Carangid and Quartered

‘…I have yet to visit Bangalore Karnataka, Radebeul Sachsen, Pretoria Gauteng or Quertaro Queretaro de Arteaga…’ said his da, Quertaro and Queretaro being at the topmost of the list. His da was slow at making sense of common sense things. He thought he’d been around the world 27½ times, the ½ coming to an end at the edge of the Red Sea. Such as it is such as it isn’t; or some such nonesuch. His da felt his way round the darkened room with the cob of his nose, rubbing against walls, along the wainscoting, under the chesterfield and on top of the cupboards, everywhere and nowhere. He seldom found anything or went anywhere, staying one cob away from freedom and industry. …never underestimate the inestimable, or a wormwood headache, Artemisia absinthium. …like a rabbit on PCP was how is da explained most things, not having a big enough vocabulary to impress upon anything… …stand back, the sky is falling… just as he came he went, PCP’ed and hell-bent on cob-knobbing… …and then nothing, complete silence, earsplitting quiet... On those days when his da rose from bed before the cock’s crow he ate a boiled oats and piecemeal bacon breakfast, specially carangid and quartered for him by the midtown butchery, the same store where he went to purchase sweet-water and over-the-counter anticoagulants. He bought bouillabaisse from the saucier, canned in old sardine tins with the tops soldered shut… He liked his chowder salty and lip-smashingly hot, simmered with leeks and fennel root… Such was his da’s temper; welded to the half-crown at the back of his head…