The City Hall Secretariat knew enough about the Mayor’s depressions to leave him unmolested in his office. He had shortly after his mayoral inauguration suffered to be installed a large birdcage, which he had picked up on a whim at an auction house in Hanham, and which, festooned with guano and papered with yellowing layers of tabloid smut, he found to be a comfort and a solace, for reasons the exact nature of which eluded even him. Inside this contraption he festered this brown afternoon, oblivious of the passing of the hours. The stopped carriage clock upon the mantle piece fleetingly told the right time, before passing over once more into error. As the shadows lengthened, the clock watchers and timeservers without, singly or in groups, stood up and sighed and stretched and gathered about them their gabardines and umbrellas and thermos flasks and other fripperies and made good their several escapes from that Hades. The tired voices, the yawnings, the hacking coughs, the scrapings of desks and chairs, the cheaply shod feet trudging along furlongs of linoleum, announced themselves discreetly, the sounds thereof being muffled in the course of their passage through door and airlock and inner door to the unattending ear of Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet, who moreover in his enervation kept his head buried under his wing. —
Birdcage, Hawksmoor Perroquet, City Hall
“How extraordinary!” mused the latter to himself and, gazing across College Green at the Cathedral’s hulking silhouette, added: “All these years of being the only linguist in the aviary. And now suddenly to find oneself relegated to primus inter pares, almost a commonplace in fact.” —
College Green
“Nivver mind,” said the crow again, this time more cheerfully, “least said an’ aw that. The long an’ the short of it is: Ian Corby at yer surrvice.” —
Ian Corby
“Uneasy lies the heed that wears the croon,” said Mr Ian Corby, “yes indeed. Ah do notice that, though but ah’ve no been lang in this toon.” —
Ian Corby
This site would like to use cookies to count visits and measure advertising. Nothing is set unless you accept.
