City Hall

…Alighting some minutes later upon College Green, he scurried into a side entrance of City Hall, made straight for his office wherein he ensconced himself, leaving strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed.

The City Hall Secretariat knew enough about the Mayor’s depressions to leave him unmolested in his office. He had shortly after his mayoral inauguration suffered to be installed a large birdcage, which he had picked up on a whim at an auction house in Hanham, and which, festooned with guano and papered with yellowing layers of tabloid smut, he found to be a comfort and a solace, for reasons the…

…petitioners who hung about the place were treated to the edifying spectacle of that tatterdemalion fellow marching into City Hall by the front gate, and discombobulating the receptionists there by his peremptory demands to be admitted into the Mayoral presence, so that he might communicate the intelligence about the dorking bird, withal omitting the diverse lacunae regarding variegation and the scotch style of dorking. His direct approach was, inevitably, unavailing…

Newly replete with indignation he took wing once more, and flapped away back to City Hall, determining that he would confront Dr Mark Wankstain in the role of wronged father, and simultaneously effect the long sought reunification with the fruit of his loins.

…a suite, that is to say an antechamber and an inner sanctum, somewhere just under the eaves of the great edifice in which his multitude of minions swinked. Making his way thither he found, at the end of a musty corridor, an oak veneer door, onto which some vandal had etched, in some infinitely irritating hipster font, the legend

…while in that place, Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet succumbed to the ravages of an intestinal parasite. His misfortune was greatly to the embarrassment of Sir Ezra Tertiary-Syphilis, whose guest he was as the bearer of letters of introduction from Sir Hearty Luncheon. Salvation came in the form of Miss Bianca Columbina, who was blessed with a gentle nature sympathetic to the indispositions of her fellow avians, and undertook the nursing of…

…on the lip of the ceramic pot pertaining to the chimney which served his own office in the City Hall, thereby disarranging the inevitable pewlies. Within minutes, Mr Ian Corby, very sooty and smeared most becomingly with the yolk of the slaughtered innocents, was ensconced at his desk and engaged upon the phone, wherefore he had turned his attention as previously related to questions of ingredients and muttigeetin’ fear hazurrrds.

…the dignitaries and nabobs and aldermen, who purposively trooped or apologetically sidled through the double doors into the City Hall’s vestibule, bore the harried look of entitled persons who have been subjected to a buffeting by gales. Sodden hats were lifted from balding heads, dripping anoraks and gabardines and waxed coats peeled from arthritic shanks, brollies shaken out and furled, all such soaked appurtenances now burdening the braided arms of…