The weather was promised. The weather did not come. We have been filing about it ever since.

The Hollow Ministry maintains no roads, mends no fences, and has never once collected the bins. We were founded on a Tuesday that has, regrettably, not yet ended, to oversee the single most neglected portfolio in public life: the enormous and growing archive of things that were about to happen and then politely declined.

A cloud that intended to rain but thought better of it — that is ours. A staircase that meant to lead somewhere and forgot — filed here, in triplicate, under the smell of old coins. When you feel certain you left a room you have never entered, you have brushed against our jurisdiction. We apologise for the draught. It is load-bearing.

Our staff are provisionally real and paid in salt. They arrive before they are hired and resign in advance, so that the paperwork may be completed retroactively by the fog, which has excellent handwriting and no fixed address. We do not recommend meeting them. We do not recommend the corridor. We recommend, on balance, that you keep reading, because to stop now would leave the sentence unattended, and we have strict rules about unattended sentences.