They first rolled the scooter with its pair of effigies down Snandrews Road. At the bottom of this thoroughfare, veering sharply left, it collided with the poubelles outside the back door of the Bellend Diner. The revellers retrieved the puppets, which had parted company with the scooter, from the comble of plasticated slime in which they were now embedded, and finding them to be undamaged, did not trouble to wipe them clean, but expeditiously lashed them once more to their vehicle, and prepared to continue their rout. —
Snandrews Road
The direction now to be taken was at this point the occasion of an altercation between the de facto masters of festivities, Medusa the gorgon and St Just the tiger or catamite of … er … Squattocrat Towers. The gorgon was all for advancing via Stokes Croft and the Bearpit into the City, and taking a turn or two about City Hall, and perhaps laying siege to the Magistrates Courts and the offices of Handjob Luncheon, and the Bridewell sty, together with certain other of the institutions which oppressed the ragged-trousered misanthropists of her natural constituency, before finally crossing the Avon and parading the charivari in Southville before the apartments where the Mayor dwelt with his wife who was the subject of their cruelty. The tiger or catamite advocated a more cautious approach, and sought to deter the company from venturing its fortunes in the City while yet its numbers remained in the low hundreds, evincing the fear that Masters Shallow and Silent should be moved by this insult to summon forth Constable Wifebeating-Cokehead and eke all his fellow train band captains, and by this means restore boring old lawn order before any real fun could be had. On this account, St Just advocated that they gather in Stokes Croft before the frontage of his own abode … er … Squattocrat Towers, where they might serendipitously augment their number by the addition of a great many of the footloose ruffians inhabiting those purlieus, and also convert the charivari lampooning the former Mayor and the present Lady Mayor into a wider protest against the Monchild-Rothsanto project, which everyone knew had finally been unmasked as a plot by faceless capitalist businessmen to efface all trace of the indigenous … er … squatting culture of Stokes Croft. In the event, withal there were voices sympathetic to the latter motion, howsomever the House carried the former; although it lies beyond the competence of the present chronicle to ascertain whether this came about because the oratorical suasions of the vestal of Kropotkin turned the assembled Dionysiacs to stone, or because Mr Crass Cheseham at the promptings of his consort inveighed against the pusillanimity of St Just. —
Stokes Croft, Squattocrat Towers, Bridewell sty, Dionysiacs, Medusa, St Just
At length, then, it came about in the small hours that the ragged knots and skeins of outlawry and vagabondage began to coalesce into a substantial and frankly intimidating formation. The individual drunques and junquies and anarquistes and quommunists composing this body had armed themselves with brickbats and flaming brands and strong liquor purloined from local shops. Thus accoutred, and with the puppets tied back-to-back on their scooter in the van, the column, by now resembling a somewhat malcoordinated millipede, embarked upon its march into the centre of the great City, to the accompaniment of bongo-drums and pan-pipes, and also a fiddle or two. In the course of its progress down Stokes Croft, its numbers were swelled by the desperadoes who dwelt in the flop-houses and … er … squats down Ashley Road and Jamaica Street. Moreover, very many very earnest young beards from very respectable families emerged from Bar Wanque and the Ghastly Hipster Opposite Turbo Island, where they had been haranguing each other in meta-meetings about grant applications for community activist projects, and found themselves persuaded by the vacuity and directionlessness of their own lives to attach themselves to this new and febrile movement. By the time it reached the Bearpit, the throng was over a thousand strong, and a bottleneck formed, with many overflowing the roundabout and halting the scanty traffic of the late hour, while others pressed down the steps and through the underpass into the Pit itself, where several dozen beggars and diverse other loungers and flâneurs added themselves to the cause. —
The Bearpit
Very soon, the turmoil had reached as far as Broadmead. Honest shopkeepers, whom the cacophony of drums and lutes had roused from their beds, stood by in their pie-jams and their nighties, and rung their hands and beseeched deaf Heaven with their bootless cries, as windows were smashed and livelihoods went up in smoke. When the appetite for wanton destruction had been by this means temporarily attenuated, the mob took its way down Nelson Street, where it laid siege to the Bridewell sty, and the yobs forming its Praetorian Guard assailed with the foulest imprecations the bacon sizzling within. —
Nelson Street, Bridewell sty, Broadmead
By now, the beaks had been apprised of the tumult which had arisen. Mr Justice Shallow, very blue of chin, unleashed Constable Wifebeating-Cokehead and his fellow cohorts, giving them full licence to sally forth from the sty - where they had passed the night scoffing doughnuts and regaling one another with strip-search videos - that they might punctiliously break as many heads as they liked, sufficing only that the civitas be suffered to have restored to it its antecedent order and tranquillity. Very shortly, the rioters found that the gauntlet which they had insouciantly thrown down had been picked up, for they were faced with a large number of stout roast-beef-eating yeomen of the blue. These gentleman were not in the least backward or niggardly in their efforts to reestablish lawn order, but applied themselves most diligently, dealing out blows with their billy-clubs, shock with their tazers, and even some nibbles by the biting dogues which they suffered to be brought from the biting dogue kennels in Lower Ashton. —
Mr Justice Shallow, Biting dogue kennels, Constable Wifebeating-Cokehead
Towards 5am, the rioters found themselves being driven off en masse towards St Augustines. There, withal nursing bruises and bleeding from their many wounds, they found that the thrill of doing battle with the bacon had imbued them with a quality of vigour hitherto unsuspected in the etiolated sluggards of Stokes Croft. Now did Medusa the gorgon and Mr Crass Cheseham deliver themselves of bracing harangues, which stirred these warriors to new deeds. And so, re-grouping themselves around the charivari which had by now become their covenantal ark, and finding their way barred by the afore-mentioned bacon, they betook themselves instead down Baldwin Street, and spilled over the Avon via the Victoria St bridge. —
Mr Crass Cheseham
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