A bleary dawn at March’s very end, filthy welkin lowering ominously over cityscape. Had they been more than minimally alert, the flâneurs at that ungodly hour straggling homewards up the Gloucester Road would have had their vigilance rewarded by a very peculiar manifestation. To be seen, fastidiously keeping within the margins of the cycle lane there depeynted: a large African Grey parrot, astride a tiny scooter. Perched behind this creature was a most comely blue and yellow budgerigar. And what might you expect to see, following in the wake of this slightly ill-assorted pair, being towed on a two-wheeled and comparably diminutive trailer, and lying in state upon a bed of cotton wool and what must I think have been pencil shavings, but a mignon little egg? —
Gloucester Road, Hawksmoor Perroquet, Scooter
To our notional observer, the progress of this bizarre congeries would have appeared agonisingly slow. In his defence, the navigating bird must need negotiate the multitude of bumps and and holes and grates and excrements and banana skins, figurative and eke literal, which bestrewed the portion of thoroughfare sequestered for his use. His companion saluted each of these impediments by flapping her wings, such efforts to maintain her own stability evidently coming at the expense of that of the contraption on which she perched. At the risk of unduly anthropomorphising the psittaciform, I venture to suggest that her behaviour also disturbed the tranquillity of her conductor, for whenever thus vexed, he bestowed upon that dilapidated corner of creation the coarsest and most vulgar epithets. For her part, the budgerigar at intervals favoured a rap world with, besides a medley of random and inchoate squarks, one or two two intelligible inanities of her own - chiefly “shut up!” and “show us yer knickers!” - the incessant repetitions of which can have done very little to assuage the biliousness of her consort. —
psittaciform
Eventually, for all that things had seemed rutted in the traces of a kind of eternal monoevent, that state of being in which they appeared enmired became a becoming. One or two and then several more pantechnicons ground along the avenue, the harbingers of the morning’s metal tide. The people borne upon this tsunami, drivers of more lorries and vans, bus-borne somnambulists, solitary motorists, Pakistanis driving cabs, gimperous cyclists, all seemed bent on their several endeavours, oblivious of the feathered emissaries of paradise. These latter followed the piste, thereby trundled haltingly down a shallow decline, at the bottom of which they were found to be passing through a leafier and more forgiving purlieu, a place where cafes extended onto veritable prairies of pavement, and shops sold the organic sundries and artisanal fripperies, the cargo which the remote and aloof tribe of ’pster professed to find indispensable. As if in sympathy, the rain let up, the sun shone, and for a few minutes everything glistened as if Persephone on her furlough wept with joy. There was a twist in the road then, and overhead a railway arch, under which the avian menagerie passed, as though to signify the triumph over them of some unseen but no doubt sneering Ozymandias. Beyond this lay a vista of some two hundred yards, ceding at the traffic lights by the Polish church to the desolations of Stokes Croft where, very much on cue, the rain began to fall again. —
‘Pster
A little further, past some more hipster bars, Jamaica Street branched off to the right, and a small triangular patch of grass in the angle of the intersection between the two streets rejoiced in the soubriquet “Turbo Island”. Here congregated the aficionados of white cider and jolly black tar. Gnarled, hepatically-compromised, prematurely bent-backed and stooping, hierophants of the mummered mysteries of those holy Saints Ǣthanol and Lycergus, dispensers of ars sapientiaque viarum to those civilians blessed or indeed cursed with the forbearance to endure their ministrations. —
Turbo Island
“Pay her no mind Hieronymus”, one of his companions suggested, “’tis only a budgie.” —
Hieronymus
Hieronymus nodded at this incontrovertible truth. —
Hieronymus
“Like there be,” he affirmed, “’tis hin yonder batiment, known as ’Amilton ’Ouse. Like just hacross like the like road like.” And here indicating a nondescript office building, against which lounged a knot of ragged young gentlefolk, he added the proviso: “But like ’tis for like the like hanarchits like, not like vuckin’ veathered creeters like.” —
Hamilton House
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