank off the town’s coast, with its only survivor being a monkey dressed in full military uniform. Assumed to be a Frenchman, the simian was duly tried in court and hung as a spy. In tribute to this historic injustice, Hartlepool F.C. decided to make their mascot “H’Angus the monkey”. H’Angus fared better than his inspiration by being elected as mayor of the town on a platform of free bananas for schoolchildren. Stuart Drummond, the man inside the monkey, swiftly ditched the costume and served three terms despite failing to deliver on his banana pledge.

Constructing a Death Star

It’s extraordinary what people can accomplish when they get together. Please note that the word “extraordinary” does not necessarily mean good, or even halfway-sensible. In a valiant, misguided attempt to give its citizens a voice on important issues, the U.S. government launched a platform in 2011 for creating online petitions: if one garnered over 25,000 signatures it would receive a White House response. Inevitably, silliness ensued, as 34,400 people signed a petition asking for a Death Star to be built in the interests of national security. A government official – it’s possible they weren’t treating the matter with utmost seriousness – politely refused, explaining that it’d cost around $850 quadrillion and also “the Administration does not support blowing up planets”.

Repealing New Coke

Emotional attachment to grocery items runs deep, as anyone who is still calling them them Opal Fruits (19 years later) will tell you. A prime example: in 1985 consumers responded furiously when Coca-Cola’s formula was updated in order to keep up with sweeter rival Pepsi. Even though taste tests suggested a preference for the new version, executives hadn’t counted on the power of lifetime habits. The endeavour was considered one of the biggest marketing disasters of all time, and 77 days after the launch “Coca-Cola Classic” was deployed to soothe nostalgic customers, eventually displacing New Coke altogether. In a delicious twist, ingredient changes had been rolled out over the previous few years, so it wasn’t quite the same drink as before anyway.

Voting yourself out of existence

Many things that can arouse an existential crisis: a depressing tax return, reaching a particular age, an old classmate’s facebook post, 20 minutes in Primark. Unless you once lived in Castlewood, Virginia, though, it’s rare for dark nights of the soul to be caused by a ballot initiative. Faced with heavy taxes after the population dropped from 20,000 to 9,000 over a decade, council members proposed a de-chartering measure that would see the town absorbed by the larger Russell County. “There are more cows than people around these parts” said a councilman, presumably before sighing heavily. 749 residents voted for, 622 against, and Castlewood officially ceased to exist. At last count its population was 2,045. The message is clear: referendums are terrible.

 

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Six. Illustrations by Jessica Wheeler.

You die on a Tuesday, which surprises you for several reasons. Over the years before that fateful weekday you had generally avoided contemplating the circumstances which might prompt your untimely demise, but even if you had given it some thought, you certainly wouldn’t have anticipated that your death would come from tripping into the road after failing to tie your shoelaces. This was, after all, something that your mother had explicitly warned you about. In retrospect you’re lucky to have made it this far without dying elaborately as a result of not tidying your bedroom.

Before the enormity of the change sinks in, you find that you are slightly excited to be dead. It had not been in your plans for the week. Logically you understood that it would happen eventually, but in a small, unconquerable bit of your heart you always secretly believed that you would never actually die. Now that you have perished, it is like you’ve prematurely seen the final episode of a television programme that everyone is obsessed with. It was neither as painful nor as scary as you might have feared. It was not even the worst thing to ever happen to you. You have definitely had breakups worse than your own death.

You leave your body in the street and continue on with your day. It does not take long to adapt to the new reality of your existence. The closest you come to sadness is a passing concern that you should be feeling more sad than you are. Your death was just another part of your life, you understand now. What is unexpected however is that you are given no guidance about what to do next. This is much the same as during life, you suppose, but you had been conditioned to expect at least a brief consultation with some manner of celestial administrator. Even in death, you are still essentially on your own, and while this doesn’t upset you, it does leave you with a lot of time on your hands. It is probably not worth going to work any more, and your social calendar has emptied dramatically.

The sudden lack of a corporeal form is difficult. You spend a fruitless afternoon in a local library trying to read over people’s shoulders, but they are either too slow or too quick for you, and you soon lose patience. Cinemas and museums are better, and you discover that you now possess a level of attention that was previously absent when there was a million things to worry about. You rarely visit figures from your life: it is hard to see them upset, and almost as hard to see them happy. As fatigue has ceased being an issue, you cultivate an interest in hiking. Perhaps it might be fun to walk to another country, you think, although if you didn’t like the area then the return journey would take ages. You’re not sure if this is going to be it, forever, or if this is just a stage like the ones that came before, but you do know that you should probably come up with a plan. On balance, you mostly wasted your life; you do not want to waste your death as well.

What do you do next?

 

The reed bends with the wind, so says the parable, while the oak tree breaks in the storm. This is a lesson about flexibility in turbulent times, or possibly about effective arboreal care, but it also argues that there are different kinds of strength. You don’t need to pull a boxcar with a rope or throw a beer keg over a beam to be strong. If you want to win World’s Strongest Man then you should definitely do these things, otherwise, remember that fortitude manifests in the most surprising places.

 

Leafcutter ants

We are prejudiced by the limits of our own perspective. If an ant was the same size as an elephant, we’d recognise that they are incredible creatures, shortly before running away in terror. This would be unsuccessful as there are over 100 trillion of the sugar-loving creeps. In terms of power-to-weight ratio, the 47 species of leafcutter ant in the Americas are some of Earth’s strongest animals, capable of carrying leaves more than 50 times their own body weight. They feed these leaves to a fungus which they have carefully domesticated over a period of 30 million years, in order to sustain a colony containing millions of burly, tiny farmers. More impressive still is that they carry this remarkable weight in their jaws, which must be really annoying when you consider it.

 

Charlotte Heffelmire

The idea of “hysterical strength” grew from legend: Ireland’s mythological Cú Chulaind underwent a frenzy called a warp spasm while Norse Beserkers, devoted to a bear cult, supposedly charged howling into battle without mail-coats. Contemporary examples are less furious: in 2015, 19-year-old Charlotte Heffelmire lifted a burning pick-up truck to rescue her pinned father then drove it away on its three remaining tyres. Such acts aren’t quite superhuman – to briefly raise the end of a vehicle is extraordinary but not physically unfeasible – yet they are no less stunning for that. For all our problems, it is comforting to live in a world that produces 5ft 6in teenagers brave and selfless enough to lift flaming trucks when someone’s in danger.

 

Staple Inn

London had a rough 17th century. After the turmoil of civil war and devastation from four major Black Death epidemics came the unimaginatively-titled Great Fire of London, which robbed 70,000 of its 80,000 plague-survivor residents of their homes. Staple Inn, built in 1585 to train and house legal professionals, was one of the few buildings to withstand the catastrophe, escaping the fire by metres. Over the following 350 years it would also survive direct hits from several Luftwaffe bombs, constant citywide development and the brief popularity of Noel’s House Party. Today Staple Inn hosts meetings for the body representing actuaries: it’s a testament to the building’s tenacity that it has endured so much for so long and still remains fundamentally boring.

 

A wedge (also: Milo of Croton)

Admittedly, Milo of Croton’s presence here seems anomalous. Far from being unexpectedly strong, the wrestler was famed for his physical prowess, winning six Olympic titles. Like many illustrious athletes in ancient Greece, Milo’s capabilities were exaggerated to semi-divine levels: one story involves him carrying a calf on his back every day until it became a full-grown – and presumably rather grumpy – bull. His appearance is instead warranted by his demise. Out walking, Milo saw a tree trunk split by a wedge. On attempting to cleave the trunk to prove his vigour, the wedge fell, trapping his hand. He was subsequently eaten by wolves. In one of the silliest, and therefore greatest, deaths in ancient history, Greece’s champion was bested by a bit of wood.

 

Oobleck

There is nothing about oobleck that doesn’t sound made up. This simple mixture of cornflour and water is named after a havok-causing slime in a Dr. Seuss story and is the cousin of mayonnaise, lava, blood and cement slurry. Its properties are where thing get truly suspicious: as a non-newtonian fluid, oobleck acts either like a solid or a liquid depending on the force acting upon it. You can slowly dip a finger into it, but if you try to jab it then the ridiculous substance will fight back. Oobleck is often used as a educational tool with hip teachers walking on it or slathering it on subwoofers, whereupon the force of low-frequency sound waves causes it to dance (if your definition of dancing is to judder around wildly, which mine is). One day, oobleck will surely enslave us all.

 

David Blaine

Hear me out. There is honour in accomplishing gruelling yet entirely pointless tasks. Perhaps while standing on one foot (at just the right angle to seem like he was levitating) magician David Blaine became interested in undertaking feats of endurance, which was strange given that people would obviously assume trickery was involved. His most famous effort was spending 44 days, for no good reason at all, inside a plexiglass box suspended by the Thames. For a short blessed spell in 2003, a whole city united in good-humoured bafflement. Crowds gathered daily. Paul McCartney showed up to see what the fuss was about. A reporter used a remote-controlled helicopter to taunt Blaine with a hovering cheeseburger. It was a simpler, better time.

 

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Five. Illustrations by Rose Wong.

The end of the line. The final stop. This bus terminates here. There is a place where each of us is heading, a biological inevitability built into our cells. Just about the only sure thing concerning life is that it will end, and this makes cheating death the ultimate defiance of nature: to return from the grave is typically to become a messiah or the monster in a horror movie. Unless you happen to be a revenant, then, you need to get creative in order to escape your certain fate.

Eleanor Markham

While the 19^th century fear of premature burial was disproportionately widespread, there were enough real incidents to unsettle. Contemporary newspapers reported that on a July afternoon in 1894, Undertaker Jones and his assistant James were taking a coffin to their hearse. Its occupant Eleanor Markham had died two days earlier, and yet James claimed to hear noises. “You shut your flannel mouth, will you?” Jones told his colleague. “She is alive,” James replied. “Don’t you hear her knocking?” “Let us carry her as far as the hearse anyway”, the undertaker instructed but the family, by now aware of the commotion, ordered the coffin open. The attending doctor told the not-dead Eleanor to calm down. “It is a mistake easily rectified.”

The terror skink

Perhaps in an effort to avoid the limelight that comes from having the greatest name of any lizard, in 1876 the terror skink vanished. Native to a single islet in the Pacific, the reptile was considered extinct until its rediscovery in 1993. Accordingly it’s known as a Lazarus taxon, a species that disappears from the fossil record before reappearing again. In this the skink is not alone. Dozens of species have also faked their own deaths: the cahow was thought extinct for 330 years before 18 pairs were founding nesting on an uninhabited rock, while the Bermuda land snail disappeared sometime in the 1970s before a colony was found in an alleyway in 2014, presumably getting up to no good.

Saint Oran of Iona

European folklore is giddy with undead countesses surprising grave-robber sextons and dead peasants carrying their own coffins through the streets, but few tales conclude as deliciously as Saint Oran’s. Along with companion Saint Columba, the missionary tried to build a chapel on Iona’s ancient pagan burial site, but each attempt failed. A voice told Oran that a living man needed to be buried in the foundations, and so he agreed to be entombed. Days later, though, he stuck his head out of the ground, unhappily declaring “There is no such great wonder in death, nor is Hell or Heaven what it has been described.” Aghast, Columba reburied his companion, exclaiming in Gaelic, “Earth, earth on Oran’s eyes, lest he further blab”.

Wood frog

“Maybe everything that dies someday comes back,” Bruce Springsteen once sang, but then he also said “Go-kart Mozart was checkin’ out the weather chart” so you can’t take him entirely at his word. It’s possible however that he was referring to the wood frog, which withstands extreme winter conditions to return from death. By using glucose and urea as cryoprotectants, the amphibian can survive for months at a time with two thirds of its body frozen. You can argue whether a frog who isn’t breathing, whose kidneys are no longer functioning and whose heart has stopped beating is actually dead or not, but you cannot deny that whoever came up with the term “frogsicle” deserves every zoology prize going.

Timothy Dexter

“I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western world”, read the inscription underneath Timothy Dexter’s statue. He was not a philosopher. The exceedingly eccentric Dexter, who stumbled into fortune after fortune, had commissioned 39 statues of great Americans on his estate and one of himself for good measure. His most infamous action – aside from his 1802 memoir A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (devoid of punctuation and entirely misspelled) – was faking his death to discover how his peers felt about him. 3,000 mourners attended the funeral as Dexter watched from below the floorboards, but he furiously dropped the ruse when his long-suffering wife appeared insufficiently upset.

Turritopsis dohrnii

Just who exactly do jellyfish think they are? What gives them the nerve? Virtually all organisms on this planet are subject to senescence, the deterioration of function over time. If you don’t get killed by a predator, succumb to a disease or tumble drunkenly into a wheat thresher then your body eventually ages and expires. It’s difficult, but those are the rules. They are firm but fair. Several species of the turritopsis genus, on the other hand, have somehow gotten the idea into their jellied heads that it’s acceptable to revert to the polyp stage using transdifferentiation, replenishing their cells and rendering themselves biologically immortal. What do they do with all that extra time? Nothing. Jellyfish can’t even read, the idiots.

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Four. Illustrations by Sam Dunn.

I was sitting in a Pizza Hut in the past, waiting to be disappointed. The conversation turned – as conversation inevitably does when I’m around Ben – to Doctor Who. Over a dozen years the programme has become the central tenet of our friendship; I assume he will spend the eulogy at my funeral defending his wrong-headed views on the Eleventh Doctor’s final costume. As we discussed its showrunner Steven Moffat and contributor Mark Gatiss, something peculiar happened: the pair walked in the door and sat down at the next table. The next table in a Pizza Hut. It was as if we had summoned the two most successful writers in television with our hunger for unexceptional Italian food.

This is far from the only incredible thing to have happened to me. Recently I woke up thinking about my first girlfriend, whom I haven’t seen in thirteen years. I spotted her that afternoon as she entered a sandwich shop. Once I lost my wallet on a bus, and a few hours later got on a seemingly different one to find the wallet sitting next to the driver. Of the 8,000 buses in London, I’d gotten back on the same one. When I was a teenager and landlines were still a going concern, I’d frequently pick up the phone to dial a friend, only to hear their voice on the other end of the line. They had called me at the exact moment I had lifted the receiver.

I’m not alone in being predisposed to experiencing uncanny events. In 1973 Anthony Hopkins was due to star in an adaptation of The Girl from Petrovka and spent an unsuccessful afternoon looking for a copy. On his way home he found one discarded on a bench in Leicester Square station. A year later, he spoke to the author George Feifer on the film’s set, learning that Feifer had lent his only copy to a friend who had lost it. It was the same copy. Or there’s the 2007 story of the local Idaho newspaper that happened to print photographs in two articles on its front page: one of a suspected thief caught on CCTV, the other of a sign painter decorating a shop window for Christmas. They were the same man. Or the episode of another rediscovered book: in 1929 the American novelist Anne Parrish visited Paris on holiday, popping into a second-hand bookshop to buy a copy of Jack Frost and Other Stories, which as a child had inspired her to become a writer. To her surprise, she found that the purchase had her name and childhood address written inside. The original copy she’d owned as a girl had somehow made its way across the ocean to the very shop she was standing in.

There is something satisfyingly ordinary about extraordinary coincidences. Life is peppered with them: in a foreign country you meet someone and find out they went to the same first gig as you, or the tiebreaker in the pub quiz is the fact you learned that morning, or the song on the radio seems to apply to your situation perfectly. Such incidents encourage superstitious awe, followed by reasonable explanations. If Ben and I constant talk about Doctor Who in chain restaurants, and Doctor Who writers are as susceptible to settling as the rest of us, then it’s not impossible that we’d end up in the same place at the same time. Likewise, there are only so many buses on each route, and in the days before the internet my friends and I had little to do except ring each other all the time. Maybe I’ve been in the vicinity of my first girlfriend on other occasions, but that day I was primed to spy her in a crowd because I’d thought of her. Even though the odds are still slim, with almost 9,000 hours in every year,sooner or later something spooky is going to happen.

Anything can seem like a miracle if it’s sufficiently improbable, but the truth is that our brains are built to recognise patterns in a world which sporadically throws a bunch of sixes in a row and is complicated enough to appear random. This doesn’t mean however that the eerily aligned can’t be significant. If, say, a swan takes sudden and dramatic flight at the end of a loved one’s funeral and it feels meaningful, then it is meaningful. What’s special isn’t that the deceased is saying goodbye via a random bird, but rather that in a difficult moment you needed comfort and your mind created something to hold on to. It was a sign: you made it. Powered by grief and love, you found your own way through the dark. Surely that’s more precious than esoteric divine intervention?

It is head-spinning to learn that a new romantic partner lived on your street for a year and you never ran into each other, but the true coincidences are of such a great magnitude that we have no way to process them except to take them for granted. Even just for me to be writing these words and for you to be reading them is an event so remarkable that it takes the entire history of the universe to properly explain it. Imagine how many things had to happen for us to be here on this planet, at this time, to be alive, to be aware, to expect to live a long life, to have access to modern medicine and Beatles records and cake, to be able to love whoever we want, to have the freedom to endeavour to make our lives exuberant and worthwhile. These opportunities aren’t shared equally, of course, and there are many, many fights worth fighting. We have barely begun. Although by most measures this has been a terrible year, it is a terrible year in a spectacular world. For us to be here, together, now: it is a privilege.

In 1980, the astronomer Carl Sagan released Cosmos, a book which explored the relationship between science and the universe. While filled with wonder at the scale and complexity of the universe, its most stunning idea comes even before the contents page, in the dedication to his wife: “In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.” This notion has taken root inside my head. The thing that astounds, I’ve realised, wasn’t running into Steven Moffat as I was talking about him. It came a dozen years earlier when I met a skinny kid in a stairwell on the second day of university. Yesterday he got engaged and asked me to be his best man. What are the chances of that?

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Three. Illustration by Eleni Kalorkoti.

Our generation has been robbed. Technology trends towards the bland, as the curved electronic rectangles in our homes will attest. Before the height of aesthetic enjoyment was pebble-smooth minimalism, however, designers often had another goal: enchantment. Automatons were ancestors of the modern computer, but their creators also delighted in a magic trick: the illusion that they acted of their own will. Even in an age where all human progress is available in our pocket and is boring, automatons can spellbind us into believing, momentarily, that they are somehow alive.

Ctesibius’ water clock

We don’t know much about Ctesibius’ life, but it’s evident that career progression was easier in ancient Greece: his journey from barber to the father of pneumatics is surely the envy of anyone in a rum job. Among the inventor and mathematician’s many contributions were his improvements to the clepsydra, which measured time using the flow of water. As well as making a clock that was the most accurate in the world for 1,800 years (the earliest was found buried in Amenhotep’s ancient Egyptian tomb), he added singing mechanical swans, bells, puppets and best of all, an owl that moved.

Karakuri

It’s unsurprising that Japan is a robotics pioneer given the emergence of karakuri during the country’s Edo period, between 1603 and 1868. For two centuries these mechanised humans were a part of everyday life, performing in theatres and religious festivals and used for parlour tricks at home. Eschewing metal for native wood and coiled whalebone springs, craftsmen built karakuri that fired arrows, climbed stairs or acted out myths. The most popular dolls were chahakobi ningyo: forward-thinking marvels which could deliver a cup of tea to you. Teasmades are less impressive all of a sudden.

Singing bird boxes

The idea of a device that does just one thing is unfashionable today, but from the late 1700s until World War I the must-have item for Europe’s affluent was a tabatière that briefly produced birdsong. Its appeal was in its simplicity: a slider was pushed on an ornate box to reveal a mechanical bird, flapping its wings, moving its head and singing. Thanks to artisans like former clockmaker Blaise Bontems, such automata authentically recreated the songs of different birds from finches to blackbirds to nightingales. Bird boxes were the cousin of watches, but their only function was beauty.

The New Motive Power

In 1853, the Spiritualist John Murray Spear was seized by an idea. He would create heaven’s last, best gift: an electrically-powered messiah. The automaton, called ‘New Motive Power’, or the ‘Electric Infant’, or the ‘Wonderful Infant’, would exalt mankind. Spear was calm about his engineering inexperience: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and other spirit ‘Electrizers’ were working through him to build the machine, made of components including magnetic spheres, antennae, zinc batteries and a dining room table. After nine months, a ceremony: allegedly, the Electric Infant trembled, and then moved no more.

Tipu’s Tiger

Animals are a mainstay of automata: in Jewish mythology, Solomon designed a throne where a menagerie of golden mechanical beasts would greet him and bring items, like if Wallace enjoyed trying to cut babies in half instead of eating Wensleydale. A grisly-yet beautiful 18th-century iteration is Tipu’s Tiger, which was the eponymous Mysore sultan’s prized possession until the British killed him and captured it. The semi-automaton/pipe organ re-enacts the mauling of a European man with accompanying tiger grunts and death wails, and is absolutely mad when you think about it.

The Jaquet-Droz automata

While they’re still made, automatons have been overtaken by the developments in robotics and computing that they anticipated. The form’s apogee was possibly the efforts of watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his workshop. His trio of doll automata, finished in 1774, remain astonishing: a draughtsman who can draw four images (blowing his pencil every now and then), a musician who plays the organ, watches her fingers and appears to breathe, and a boy whose 6,000 parts, programmable memory and goose feather quill are capable of writing anything. As an expression of mechanical imagination, they are wondrous.

Originally published in Oh Comely Issue Thirty-Three. Illustrations by Eleni Kalorkoti.