Some days following the episode described in the previous chapter, a party of the local qualität assembles preparatory to striking out on a tranquil but invigorating perambulation about the graceful purlieus of Page Park. The party’s vanguard is a familiar couple, he a thin and sinisterly undercooked charlatan in vintage seventies tailoring, she the quintessential Trans-Ural personification or avatar of that most serviceable of epithets, ‘all fur coat and no knickers’. —
Page Park
An unrespectable distance behind the two lovebirds stroll their chaperones, Mr Tad Curmudgeonly and Mr Don Quicksotte, the former sneering in what we must concede to be impeccably good taste at the inane prattling of the latter. As for Mr Don Quicksotte, he today finds himself additionally burdened with the oversight of a tiny, shivering creature, a recent acquisition by La Dročerpyatova, of the persuasion which Sir Hearty Luncheon, in the vanishingly unlikely event of his gracing such company with his presence, would unthinkingly have dismissed as another ‘yapdog’, no different from the brute in his dear wife’s handbag, and no doubt similarly prone to raise and intensify the cant to respective levels and densities which he for one never did bear, and as such to be deprecated according to the usual forms. Today, the principal role of this wretched beast appears to be the hindrance of the Quicksottic limbs, and the limbs of all ladies and gentlemen who keep company with the Quicksottic limbs. At any rate, there is every few yards a bother: a tripping over and an entanglement and a general fuss, all of which exacerbates the strained bonhomie of Mr Don Quicksotte and consequently the exquisite vexation of Mr Tad Curmudgeonly. —
Mr Tad Curmudgeonly, The yapdog
While the two chaperones are engaged in this unedifying charade, the vanguard encounters a third party approaching them on the path towards the bandstand. The new party consists in a third pair of individuals also familiar to us, which is to say Ms. Amelia De'Ath and Mr Rex Anusol. Of the two, Ms. De'Ath appears rather the more urgent, and there is a gleam in her eye of triumph at encountering the two ingenues of Mangotsfield. The demeanour of her companion is by contrast one of fashionable enervation, inasmuch as to pose the rhetorical q, how in God’s name did one come to be hitched to this harpy? —
Amelia De’Ath
“Amelia De'Ath, stalwart of local business catering in particular to the copracentric hobbyist community, this is Dr Wankstain and Ms. Dročerpyatova. You will of course be acquainted with Dr Wankstain’s candidacy in the recent election what was sadly unavailing. Ms. Dročerpyatova is your clueless pervert chum Roger’s former tart, what has made such a riproaring success in the gold-digging way of things.” —
Copracentric hobbyist community
Mr Rex Anusol, exasperated by the present company and discerning in the person of Mr Tad Curmudgeonly an acquaintance worth cultivating in a professional capacity, makes off in the direction of that gentleman, and is vey soon and inevitably entangled in the gordian proclivities of the beast in the charge of Mr Don Quicksotte. This is eminently to the satisfaction of Ms. Amelia De'Ath who immediately addresses herself to Dr Mark Wankstain. —
Dr Mark Wankstain
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