Chapter 3 of Pretty Poli

3.

Animal Rationis Capax Otiose Paenitet

The parrot in short order found himself most unceremoniously bundled from the building, much to the hilarity of the topers congregating still across the road on Turbo Island. Affecting to ignore the foul execrations flung at him by those gentlefolk, he levered himself upright and, by now without his scooter, which had presumably been appropriated by some wave-particle in the fusion of anarchy, on clawed foot took his disconsolate way down the shallow slope into the city centre. What ensued as the shadows lengthened is lost to this chronicle. The natural surmise is that the parrot took in some ditch somewhere such repose as his troubled conscience that night afforded him.

Suffice to say, at an unforgiving hour the following morning, he was to be observed in the purlieus of Easton - Robertson Road, to be precise, where it adjoined Foster Street - perched on a telegraph pole and eyeing the entrance to the premises on the corner across the road. The rain had not stinted since the prior forenoon, but had rather increased in both intensity and oleaginousness, now manifesting itself as an unremittingly nasty and viscous affair, and seeming by this means to answer to the despondency which the parrot published to the world, as he hunched up there in silhouette amongst the tree’s scanty twigs. The establishment opposite which he kept his vigil rejoiced in the name ‘Club Autonomie’, and announced itself as a community centre, a noble aspiration somewhat belied by the notices posted on its windows, a gamey stew of distinctly antisocial revolutionary socialism.

After some thirty minutes or so, there appeared without a scowling middle-aged lady in bedraggled dreadlocks, who unlocked the black door set into the corner, and then stood there momentarily, eyeing suspiciously the lengths of the two streets. The parrot, taking advantage of her stasis, fluttered down from his perch and marched in by the door which she held ajar. For her part, the lady beadle of that admirable establishment affected not to be surprised at the advent of that harlequin ambassador of the tropical, being no doubt much practised in never letting slip the mask of diversity-acceptance.

Within the Club, a number of chairs in mismatched formica were place around a couple of tables. A pungent odour of the 1970’s permeated throughout. The parrot rather wearily hauled himself onto an eviscerated reproduction fauteuil, and addressed his new companion.

“Nice gaff you got here. You wouldn’t happen to have about the place a copy of the Anarchist Bible? I did hear that you might.”

“Only certain fragments,” said that crusty personage rather doubtfully, “it keeps getting burned. Was there anything in particular … ?”

“I have in mind a sort of oath which I want to swear,” said the parrot, “pertaining to my future conduct.”

“Well,” replied the nymph of the grove, “the Book of Autonomous Actions is nearly complete, and only slightly singed, but I don’t know, it might not be sweary enough.”

“It’s all one to me,” said the parrot in his extremis, “either that or the Book of the Spectacle will amply serve my purpose.”

“Autonomous Actions it is then,” said his hostess, reaching up to the high shelf that ran along the back wall, and fishing therefrom a grimy sheaf of loose papers. This she placed upon the low table in front of the parrot’s fauteuil. The parrot clambered over onto the table and, placing his right claw upon the Holy Book, solemnly intoned the following words:-

“I, Hawksmoor the parrot, on this April Fool’s Day do take an oath before Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon, the presiding spirits of non-hierarchical social organisation, here in this profane temple, that I will refrain from all equine anaesthetics, Latin-American talcums and amphetamine-based substances for a period of twenty-one years to come. And this I swear upon this Book of Autonomous Actions, and may I be robbed of my remarkable linguistic and cognitive abilities if I break this my oath.”

Fortified by the resolve which the making of this oath had implanted in his afflicted breast, Hawksmoor immediately quit the environs of the Club Autonomie, and set about searching for his forsaken consort and their unhatched egg. 

The fruitlessness of this endeavour became swiftly apparent. The gentleman with whom he had misguidedly transacted had dropped certain hints as to his being occupied as some kind of animal behavioural scientist, perhaps even the ‘hornotholojit’ of the Infirmity Lady’s divination. Nevertheless, he had left no name or forwarding particulars, email address, mobile number, or other means by which he might be contacted. Furthermore, Hawksmoor was exceeding loth to make enquiries at the municipal zoo up on the edge of Durdham Downs, lest the panjandrums of that bestiary view him under the specie of an acquisition, and lay rough hands upon him, and by main force incorporate him into the aviary which they maintained in that place. Being nonetheless reluctant to derogate from his duty of reuniting himself with his wronged consort, he made his way into the centre of the metropolis, and then up the hill at the top of which, like some Benthamite speculum surveying the life seething below it, brooded the University. Alas! withal it was an oracle of many mouths, very many of the mouths in question were stoppered by beadles officiating most punctiliously as the corks of those orifices, who drove Hawksmoor thence with staves and execrations, considering it not mete nor condign that a bird should be afforded the considerations due to an erect hominid. Other portals, in principle more willing to be of assistance, were perforce gnomic and unavailing in their efforts, Hawksmoor contributing to this lamentable state of affairs in view of being unable to supply name, nor department, nor faculty pertaining to the personage who had made off with his spouse.

Eventually, all roads leading to culs de sac and stoppered mouths, Hawksmoor was forced to concede the fruitlessness of his quest. Reluctantly, he determined that he would secure himself a perch in a district of Bristol which he had for some time had his eye on, and there seek by honest swinking to ascend the greasy pole of human endeavour. Reaching this determination, he demurred not but straightaway took wing, and flew from the centre of the metropolis out over Spike Island, until he came to Windmill Hill, where he foraged and scratched around amongst the scanty twigs and grasses of that meadow, and gradually built himself a most comely bower, which in later years became an arts centre, being known as the Parrot’s Palace.

My son's the next Kruder & Dorfmeister

My son Joe has started uploading his compositions. Here's his URL:-
https://soundcloud.com/joseph-craven
I am a very proud parent indeed. I wish I had a tenth of his talent.

The opening paragraphs of my newly begun novel

Pretty Poli;

Or:

Monsieur Perroquet's Ascent to a 

High Perch

A Novel

By Richard Craven

1.

Unheeding the Yellowhammers.

A most bleary dawn for May, the filthy welkin lowering ominously over the city’s roofscape. Had they been more than minimally alert, the flâneurs at that ungodly hour straggling homewards up the Gloucester Road would have had their vigilance rewarded by a very peculiar manifestation. Not to put too fine a point on things, there was to be seen, fastidiously keeping within the margins of the cycle lane there depeynted, a large grey parrot astride a tiny scooter. Perched behind this creature was a most comely yellow budgerigar. And what might you expect to see, following in the wake of this slightly ill-assorted couple, being towed on a two-wheeled and comparably diminutive trailer, and lying in state upon a bed of cotton wool and what must I think have been pencil shavings, but a mignon little egg?

To our notional observer the progress of this bizarre congeries would have appeared agonisingly slow. In his defence, the navigating bird must need negotiate the multitude of bumps and and holes and grates and turds and banana skins, figurative and eke literal, which bestrewed the portion of thoroughfare sequestered for his use. His companion saluted each of these impediments by flapping her wings, such efforts to maintain her own stability evidently coming at the expense of that of the contraption on which she perched. At the risk of unduly anthropomorphising the psittaciform, I venture to suggest that her behaviour vexed her conductor, for whenever thus disturbed he bestowed upon that dilapidated corner of creation the coarsest and most vulgar epithets. For her part, the budgerigar at intervals favoured us with, besides a medley of random and inchoate squarks, precisely two intelligible imprecations of her own - “shut up!” and “knickers!” - the incessant repetitions of which betrayed a poverty of vocabulary, and indeed a mindlessness, which can have done very little to leaven the biliousness of her consort.

With the passing of the hours, there commenced, hesitant and desultory at first then by degrees intensifying, an oily rain. A hyperborean gale intermittently whipped up the cardboard and polystyrene fragments maculating in the gutters, and buffeted the plumed personages in their hindquarters. It was a harsh affair, that wind, which did not fill their sails, withal it ruffled their feathers, inasmuch as their progress continued as jarring and as vexed as ever - indeed, it seemed to the universal speculum much as if those gaudy apparitions congealed against that dun occluded landscape of tarmac and commercial premises and discarded stuffs.

Eventually, for all that things had seemed rutted in the traces of a kind of eternal monoevent, that state of being in which they appeared enmired became a becoming. One or two and then several more lorries ground along the avenue, the harbingers of the morning’s metal tide. The people borne upon this tsunami, drivers of lorries, bus-borne somnambulists, solitary motorists, Pakistanis driving cabs, gimperous cyclists, all seemed bent on their several occupations, oblivious of the feathered emissaries of paradise. These latter followed the piste, thereby trundled haltingly down a shallow decline, at the bottom of which they were found to be passing through a leafier and  more forgiving purlieu, a place where cafes extended onto veritable prairies of pavement, and shops sold to hipsters the organic sundries and artisanal fripperies which they professed to find indispensable. Then there was a twist in the road, and overhead a railway arch, under which the avian menagerie passed, as though to signify the sneering triumph over them of some unseen but no doubt sneering miles gloriosus. Beyond this lay a vista of some two hundred yards of non-description, ceding at the traffic lights to the desolations of Stokes Croft.

The beginning of The Montpeliad, an Augustan-style satire modelled on Pope's Dunciad

The Montpeliad

by Richard Craven

Of slumming hipsters and of slurring drunks,
of raving seers, visionaries, tortured monks,
of bulimic girls with temperamental cats,
and flagellants in tin foil hats
of student anarchists and Trotskyites,
and knuckle-dragging apes with dogs that bite,
and anti-GM activists smoking GM skunk;
of all the witless wank this square mile's wunk:
sing, St Lycergus! Sing, Terpsichore!
They've snorted all the ket, and now want more.
This dawn I took my way down Picton Street,
which bore the mark of canine, smeared by feet,
and saw there party-goers from the night before
wearing wings of angel, ears of bunny, monkey's paw.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped her, crying
"That cheese you're growing in your attic's frying.
Oh keep far hence the helicopter and the snout
or with their infra-red they'll sniff it out".
Next saw I Laudanum's lover, clucking like a hen,
shivering outside the apothecary's den,
and shouting "Open like the fuckin' door!
If you've not got gear, you must at least have draw!"
Alas, the chemists in there took him for a nark
and barred the gate, and sent him to Montpelier Park.
I tarried not, but hastened to Stokes Croft,
where Banksy's imitators spray, like dogs, aloft
epigrams of Gramsci, turgid agitprop,
the granular piss of Marx, and Lenin's plop.
Passed I by the People's Rep eponymous
where Comrade Chalkley's china gathers dust,
and bent my steps past the Jamaica Bell
and Compass House, that reeking five-barred Hell
where squats Jaundice yellowing upon each brow
and Reason in a flood of White Ice drowns.
In King Square Park, a sort of mummery engaged
the very rude mechanicals upon that stage:

I have the honour of having taken the most wicket-keeping catches in Division 2 of the North Somerset Cricket League last season:-

http://nscl.play-cricket.com/subsite/web_pages/7179

My team, the Old England & Bristol Sikhs, won 13 out of 17 matches last season, and got promoted to Division 1. We won our first match of the season yesterday - although I was absent attending a 50th birthday celebration in Kent.

A Sonnet To Dinner ...

... where the witticism flows like wine,

and likewise stains the lips from which it drips.

Who has not felt the tongue's cruel flail?

Who has not quailed before that whip?

Admit me not to Pandemonium,

that two-starred Hell, where unkind hosts 

hold court, and homicidal chefs concoct

culinary deserts of burnt toast

I cannot look upon another assiette

bare but for some nanoparticle of Hollandaise.

I cannot go to banquets where I am the ghost.

I'll not be the lapdog, not the salon pet.

I'll lurk at home, and swallow takeaways

and, very coldly, sweat.

After finishing Amoeba Dick and sending it to an agent, I'm taking a month off writing before I start work on my next novel - Pretty Poli, or Monsieur Perroquet's Ascent to a High Perch. I'm using this time to attend to my home, for a diy frenzy is necessitated by the slum conditions and domestic desuetude in which I have become enmired whilst writing (i) my PhD and (ii) Amoeba Dick.

On the subjects of Pretty Poli, I'm going to have to do some research. The easy part will be re-reading the Mayor of Casterbridge. But is there anyone out there acquainted with a talkative, and preferably rather rude, parrot?