Mangotsfield

…That is to say: a … er … squat bungalow crouching alongside the main road into Mangotsfield. Beyond the ugly brick wall, and the corroded and wilting wrought iron gates, traffic greyly snarls. Between the gates and the bungalow lies a broad and unkempt expanse of gravel, with dotted about here and there some statuary - fairly putrid, it must be conceded - and one or two desultory attempts at…

…with his customary equanimity; and when, vey late that night, he finally returned to the familial bungalow in Mangotsfield, it was with the consciousness of having gleaned from the tsunami of his uncle’s verbiage at least one nugget, namely that Uncle Curmudgeonly felt a profound personal distaste for Mr Crass Cheseham.

…windows scrolled downwards, introducing into the interior of the vehicle that portion of the global miasma pertaining to Mangotsfield, which was nonetheless relatively less offensive than what it had replaced. Lady Luncheon, espying upon the pavement some kind of local person, conceived an idea.

…want of a clean, has bubbled away these numberless years in the back garden of the bungalow in Mangotsfield. Reclining with what grace she can muster amidst the mineral deposits and the algae and the slime, Miss Minerva Ledwitch assembles and with some deftness maintains upon her head’s frontispiece the several elements of maxillo-facial muscle operation which, when correctly concatenated, convey to the observer a sublime contentment on the part…

One morning a few days later, Dr Mark Wankstain breakfasted at home in Mangotsfield with his darling Mummy and Daddy. This represented something of a departure from his normal routine, according to which he rose with the larks, languidly indulged five minutes or so of alarmingly frank yoga, followed by a second similarly brief interval of frankly alarming ablutions performed according to an obscure and recondite system of, one can…

…who looked through the window when gravel was heard being crunched underfoot and, espying the approach of the Mangotsfield Blavatsky, hastily gathered unto herself the coat rack on wheels and the hot water bottle, and vey punctiliously stuffed the generous length of pink rubber tubing back into her plastic bag, and made some uncharacteristically half-hearted excuses and a hurried departure via the back door. I think that she must have…

…Gamina Dročerpyatova had been living in Mangotsfield for nearly a fortnight now. Miss Minerva Ledwitch, as after tiffin she stretched out her limbs in Charybdis, considered whether the young lady’s residence with her family had been an unalloyed success. On the one hand, it could not be pretended that the fair Gamina was possessed of the least scintilla of culture. She had clearly never ventured through the portals of the…

…Dročerpyatova began to find that she met with a certain froideur on the part of her hosts in Mangotsfield. Dr Mark Wankstain in particular had metamorphosed. Gone was the dapper little chimpanzee burbling his fashionable Likeney nonsense about triangulation, replaced by a surly, shambling, monosyllabic, altogether abject and charmless goblin who, on the rare occasions when their paths crossed, would not deign to look Ms. Dročerpyatova in the eye, but…

…more than when, perambulating of a forenoon into town from the modest little terrace which he inhabited in Mangotsfield, he would chance upon one of those contraptions of his, rattling away atop some artisanal bakery or hipster candle shop. On such occasions, which were by no means as rare, he suspected, as he suspected those whom he suspected of being his enemies would have suspected them of being, those great…

…walk might lower his blood pressure and leaven his mood, he struck a course for his home in Mangotsfield, which took him up onto Montpelier Hill and down through St Werbuggers and across the footbridge over the motorway where it limned the boundary between that suburb and Easton. He had not gone very far through Easton, when he came upon Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet, staggering with raucous companions out of a…