“At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that there are on the plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, "Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth." —
Don Quixote, The windmills of Don Quixote
Yet more rain. Cold, soaking rain. Endless, eternal rain. A vortex of rain. Life for some while yet proceeded in the Hotwells Road largely as it had done since time immemorial. Cars and vans and lorries and cyclists splashed along the dark dank serpentine tarmac, drenched the footbound bondsmen and peons, made those poor saps curse fate and murmur against all engines. —
Hotwells
Withal, change was afoot. For the vortex or trough or, if you will, depression deepened. Across that Road, the Avon as ever bore those muddy waters off, to limn the Bristol Channel with new contours of silt. Only, now that mighty river brimmed, the riparine gods bid to burst their banks, to make inruption into the civitas. Drains blocked, boats in dry dock floated, ground floor offices and homesteads sought out sandbags. —
The Avon
We felt the effects in Pex ‘n’ Quads. By degrees, the moat surrounding us became genuinely a moat, in which now floated a mildewed armada of discarded stuff: frayed and curling cardboard boxes crewed by half-gnawed fragments of hen; spavined cider and lager cans; plastic three litre bottles, like the cans spavined and formerly containing cider and lager, withal buoyant; outlying: the butts of cigarettes and single-skins. And now the waters rose still higher. And in short order, Poseidon discovered a breach in our defences, and we arrived one morning to find the basement weights room an inch or three underwater. —
Pex ‘n’ Quads
The session in question featured three victims, thanks to the arbitrary machinations of the faceless committee responsible for organising these farragos. The first of these victims was the edgy fake psychopath Wanksy, who modelled himself on the genuine predator Harrison Lupine, the Cycle Path Bum Bandit. I must confess that I rejoiced in Wanksy’s misfortune, for our paths had crossed in such a way as to instill in me nothing but contempt for that desiccated turd. We had met in the Ghastly Hipster opposite Turbo Island. Grey, drug-ravaged, clad in combat fatigues and accompanied by a terrier, he produced from some kind of knapsack a large bag of kush or cheese, intimating that I might purchase some if I wished. By then I knew too well that psychoactive drugs had stolen too many of my days, and abhorred further intercourse with that diabolical weed. Wanksy took umbrage at this rejection, and inquired whether I had ever slaughtered a fellow, intimating that he had, and that I was to expect a visit from him with his sawn-off shotty. By this means, Wanksy revealed himself to me as one of those tiresome charismatic eccentrics with big personalities, whose natural habitat is the terrace of the Old Disgrace, although I had never seen him there. Evidently, he considered me as one of the legion of civilians on whom he might impose his gnarled hippy wisdom. I imagine that, despite his advancing years, he still participated in the young man’s game of spraying edgy nihilistic graffiti in the dank places of Stokes Croft and Montypee and down like fuckin’ Easton. I imagine also that his youngers and marginal betters tolerated him, albeit grudgingly. He quite likely possessed a yurt. He certainly possessed a truck, for he told me as much himself. —
Ghastly Hipster opposite Turbo Island, Wanksy
The second bondsman under the yoke that evil hour was the …er … squattocrat Lord Snatch, who of course was another charismatic eccentric with a big personality, and who most certainly did make it his business to hold court on the terrace behind the Old Albion. Wonderful to relate, Lord Snatch actually was a genuine noble, withal one of those thin-blooded indigent sorts, caught between the rock of assumed superiority and the hard place which was the legacy of Lloyd George, and by this means pulverised into a state quite unsuited for gainful or productive or, for that matter, meaningful existence. Snatch Towers, a ramshackle Cotswold pile entailed upon his heirs, he left to the mercy of his rapacious trustees, who I think probably accepted the debased coin of Dives the billionaire, and who barred the gates to him and treated with open contempt his entreaties for some kind of income. And in short order he betook himself first to Bath and then to Bristol, where his burgeoning scagsmithery prompted him to seek out Onanisticles and others of that ilk, and generally to pursue a course of the most disgusting desuetude and bohemianism. He inhabited ruined palaces, buggered stucco, and various dilapidated hovels and shacks which were neither bought nor rented, although I suspect that with a little more husbandry, meaning a little less scagsmithery, either of these options would have been possible for him. Instead, he polished his seigneurial role by lording it over a succession of those most hierarchical of habitations, … er … squats. At some point during this rake’s regress, he acquired a spouse. It may reasonably be said of the fair Lady Kelly, Countess Snatch, that she did not adorn her title, being of a Midwestern or, I am inclined to think, Rustbelt provenance, this desolation being overlaid with the scagsmithery by means of which she kept company with her lord and master. Lord and Lady Snatch alike both eschewed the conventional niceties associated with their station. They were thin people, who dranque too much, and spoke with the accents of their supposed inferiors, larding their speech and torturing their syntax with ‘like’s and ‘fuckin’s whose names were Legion, for they were many. —
Lord Snatch, Scagsmithery
Don Quicksotte the booster of wind was that morning’s final sacrifice. Appointed some two years previously as the Chief Executive of Idiot Left Energy plc, he had grown quickly into his role as the pioneer and proponent of all that which was sustainable and renewable. Mr Quicksotte did not love gas, but he did love hot air, and was known for chairing endless meetings in foro publico, which is to say round one of the larger tables in the Ghastly Hipster opposite Turbo Island. At these meetings, this windy fellow held court, subjecting his acolytes to a thin gruel of twisted logic and mutant Fabian drivel, which it forms no part of my business to reproduce in the present chronicles. Like other pumps and boosters before him, Mr Quicksotte appears to have come from nowhere, for withal he was quite an elderly fellow, nothing seems to be known of his past prior to his appointment as Chief Executive of I.L.E. This is not to say that there was anything fraudulent or in any other way untoward about the fellow; indeed, I am quite satisfied that he was a gentleman of the utmost integrity, withal misguided. My suspicion is that the explanation for his prior inconspicuousness is merely that he was, well, inconspicuous; and that following a life of blameless unremarkability, he came by his obsession with the bag of Aeolus as a matter of a morning’s spontaneous aperçu, and straightways donned his armour, bestrode Rosinante, summoned a selection of useful idiots to fill disparate elements of the Sancho Panza role, and tilted at those windmills. —
Don Quicksotte
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