'Drink irresponsibly,' said the chap to me solemnly, as he handed me a copy of the Unusual Times. And then he was off again, working his way through the crowd with his outlandish moustache. 'Read all about it - punters poisoned in Hendrick's queue!' he cried (hang on a minute... I'm in the Hendrick's queue!), but that was the last I was to see or hear of him, as I find myself ushered into the Carriage of Curiosities.
Hendrick's Horseless Carriage of Curiosities describes itself as an 'evolving collection of oddities... housed in a painstakingly restored train carriage from 1890'. It could have been a prototype for the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, and was fortuitously parked in Manchester Square when I stumbled out of the Wallace Collection. The price of admission was a contribution to the collection (of oddities, that is, not the Wallace) – in my case a slightly worn sleeping mask which I claimed to be a war trophy from the somnabulant soldiery of Samarkand (of course).
Having collected my gin from the counter and notched up a point on my 'tipple tally', I gather round another chap with another outlandish moustache.
'And this, ladies and gentlemen,' he says, picking up an item from among the Carriage's many curiosities, 'is a perfectly petrified pterodactyl penis.' I find myself intrigued by his erudition. To the untrained eye it looked suspiciously like an antelope's antler.
'What if she had an incompatible thread?' asks a member of the audience.
'Well, sir, it will not have escaped your notice that pterodactyls are now extinct.'
Emerging again from the Carriage, I find a pretty young thing with a feather fascinator and a voluminous velvet dress singing along to the strains of a ukelele. In the distance, someone has tumbled off a penny-farthing.
Drink irreshponshibably *hic!*.
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