Hieronymus

“Pay her no mind Hieronymus”, one of his companions suggested, “’tis only a budgie.”

Hieronymus nodded at this incontrovertible truth.

“Kinnell,” said Hieronymus who evidently, during the greater part of the years which had elapsed since the events described previously, had very little stirred from his accustomed and no doubt commodious place upon that bench, had more or less become at one with the fixtures and fittings, being otherwise somewhat changed in point of being more grey and yet more dirty than before. “Kinnell” quoth again that savant, as the…

…or plastic bottles, turned heliotropically towards the meagre rays slanting in declivity overhead. The two birds sought out Hieronymus among these recumbent saints, whom the smaller of the two now addressed.

Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet the Mayor, covertly pursuing Hieronymus the toper of methylated cider, turned right from Stokes Croft into Ashley Road, advanced then a few yards, and very smartly scoped his quarry on the left, proceeding down Picton Street with a celerity which might have been considered rather to belie his apparent lameness. Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet, who very much wished to keep that fermented apple enthusiast in view, was now…

The harlequin Hieronymus staggered about under a big pile of Big Issues, which to his ever increasing chagrin never would diminish. Nor was this his only burden, for he felt himself much under the injunction of the Mayor (whose avenging beak he feared) to, in his own words, zeek out the dorking bird, green and blue and vuckin' brown. To this purpose, he instigated a distinctly Teufelsdröckhish wandering about town.

…upon a late afternoon approaching midsummer, the toper Solomon was to be espied in company with the harlequin Hieronymus sloping hangdog through Little Mogadishu Gate. Their passing was observed by a small knot of black-shrouded Somali womenfolk, who instinctively shielded their infants from those ne’er-do-wells and shrank from their presence. There was at that very moment a sudden froideur, and a biting wind whipped up the cardboard detritus from the…

…inter alia, Medusa of the writhing dreadlocks, and Solomon the toper and Hieronymus the harlequin, who were both drinking to the success of the skin grafts which they had undergone in the wake of the industrial accident in Little Mogadishu.