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My favourite textual form may well be the list of hyper-specific categories organised alphabetically. The rationality of A to Z, which is a kind of order, holds together otherwise vastly distant things, which often possess no order, and so produces a series of wild juxtapositions that create a kind of joy.

Here is a list of books on the ‘Science and Miscellaneous’ shelves of The London Library, in St James’ Square, London:

The drop-down menu on human resources websites is a particularly rich seam, here – where you are invited to select one professional identity from a long list of what seem like crazy possibilities. I always try to chose ‘Admiral of the Fleet’ if it’s available. There’s a comedy in the disjunction between the arid website, with its literal minded protocols of ticks and boxes and that oppressive sense of life as the selection of one identity from a closed group defined by someone else, and the teeming possibility of endless other selves.

I mean things like this – from a well known car insurance website.

Chief Chemist or Chicken Sexer? One of life’s fork-in-the-road moments.