A Most Ingenious Parrot Box?

We all know that Hector Spinkel owned a parrot, but did he own a parrot box? More to the point, what is a parrot box? Not, I fancy, a box in which one keeps a parrot – no, that would be cruel – but a box which either houses objects related to a parrot (parrot-seed, talon-clippers, feather-combs, the pocket version of How to Make Your Parrot Speak and its sequel How to Shut Your Parrot Up Again) or which incorporates the image of a parrot into its design.

You may be interested to know that, as a child, I owned a box of the latter sort. It was bought for me by a friend of my father’s on a trip to an outsize aviary outside Hamburg. Little bigger than a large matchbox, it had on its lid an illustration of a greyish-green parrot, most likely the Senegal Parrot (as seen here). I kept in it four blue marbles, with which I never played.

Other, perhaps more famous, literary-minded personages are said to have owned, or been in some way connected with parrot boxes. It is claimed that Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, owned a parrot box that looked a little like this. Some say he housed a library in it – I am not altogether sure. Flann O’Brien, meanwhile, owned a much bigger parrot box, inside which he kept another parrot box, inside which he kept another parrot box, inside which he… (and so on). I am also informed that Ingemar Holleston owned a box in the shape of a parrot, which might have looked like this. Or then again, it might not have looked like that at all. So far as I know, none of these men actually owned a parrot.

Incidentally, whilst we’re flapping clumsily around the subject of Hector Spinkel, I wonder whether anyone knows when his long-awaited biopic is due to be released? The last I heard was that several Hollywood stars had declined the part of Spinkel – and that someone called Denzil Gust was involved, as either actor or director (I forget which).