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 only assume, Californian provenance; whence, gorgeously caparisoned in his vintage flares and geography teacher jacket, he would betake himself vey promptly unto whichever eatery boasted the twin cachets of smashed avocado on sourdough and not yet having been heard of. —
Dr Mark Wankstain, Mangotsfield
Miss Minerva Ledwitch had in truth not quite completely recovered from the thrill of having all those rough men intruding upon the sanctity of her bower, and was this morning as grateful for the presence of her son as she was exasperated by that of her husband. Withal, it did not escape her notice that there was something a tad altered in darling Marky’s demeanour. What this something might be at first puzzled her, for on the surface he continued to be his customary good-humoured, superficially affectionate self. (It scarcely wants remarking of course that there was about him vey little that was not surface and superficial.) Notwithstanding, following the elapse of a further few minutes, she found that she had put her finger on the problem: there had occurred a slight but discernible diminution in his habitual good cheer. —
Herod
Miss Minerva Ledwitch inclined to ascribe this phenomenon to her son’s failure at the election, the three seats having been captured, inevitably, by the Candidate in the National Socialist interest, the candidate in the Vert Rouge interest, and the candidate in the Liberal interest. In this albeit tentative prognosis, however, she was mistaken, for her son had read the announcement of the result with an equanimity born of long anticipation and bolstered by the standard platitudes about triangulation. The fact is, Dr Mark Wankstain was just now experiencing - whether or not for the first time who can say, but it seems likely - the awakening of that slumbering pygmy which we propose to call - laugh if you will - his conscience; and you may indeed chuckle, inasmuch as the Wankstain conscience was a runty and pallid embryo, much adulterated with prudential concerns, and the birth pangs of which were scarcely discriminable from those attending miscarriage. The event which had precipitated this altogether extraordinary state of affairs had been his learning of the arrest of Mr Helix Folt. He was already aware, in a vestigial, reptilian way, that the recent disturbances had not redounded epslootly and entirely to the credit of the Conservative interest, given the hand taken in the affair by that frowsy brummagem Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole. Indeed, the more he thought about it, the more - although still vey little - he regretted his own indifference in letting pass without remark the latter-named gentleman’s denunciation of Mr Helix Folt’s whistleblowing as the stammered maunderings of a lisping Asperjew. Although not personally speaking disposed to antisemitism, on the other hand Dr Mark Wankstain had not hitherto regarded Jew-hate with even the mild aesthetic distaste of Sir Hearty Luncheon, reasoning that it was all grist to the remorseless mill of triangulation. Whether Jew-hate actually did serve the purposes of triangulation was quite another matter. Indeed, there was the distinct whiff of anathema arising when an hypothesis to this effect was brought into juxtaposition with the notion that anything actually did anything in the shifting sands of the postmodern desert inhabited by Dr Mark Wankstain. Be that as it might be, Dr Mark Wankstain was troubled. Quite apart from all this unnecessary nonsense about Jews, there was also the matter of Mr Helix Folt’s complaint. No matter how one finessed the matter, was there not in the final analysis something rilly rather orff about treating octopi? —
Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole, Triangulation, Helix Folt
Seated at the table and assuming his standard role of breakfast party hinge or gooseberry, Mr Don Quicksotte chuntered and cooed happily to himself. Before him sat his customary bowl of ionised water, recently boiled and adorned with seven or eight of the nameless roots which he disinterred now and then from the patch of impoverished soil in his shed’s shadow. These Mr Don Quicksotte spooned individually and sporadically into his fuel’s inlet, all the while smiling vey cheerfully at some private amusement. Betimes attempting to engage one or the other of his companions in the contemplation of the glorious prospects awaiting his project to furnish every last one of our city’s haut bourgeois households with a toy windmill upon vey reasonable leasehold terms, covenanted to keep the taxman’s greedies off the moolah, he received with perfect equanimity both the amicable but patronising rebuffs of his … er … son and those, sour and exasperated, of the companion of his years. —
Don Quicksotte
At length, the thoughts of Dr Mark Wankstain began to turn from the contemplation of Mr Vercingetorix Bumhole to the contemplation of that no less appetising individual Mr Crass Cheseham, the former being the puppet of the latter: if the frowsy Brummagem had transferred the triangulation-frustrating viruses of Jew-hate and octopi-treating from the National Socialist interest to the Conservative interest, he could scarcely have done so without the consent, explicit or otherwise, of the Fascist Dictator of Stokes Croft. Dr Mark Wankstain had hitherto treated Mr Crass Cheseham with the same blandly patronising insouciance with which he treated everyone else. To any self-respecting postmodernist, judgement was anathema, and Dr Mark Wankstain held himself, if I may be permitted to report an intellectual solecism, in vey high regard as a postmodernist. Far be it from him to question the credentials, let alone the integrity, still less the droit de trough, of every single shyster and mountebank pretending to the status of social entrepreneur. In the case of Mr Crass Cheseham most especially, that the gentleman in question had contrived with such conspicuous success to latch himself onto the public teat, and in so doing to overcome the limitations of so drastically impoverished a vocabulary, was to Dr Mark Wankstain a triumph of inclusivity, a matter for celebration rather than an indictment of the putrefaction of the body local-politic. —
Mr Crass Cheseham
Now the Poncemaker General carried his tablet with him wherever he went, and seeing as wherever he went included breakfast at home with his darling Mummy and … er … Daddy too of course, thither upon this morning the Poncemaker General had carried his tablet. His darling Mummy, favouring the fruit of her loins with a sideways glance or two, observed the unprecedented corrugation of the filial brow and the intentness with which the Poncemaker General perused his tablet, and deduced therefrom a connection between the two. —
Tablet
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