At one end of the table, Mr Don Quicksotte the booster of wind sat and chomped on the jugged squirrel and kale sandwich which the kitchen warriors of that establishment had presented for his degustation. This pumper of Aeolus’s bag, middle-aged and immensely tall, and bald but for some grey scrub about his temples, viewed the world through metal-framed lenses making no concession to contemporary modes, and made a habit of sporting a very bright yellow sweatshirt or jersey on which was inscribed the legend ‘Idiot Left Energy’, such being the name of the corporate individual which he had the honour of serving as Chief Executive. A salesman by nature and an ideologue by inclination, Mr Don Quicksotte liked very much indeed to hold court. To this end, his oral aperture was something of a two-way street - jugged squirrel and kale and other delicacies on their ingress met as it emerged the booming torrent of eco-lala and unassailable sustainability rhetoric and Aeolian unreason with which Mr Don Quicksotte made it his business to baffle his captive audience. Withal, upon this day he seemed less stentorian than was his wont, and perhaps even slightly out of countenance. —
Eco-lala, Don Quicksotte
The reason for Mr Don Quicksotte’s discombobulation was readily apparent, viz. that the sun of his eloquence had been eclipsed by the veritable gas giant of inanity emanating from the gentleman at his right elbow. The gentleman in question being a certain Mr Crass Cheseham who, in between washing down with Georgian champagne the caviar that he chewed, regaled the company there assembled with tales of his exploits as the Honorary Consul - withal he habitually arrogated to himself the status of local plenipotentiary - for both of those havens of humanitarian douceur the Republic of Belarus and the Democratic Republic of North Korea. Mr Crass Cheseham wore permanently clamped to his bonce a grimy beanie-hat, under which according to a popular rumour there … er … squatted a disgusting little homunculus serving in the capacity of a mini-me, and performing some sort of nominee role in an incorporated entity rejoicing in the moniker, Fascist Dictatorship of Stokes Croft, such being the means by which Mr Crass Cheseham prosecuted his business affairs as a sole trader, from premises bearing that name situated directly across the junction from the Ghastly Hipster Opposite Turbo Island. The chief business of the Fascist Dictatorship of Stokes Croft was to act as a sort of sponge to soak up the many and various community grants for which Mr Crass Cheseham and his fellow truffle pigs most assiduously schmoozed the put-upon officers of the agencies which doled out the boons in question. Mr Crass Cheseham was a keen patron of the arts, discerning much merit in the urban action paintings which abounded in that lively and vibrant bohemian quarter in which he was pleased not to make his home - withal choosing to live at some distance in the leafier purlieus of St Werbuggers. Betimes, he made it his business to have a hand in the disbursement of portions of the choice truffles which he snuffled up to those graffers who by dint of his and their sliminess fell within the purview of his patronage. —
Ghastly Hipster opposite Turbo Island, Turbo Island, St Werbuggers, Stokes Croft, Mr Crass Cheseham
Mr Crass Cheseham pursued this interest in common with the third gentleman in attendance at that gathering. Dr Mark Wankstain, the proud holder of a PhD in Design Poncery from the Postmodern University of Kenilworth and Egham, had since enjoyed a measure of success as a consultant in that most soigné of industries in which he had earned his doctoral spurs. Be this as it may, he had grown weary of life as an entrepreneurial buccaneer and had lately sought a gentler existence as a suckler on the public teat. To this end, he had one or two years previously obtained a sinecure as the Bristol City Council Poncemaking Director, in which capacity he strove to render Bristol even poncier than Bath, for which travails he was expected to make do with a modest annual pittance, viz. £72,000 plus luncheon vouchers, corporate Chelsea tractor lease, and a pleasingly gamine personal assistant. In marked contrast to Mr Crass Cheseham, who to go with his beanie hat tended to favour dirty jeans and fleeces, Dr Mark Wankstain was ever such a natty dresser, a sporter of Italian tailoring and a neatly clipped beard. Dr Mark Wankstain was of an effeter persuasion than Messrs Quicksotte and Cheseham, and did not deploy the same tools of stentorian bluster that they did in striving to dominate discourse. Withal he was a sort of uber-hipster, who did lard his speech with all the yeahyeahyeahyeah's and likes and fuckin's and other tropes typical of that species, such that you would have forborne to introduce him into the respectable society of your aged relatives, since that twerp simply did not know how to behave, the aforementioned tailoring notwithstanding. —
Dr Mark Wankstain, Bristol, Bristol City Council, Sir Hearty Luncheon, Handjob Luncheon
A fourth gentleman there was who, seated betwixt Dr Mark Wankstain and the personage at the end of the table facing Mr Don Quicksotte, held himself very much aloof from the hurly-burly of the hipsters and truffle hounds among whom he now found himself. The gentleman in question was none other than the aforementioned Sir Hearty Luncheon, who after apparently emerging from nowhere had turned himself into a panjandrum of provincial finance, in which capacity, in company with a certain Lord Handjob, he helmed a sort of integrated investment bank blessed with the moniker Handjob Luncheon. Sir Hearty occupied a considerable portion of spacetime, being of advanced middle age and seeming to extend for many furlongs in every direction. Sir Hearty Luncheon clad his person in an ancient, formless and not particularly expensive charcoal suit, and had an immense head, bearing atop its summit some snowy corrugations of keratinous matter, and onto a tiny central portion of the forward-facing surface whereof were glued his facial features, these resembling nothing so much as some farm buildings in Kansas. Upon this prairie he cultivated a mask of indifference, which served rather inadequately to belie the construction of disdain which certain among his contemporaries sought to impose as their interpretation of his attitude towards the antics of the petitioners and mountebanks who compassed his every waking hour. Sir Hearty Luncheon’s remarkable spatiotemporal dimensions were entirely commensurate with the immense displacement which that noble and distinguished manatee effected in the small pond of our City’s political life. And sooth, a hidden, submarine species of displacement it was, for Sir Hearty Luncheon was a discreet quiddity, an eminence gris who preferred to indulge his penchant for string-pulling from the murky shadows, from under the bank’s dank lips so to speak, wherefore nothing of his machinations could be immediately discerned but the faintest of ripples, withal deeper groundswells were finally evident to those blessed with patience and insight. (That other manatee Lord Handjob was an even ghostlier presence, such that there were those who in moments of levity evinced a degree of scepticism as to his actuality - although these Pyrrhonian speculations were contradicted by the occasional reports wafting in on a sort of scirocco, which concerned his dalliances with sundry race-horses, and also with certain celluloid houris in Palm Springs, whither he had repaired, so it was said, in order to take the water-sprinklers.) —
Dr Mark Wankstain, Palm Springs, Sir Hearty Luncheon
The four gentlemen thus described took their repast in the company of a spinster of most respectable antecedents, Miss Minerva Ledwitch, who being often in the company of Mr Crass Cheseham, next to whom indeed she now sat, was often apprehended as the latter’s life’s companion; however, whether this correctly describes the state of affairs obtaining between these two, was ever a matter of speculation. Miss Minerva Ledwitch could be quite disconcerting, uniting in her person as she did an array of intuitively mutually contradictory properties, these including: —
Herod
(iv) Miss Minerva Ledwitch’s paid employment as the Chair of the Bristol, Bath and North Somerset branch of the Blood & Soil Association, which was best described as the ideological harbour for a peculiar species of aristocratic postfascist; this being itself somewhat remarkable, given Miss Ledwitch’s vaunted disdain for the Third Way. —
Blood & Soil Association
At the head of the table, perched on an infant’s high chair opposite that windy chump Mr Don Quicksotte, was none other than Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet. This creature, no longer the young beaker with whom we opened our chronicle, had lost his adolescent sheen but had replaced that metallic hue with tastefully muted Farrow & Ball tones, and was now a mature bird basking in the High Summer of his years. I have no doubt that, had he been human, the exquisiteness of his tailoring would have embarrassed Dr Mark Wankstain into silence. An unaccountable je ne sais quoi of smooth urbanity seemed to permeate the space around him, although the air of self-confidence which he exuded was compromised by the occasional sidelong glances which he cast in the direction of the bulky form of Sir Hearty Luncheon. —
Farrow & Ball tones, Hawksmoor Perroquet
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