Montpelier

…Turn right at the lights, opposite Ninetree. Scoot down Ashley Road and immediately left down Picton Street. Ecce Montpelier. A little concrete precinct outside the store at the bottom of Picton, for the two or three connoisseurs of fortified cider who favoured Montypee for its air of louche poshness. More junquies loitered here also, customers of the pharmacy next door to the store, Lord Snatch oft-times among them, with his…

…Bosom pals with all the big chief bone-in-the-nose trustafarians in Montpelier. Fect of the metter is, dear boy, squalid and distasteful though the business be, you’re best off appointin’ him yer agent for the ward contest.”

…again Mark Wankstain, “and like there’s like going to like like be a like election, yeah? In like Montypee, yeah?”

Upon Montpelier there some years ago befell the singular event known as ‘The Great Arrogation’, when that suburb had bestowed upon it the dubious privilege of sending no less than three delegates to sit in the Council Chamber.

…Thus caparisoned, Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole sets up a species of charity bar in Montpelier Park, in the form of a mountain of tins and bottles with which the imbibing fraternity and eke sorority are cordially invited to make free, provided only that they undertake to lend their voices as raucously as possible to the manful struggle of Dr Mark Wankstain against the rising tide of Bolshevism.

…whispering bones of hipster exceptionalism were at long last to be dressed in the reifying flesh of the Montpelier plebiscite. The Flake Nut, the Old Disgrace, the York Road Buggerfuck, and the Startling Farter had all been commandeered to serve as polling stations - withal, the thrusting upon these excellent institutions of so singular an honour had in no wise prompted them to leave off the day’s sale of fortifying…

Night was falling as Mr Helix Folt, approaching the purlieus of Montpelier, found that, far from abating, the clamour was beginning once more to build, as that posh slum’s several watering holes flung open their doors once more, and the multitudinous imbibers of the parish needed no further invitation, but straightways betook themselves within. Upon passing under the railway tunnel defining the border between Eastville and St Werburghs, and discovering…

…weather of his passage up the hill, and followed that juggler as he executed a sharp left into Montpelier Park. Wherein Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet came upon Hieronymus engaging in a pharmaceutical transaction with those very popular and fraternal tribunes Caius and Tiberius Craquus. Not wishing to intrude upon these sensitive proceedings, the Mayor took wing, and soared heavenwards and perched upon a branch of a tree overlooking that glade.

As he flapped over the louche quartier of Montpelier, a light breeze bore up to him the bruited din of posh slummers shouting and spitting and swearing in the garden of the Fruit & Nut Flake in Richmond Road. He bethought himself then that he might see if he could catch last orders, and swooped down, alighting rather clumsily in the children’s sandpit of that place. An elderly gentleman was…

…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 very tumbledown terraced house in a…

the Snail of this louche suburb, Montpelier.

the fallen arches of Montpelier?