On the long train from Liverpool to Margate for a book tour event, I clocked four hours listening to the audiobook for Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed. It was hard to be on the train for so long. Too hot for October, aisle seat, no table; and last week, two trains collided on the same track in Wales so I braced myself for an unexpected death. The book was hard too. The Dispossessed is about a man from a rough, desert planet who becomes the first person in two hundred years to visit the much more vital planet next door: a lush place full of seas, tall buildings, jewels, velvets, and riches. The book was hard-going because of the finicky way it is written. When I told a friend I was reading it, she told me she never got past halfway and I could see why. Like a story told through pointillism, there was too much detail; science-fiction clogged up with the mechanics of its own lore, interplanetary politics, names full of consonants. Listening to the audiobook, it was like the author was slowly pouring more and more sand into my ears, siphoned from the book’s endless, depressing deserts.

But I carried on reading because every so often, a single grain of the story would trickle down and around the spiral inside my ear and scratch my imagination. After the middle-aged man from the barren planet finally exits quarantine, and as he is taking in this other world that is so utterly different from his own, he notices something odd. ‘Somewhere, out in that blue and green splendour, something was singing: a small voice, high up, starting and ceasing, incredibly sweet. What was it? A little, sweet, wild voice, a music in midair.’ The main character had never seen a bird before that point. Never heard one either. There are no animals where he comes from. And I felt that moment deeply. I felt his pleasure and his revelation, and I felt it all with clarity in the midst of such an unclear book. I knew then that I was probably going to finish The Dispossessed. Ursula K. Le Guin is using the blank-slate perspective of an alien to have us, the reader, meet our own world as if for the very first time. I appreciate it when artists invite us to reflect on the bizarre shit we take for granted.

So, by the time the journey was over and two high-speed trains hadn’t collided on the same track; when I was safe in seaside Margate, walking under beefy seagulls on the way to my hotel; when I let myself lie down in the dark for two hours because I still get short of breath 4 years into Long Covid; when all was said and done, I was left feeling ludicrous, human, alienated. I needed to focus on my own book for the sake of the event, but all I could think about was the ‘music in midair.’

The Wi-Fi in the hotel wasn’t working. The Wi-Fi was also down in the restaurant down the road so card payments weren’t going through. There was no cash in the ATM round the corner either, which meant I turned up to the event a few minutes late, unstable and giddy. I think it came through in the conversation with Ryan Smith from Margate Bookshop; I told the audience that I like fiction that deals in the surreal, because I don’t really know how I am thinking these thoughts in the first place and I don’t think surrealism knows either. I also ended up telling them that my favourite past-time is asking my boyfriend how we are alive. To my dismay, he never has an answer. Everybody in the audience laughed. A small unserious part me thinks that when I bring this stuff up and people laugh, it’s because they know the magic behind human existence and I don’t. Like, they learnt it in school on a day when I was off sick or something — I don’t know.

It’s not a bad thing, the laughing or the open-ended questioning. It makes me feel high. Makes me think I could squeeze my boyfriend’s arm to discover he’s been made of plasticine all these years; makes me think I could catch the music in midair and discover that the thing I caught in my net is not in fact a bird, but a wind-up music box. It makes me think that everything is elastic, and great! Because if that’s the case, then there’s still time for everything bad and violent and impossible to change for the better. For the genocide in Gaza to end, for Long Covid to be cured, for global warming to leave October alone. Still time for a single, perfect answer to come to me at some point, in art or science or religion. It might come to me in an email from the person who knows it. Hopefully not an email because I might miss it. Hopefully they will just knock on my door.

‘A long time later, he was awake. He could breathe. He was perfectly well. Everything was all right. He felt disinclined to move. To move would disturb the perfect, stable moment, the balance of the world.’ I had my breakfast the next morning on the beach with headphones back on, ploughing on with The Dispossessed. There was an old man and a kid playing football. I watched as the ball got away from the two of them. I thought that I mustn’t be able to see the slope of the beach from where I was sitting because the ball appeared to roll way too fast, as if it had a mind of its own — as if it might be motorised. I listened to a group of characters in the book getting het up because they realised they couldn’t be sure what life was like on the twin planet, whether it was better or worse than life on the desert moon. One character says quite rightly, ‘we only know what we’re told.’ It makes me think about you, the person reading this, and how you can be sure I went to Margate at all. The football rolled so far it went into the water, and I didn’t know if the tide was coming in or out, or if they’d get it back. I took my headphones off and left because the football had disturbed the perfect, stable moment. There was only one place I wanted to visit before I agreed to potentially die in a train accident on my way back home to Liverpool, and that was Margate’s number one tourist attraction: The Crab Museum, which is definitely real.

Opened in 2021 by brothers Ned and Bertie Suesat-Williams and their friend Chase Coley, The Crab Museum is a small, casual, first floor room filled with all the things you might expect a museum about crabs to have. Boards with text on, imagery, a diorama, a film, an interactive area, a digital microscope to look at crab legs, a gift shop. I did the dutiful thing, reading everything about the biology of crabs as I went around the room until I got to the last section. A few boards told the story of Thomas Gaskell, a local fisherman who caught a crab in 1862 that was 2.5 metres wide. The crab was sold to the circus, ‘made to wear a fine hoop skirt and dance the waltz.’ After the drunk circus master tormented the giant crab, it killed him, ‘and the incredible true story of the Margate crab has been forgotten until now.’ Even though I’d been lulled into this dreamlike, liberated state between Ursula K. Le Guin and the Wi-Fi being down everywhere I went, the act of walking into a museum had me instantly falling back into line, and so much so that I nearly missed the joke right in front of me.

On the final board in the display, inside a menacing thought bubble titled ‘impossible questions to ask grown-ups,’ the museum asked if it mattered if things were true. I googled Thomas Gaskell on the train home, the man who fished the imaginary crab, and he was an oceanographer, not a fisherman, and he wasn’t even alive in the 1800s. I thought of the audiobook again and the character who said ‘we only know what we’re told.’ When I went to the toilet, there was a cabinet with a tin of rice pudding and a packet of crackers, with a wonky paper sign that read ‘Carb Museum’ alongside a disclaimer about one of the Directors having dyslexia. Under headshots of Ned, Bertie and Chase on the Crab Museum’s .org website, there is a hand-written line that reads ‘they don’t know what they’re doing.’ It reminded me of the small print I wrote into The White Pube’s email signature years ago, at a time when it felt like people were taking us too seriously as art critics. It reads ‘not a registered anything 1234567890.’

I went to the Crab Museum expecting to think about crabs but I left thinking about the inherent authority of museums. It made me laugh. I had only just been telling an audience the night before how much I prefer fiction for the loose way it plays with surrealism, and how that was weirdly comforting to me because, in the realm of fiction, it feels more acceptable to be so openly unsure about things. And I’m unsure of everything. I’m unsure of reality, unsure of power, unsure of the power that interferes with reality and claims objective truth. I’m unsure of political authority and police and big business and money; and I’m unsure how much longer humans will last in the Anthropocene. And so, given my preference for the pliable, it’s a wonder I went to a museum in the first place. It’s a small miracle that the museum I visited was happy for me to use it like a prism through which to see all of these constructions for what they are: man-made, historically recent developments. There was a time before museums! There was a lot of time before any of this!

The Crab Museum seemed to put a question mark after every statement it made, and that put me at ease. There was another question mark next to its missing and totally unnecessary accreditation as an official, ontological museum in the eyes of the UK government. I thought I saw a smaller question mark behind, or to the side, of the crabs themselves, with them not having any presence in the actual museum. No aquariums, no captivity. And then, there was a final question mark floating behind the visitor as she left down the corridor, walked back across Margate’s yellow beach besides it boiling seas. On the train, headphones on again, she felt like the alien-man on the moon who has yet to come to terms with the birds. Now she knew she had to figure out the crabs as well.

— #1 please comment a crab emoji 🦀 on our instagram so that I know you were here

— #2 visit the crab museum’s website here

— #3 i found an online pdf of The Dispossessed here

— #4 you can buy our book Poor Artists here or at your indie book shop !