Tad Curmudgeonly, lordly luminary of the local offices of that venerable campaigning organisation Greenwar, was delighted to make acquaintance with this johnny-come-lately whelp of his sister, and waxed exceedingly loquacious under the influence of the obscure and précieuse gin with which he was plied by the fellow. Apart from looking somewhat askance at the, shall we say, semitic appearance of the surname with which his nephew presented himself, he betrayed very little curiosity as to the provenance of the cove, being keen to expatiate at considerable length upon certain of his own interests - the iniquities of modern commercial agriculture, the numberless multitudes of benighted subcontinental farmer-wallahs whom the thraldom of modern crop science had driven to make away with themselves, and the spiritual desiccation of modern schooling with its gradgrindian fixation upon rote learning and competitive sports, practices serving only to gratify the instincts of the bloated Israelite bankster and the portly Israelite factory magnate. From these topics, he strayed as the fancy took him up and down many and diverse conversational lanes and by-ways, frequently finding himself in dialectical culs-de-sac, from which he only with difficulty extricated himself, and then only by means of summoning the aid of his nephew.
For his part, Mark Wankstain tolerated this imposition with his customary equanimity; and when, very late that night, he finally returned to the familial bungalow in Mangotsfield, it was with the consciousness of having gleaned from the tsunami of his uncle’s verbiage at least one nugget, namely that Uncle Curmudgeonly felt a profound personal distaste for Crass Cheseham.
“Ghastly jumped-up little plebeian, reeking of armpits and feet. Betrays his want of education in that unlettered filth which the Council’s culture-boobies pay him to spray all over the walls. Lord knows what your poor dear mama sees in him.” And now venting a sigh and a harrumph, he added, with his characteristic insensitivity, “at least he is not that palsied poltroon Quicksotte, I suppose. That is as much as can be said for him.”
Notwithstanding his animus against the dreadful oik, Uncle Curmudgeonly counselled against Cheseham’s summary rustication from the Ledwitch kraal.
“It pains me to say this, but the man’s gorn bush. Bosom pals with all the big chief bone-in-the-nose blackamoors in St Pauls. Fact of the matter is, dear boy, squalid and distasteful though the business be, you’re best off appointing him your agent for the ward contest.”
In response to this, Mark Wankstain smiled most toothsomely, and reflected upon the leverage which he enjoyed over the truffle-boar in question, in virtue of his appointment as dispenser-in-chief of ponce-making patronage.
The revelation of young Wankstain’s intention to forsake the Greens, the socialists, and even the liberals, in order to stand as, of all things, a Tory, was initially somewhat discombobulating to his uncle. However, and chiefly by dint of several further and commendably liberal applications of the obscure and précieuse gin, Mr Curmudgeonly had within the space of thirty or forty minutes reconciled himself to the notion that it was not altogether a mean thing to switch a succession of hobbled mounts for a fresh one.
“There has of course been no green politics worthy of the name,” he announced, “since the present shower of sock-’n’-sandal namby-pambies disavowed their roots in the honest old British Union of Fascists.”
Labour and the Liberal Democrats came in for like deprecations. Socialism had been an empty vessel ever since those middle-manager thugs in their shiny off-the-peg suits had chucked good old Wedgie Benn overboard. And Lord knew what the Liberals stood for these days - Uncle Curmudgeonly never could abide buggers, and most especially not buggers who went in for shooting eachother’s dogs; which being so and by process of elimination, there remained but one course open to the blue-blooded bien penseur feeling himself obliged to do whatever he found necessary to retard the degeneration of this once great realm.
