One who particularly smarted under the yoke of eminent Olympian blitheness was Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole. This gentleman most especially resented his thralldom on account of the fact that he found himself subject to the whims, not of a single deity, but of a species of Holy Trinity. It may be readily conceived how unpleasant for him had been his being at the disposal of the brutishness of Mr Crass Cheseham. How much the worse to have had added to the depredations of that Holy Ghost a Father in the form of Mr Tad Curmudgeonly and a Son in that of Dr Mark Wankstain. The Gospel according to this Trinity had proven to be a confused, contradictory, warped affair. The Holy Ghost would monosyllabically grunt his command that a hapless Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole perform X, the Father becoming brusque and choleric would demand X’s undoing, the Son with his maddeningly cheerful “yeahyeahyeahyeah!” and his homicide-inducing talk of triangulation would instantly reinstate the performance of X, whereupon the Holy Ghost would countermand his own original instruction, and thus the cycle would perpetuate. —
Dr Mark Wankstain, Mr Crass Cheseham, Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole
I suspect that, had it not been for the cumulative burden of serving three, in their individual ways and eke collectively, so objectionable masters, and supposing Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole to have found himself answering to the whim of Mr Tad Curmudgeonly alone, then he might perhaps have borne his burden with something more closely approaching equanimity. This is not to say that Mr Tad Curmudgeonly was a person whose company excited spontaneous delight and admiration in any absolute sense. He was vain, supercilious, and exasperatingly condescending towards those whom he took to be his social inferiors, which is to say almost everyone. A martyr to Dunning-Kruger Syndrome, he was steadfast in maintaining that his deep-seated and primitivist irrationalism, his purblind contempt for the basic tenets of reason, was the mark of a higher being, of one the profundity of whose spiritual insight put him on an exalted plane, entitling him to sneer at the mundane, footling, quotidian obsessions of the university logic-chopper. He had about him nonetheless sufficient of the vestiges of the gentleman - which amounts to the observation that he could still quote some of the Horace and Ovid which had been dinned into him at, one assumes, Bedales forty years before - to suggest a justificatory pretext for his infuriating habit of interrupting and talking over those who, like Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole, had neglected to take the measures required to slough off their ghastly regional accents. —
Mr Tad Curmudgeonly
Whatever the facts of the metter, whether or not our intimations are sound in holding Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole responsible for the suborning of the printers, at all events and in the manner of Lee Harvey Oswald, if it was not him then someone else must have done the deed, for suborned the printers most certainly were; and by this cause it came to pass that Mr Tad Curmudgeonly clutched in his well-soaped palm a nasty, scurrilous document wherein were sown several base and greasy insinuations, chiefly regarding the paternity of the candidate in the Conservative interest in the upcoming elections, in which connection an individual rejoicing in the name of Cheddar Gammon figured prominently. Presumably purposing to ensure that there would be a sufficiency of material to slake the cozener’s appetite, the author had also felt moved to allude to a squalid little narrative concerning a burlesque lady who had been less than entirely diligent as to the dissolution of her union with one Master Bates before undertaking to join herself in matrimony to a gentleman apparently publishing himself to the world as Roland Shirtlifta. —
Roland Shirtlifta, Cheddar Gammon, Master Bates
Mr Tad Curmudgeonly, never having been one to wash either his own or his family’s dirty linen in public, waxed vey bilious indeed about the stain upon his sister’s honour. That nonsense about Messrs Bates and Shirtlifta he found altogether less troubling, inasmuch as it did not concern either himself or those linked to him by sanguinary ties. Nevertheless, Mr Tad Curmudgeonly was amongst other things a gentleman who preferred, all things being equal, to keep his powder dry, and on this account viewed the secondary scandal as a thing to be suppressed, and its premature revelation as a thing to be deprecated. Trudging down Picton Street, he discharged into the night air a volley of florid imprecations the like of which one would not readily associate with a gentleman such as he, in relation to whom one took for granted the outward marks of refinement as manifesting the analogous inner felicities. —
Picton Street
Halfway down the street, he came up alongside the first of the posters glued to the wall earlier by Mince. It was vey dark by now, and Mr Tad Curmudgeonly was relieved to discover that the lettering was too indistinct to make out the scandal. Anticipating that he would have his work cut out if he hoped to remove all the posters by morning, he straightaway applied himself to the task, seeing if he could peel a corner away from the wall and by this means remove the offending article in its entirety. —
posters, Mince
The second poster soon proved to be every bit as obdurate as its predecessor. After several minutes further and vey little availing scratching and peeling and tearing, Mr Tad Curmudgeonly felt himself obliged to undertake a thumbnail calculation involving as terms the estimated number of posters adhering to the walls of Picton Street and York Road, and the time taken to bring a poster to the incomplete but more or less serviceable state of effacement described earlier. Upon arriving at the product of his thumbnail calculation, Mr Tad Curmudgeonly emitted sighs and gremitations signifying that the value of the candle exceeded that of the game, and that the sigher and gremitationist was engaged on both a wild goose chase and a hiding to nothing. —
York Road
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