Sunday, June the 25th, 2006

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Pipistrelle Pursuivant

The pipistrelle pursuivant is a heraldic bat, usually golden and black, but sometimes red. It appears on shields, flags, and banners, visible when the banners are unfurled but hidden when they are furled. In its furled state, the bat is known as a clandestine pipistrelle pursuivant.

You will have seen this decorative bat if you have ever visited the bleak and crumbling stately home you pass if you are cycling between Pointy Town and O'Houlihan's Wharf. It is easy to miss it, as the house is set in vast overgrown grounds and the grounds are ringed by titanic cedars which have gone unpruned for a generation. No pruning, nor any sort of gardening activity whatsoever, has taken place at Plunkett Hall since it fell into the hands of Tadaaki Van Dongelbraacke, the half Japanese, half Dutch kleptomaniac stamp collector, who bought it for a token shilling in 1966.

Van Dongelbraacke chanced upon a mezzotint of the pipistrelle pursuivant in a shabby gift shop in O'Houlihan's Wharf, where it was used as scrap paper to wrap up a gewgaw that took his fancy. In the unheated rumpus room of the stately home, the philatelist, accompanied by his lanky companion Raoul, examined his purchase.

“What do you think of my new gewgaw, Raoul?” asked Van Dongelbraacke.

Raoul was a man of exquisite aesthetic sensibilities, which first became evident when, at the age of six, he fell into a neurasthenic swoon while listening to the first Blodwyn Pig album. A huge dosage of Baxter's Revivifying Brain Salts was required to steady his nerves once he regained consciousness, but thereafter Raoul was treated as a flawless arbiter of taste. Thus, Tadaaki Van Dongelbraacke reacted to his pal's judgement with punctilio.

“The gewgaw is a worthless piece of trash,” pronounced the frail beanpole, “But the paper in which it is wrapped is gorgeous, so much so that a mere glance at the mezzotint of the heraldic bat and I feel my nerves juddering as if I may swoon at any moment.”

Instantly, Van Dongelbraacke smashed the gewgaw into a million pieces with a big fat hammer, and resolved to blazon copies of the pipistrelle pursuivant from every cranny of his domain. And so it came to pass. Raoul, of course, confronted wherever he looked with the image of the superb bat, was in a constant state of enervated fragility, regularly wolfing down bowls of mashed potatoes to try to keep his strength up. But inevitably, he faded away, a puny weakling confined to his bed, while Van Dongelbraacke paced the corridors of his magnificent home, biting his fingernails and tootling dirges on his recorder.

Hold that image in your head, dear reader, for we shall return to it at a later date.