Duration 2.28
Casternarm: "One, two, three, four... Capercaillie, Lammergeyer, Cassowary..."
Casternarm Fallast, occasional pianist, professional indexer and itinerant propagandist for a well-known opera company. The VUE has not impaired his livelihood but has widened his outlook on birds.
Casternarm: "Dotterel, pratincole, phalarope, sanderling, bufflehead, tanager..."
Casternarm acknowledges the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds and he sincerely believes that the epicentre of the Violent Unknown Event was the Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, West London.
Somewhere along this western section there are two places, possibly three, where the epicentre of epicentres might have been situated. The first is Stamford Brook Underground Station, and the second is the Raven Public House. Twenty-seven people died in the lounge-bar on the night of the Event and fourteen had died in the saloon on the morning after. Seven more had been variously blinded in the beer garden at the back.
Casternarm: "Capercaillie, Lammergeyer, Cassowary..."
The VUE has introduced Casternarm to insulin, ventolin and praemocetylene, widened his feet so that he now takes a larger shoe, and has given him arthritis. He now indexes for a publisher of popular ornithological literature.
Casternarm: "Sora, grosbeak, hawfinch, lanner, barbet, lory, mooruk, trogun..."
A third possible VUE epicentre is this maternity hospital where thirty children born in the twenty-four hours following the VUE, all showed a physiology that would suggest flight.
Casternarm: "Scoter, chuker, killdeer..."
In celebration of the Goldhawk Road, Casternarm researched the indices of the ornithological text-books sent to him by the publisher, and compiled from them a list of ninety-two of the most unfamiliar bird-names he could find. With this list Casternarm is hoping to achieve several ambitions, one of which is to find a sympathetic composer willing to use the bird-list as the libretto for an opera.
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Notes: Goldhawk Road is a thoroughfare which joins the district of Shepherds Bush to the borough of Turnham Green. Both of these places have some significance in the English Seventeenth Century Civil Wars, marking the sites where Royalist and Commonwealth forces met and fought.
The maternity hospital in Goldhawk Road is called Queen Charlotte's and has been in existence since 1739, making it the oldest maternity hospital in the country. Queen Charlotte has nothing to do with the English Civil Wars. She was the wife of George III, though it may be of consequence that George III suffered from porphyria, the disabling sickness contracted from exposure to too much sunlight, and a disease officially included in the VUE's list of 41 primary debilitating mental diseases.
The Falls Biographies
