During the weeks that followed the Hipster Riots, “Gloucester” Oldspot directed the Avon & Somerset Bacon Special Branch to draw up lists of the participants in the disturbances, whom the uniformed bacon going forth most diligently apprehended. That Lucius Cornelius Sulla of the A&S Bacon now concocted certain punitive measures with Aldermen Shallow and Silent, the two Caecilians of Nostra Urbs et Civitas to this purpose resuming their offices as Justices of the Peace. These blue-chinned and mutton-chopped gentlemen donned their periwigs, and instituted Special Assizes to try the ruffians whom the bacon dragged before them. Such was the indignation aroused among the sober citizens of our Great Metropolis, that the beaks felt themselves constrained to the ignoring of mitigating pleas and evidences and the handing down of harsh sentences, doling out bread and porridge and the breaking of rocks, alike to the fugitives and to those who sheltered them. Those whom the charivari had driven into madness now in sober trepidation ran their fingers down the lists of persons captured and of persons yet sought, which were published each morning in the banns of the Evening Post. Many, fearing the knock on the door in the dead of night, abandoned home and hearth and fled unto the desolate Tophets and Hinnoms lying beyond the City Walls. —
lists of persons captured and of persons yet sought
One whose stock by contrast rose in the aftermath of the Hipster Riots was Mr Ian Corby, chiefly on account of his address to the mob being held forth as having been the catalyst which put an end to the trouble and effected the salvation of the Civitas. Men said that, although the charivari depeynted him as that stereotypical figure of ridicule condemned to wear the cuckold’s horns, nevertheless he had surmounted that indignity with aplomb. That he had been bereaved of his errant wife aroused sympathy in the collective breast, and men said to one another that he was a brave corvid, who was better off without that dove who indiscriminately besmirched all surfaces with her guano and had done rudeness with that ruined parrot, and furthermore that he had truly served the Electores and the Populus in effecting the dispersal of the Profanum Vulgus. True, certain individuals - Mr Crass Cheseham being notable in this regard - whispered their insinuations behind his back, saying that he was the Teflon Crow and a blackguard at heart. Withal, the greatest have ever had their gnats and fleas to bite ’em, and Mr Ian Corby was in this respect no exception, and being of a famously sanguine disposition, reacted like the proverbial aquatic fowl in paying his detractors very little mind. —
Mr Crass Cheseham, Ian Corby
During the ensuing weeks, the redevelopment of Penistone House gathered pace. The former edifice being razed and effaced and the ground levelled, the jackhammers and engines of destruction were removed by the horny handed sons of toil, these gentlemen returning with girders and planks and joists and plasterboard, which they proceeded to assemble and hammer into place. And in this manner, there rose like a phoenix, from the ashes of the former house of duns, a shiny new arts ’n’ cultural centre incorporating Miss Minerva Ledwitch’s colonic irrigation spa and adorned with Mr Don Quicksotte’s enchanting turbines. —
Herod, Don Quicksotte, Penistone House
This, of course, was all very much to the satisfaction of Miss Minerva Ledwitch. What was perhaps not quite to her satisfaction was the failure to resolve the issue of boring holes, inasmuch as the purchase and demolition of … er … Squattocrat Towers had, in the wake of the Hipster Riots, not proceeded quite as had been envisaged, the water supply for her colonic irrigation spa being in consequence not yet assured. —
Squattocrat Towers
The lady in question was to be observed, upon a dismal late morning during this limbovin period of our chronicle, ensconced with Mr Crass Cheseham at one of the deliberately rickety tables set aside for hipsters, behind the steaming windows of Bar Wanque. —
Bar Wanque
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