Some hours later, there was to be observed toiling up the Gloucester Road a certain large African Grey parrot of our acquaintance. The large African Grey parrot of our acquaintance, withal he was large when measured against the physical scale, yet seemed morally diminished - dirty and bedraggled he was, and several of his red tail feathers had gone astray. He was very unsteady on his feet, and stumbled every few steps, his progress being in no whit facilitated by the necessity of towing behind him the tiny scooter, on which most incongruously wobbled a large cage. —
Gloucester Road
The motorists and the people aboard the buses, the drivers of the pantechnicons and the Pakistani fellows at the wheels of the taxi-cabs, the gimperous cyclists and the pedestrians hurrying hunched through the blizzard: all this humanity paid very little attention to the eccentric congeries toiling through their midst. The large African Grey parrot, being morally diminished, shrank from the notice of people, and so people did not notice him, and in this manner he struggled past the Polish Church, and underneath the Arches, and followed the rightward course of the first part of the Gloucester Road, past all the hipster cafés and hipster bakeries and hipster shops retailing their artisanal this and that, and up through Bishopston and Horfield and Filton. And all the time the snow fell and settled everywhere, and the cars made tracks through it. The snow fell thicker and thicker, and after many hours it seemed to the eye that all was snow, that every last thing on God’s earth was part of the same indistinguishable, impenetrable wall of white. And the large but diminished African Grey parrot and the tiny scooter and the wobbling cage disappeared into this whiteness and were swallowed up in it, and were lost to sight. —
Filton
Some weeks thereafter, Mrs Isolde Corby found that there stirred within her breast certain pangs of, if not exactly remorse, at any rate the uneasy presentiment that Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet, for all his deceit and malfeasance, ought not to have been abandoned quite so precipitately to his fate. —
Hawksmoor Perroquet
Eventually, upon a day towards the very end of March, just as their resolve was failing them, they came upon a spectacularly fat and wizened crone sipping Munter’s Blinding Cider at a table in the garden of the Spitting Chav in Patchway, who claimed to know what had befallen Mr Hawksmoor Perroquet. —
Spitting Chav in Patchway
Laudanum (n.) /ˈlɔːdənəm/Tincture of opium. A term adapted metonymously by Lord Snatch and his ilk to denote heroin. —
Lord Snatch
Psittaciform (adj.) /ˈsɪtəsɪfɔrm/Of or pertaining to the form of a parrot, q.v also ‘psittastic’. —
psittaciform
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