Brisbane roadstead
An account of his lineage
They say the first of his name shipped out long before the fashion for sitting in cardboard boxes. The Keks line were mariners — watch-standers and depth-takers — the sort who read a horizon the way a lesser cat reads a food bowl. Where the chart said here be nothing, a Keks let down the sounding line and wrote in a number.
Sir Keks inherited the whole of it: the sea-legs, the unbothered gaze, the certainty that the world will arrange itself agreeably if one simply waits, well-groomed, in a patch of sun. The navy blanket beneath him is, he will tell you, merely the nearest available ocean.
He keeps his watch from a warm berth now, and files his dispatches daily — brief, vertical, and conducted with the composure of a captain who has seen weather and found it beneath comment.
— entered into the record on his behalf, as he was asleep.