For a long time (well, it felt that way, anyway), En fancied a bloke at UKC who resembled Eric Stoltz. None of us knew anything about him, so Ell and I (Zed) decided to try and put her off by making up his life story. It didn't work (although she eventually succumbed to the charms of The Sleeve), but boy, it was fun!

Note: we christened him Walter Winterbottom, before realising that there was a former England football manager (may he rest in peace) called this. So if you found this page while searching for information about that guy, be warned, it will prove totally useless. Actually, it will prove totally useless whatever your intentions were when coming to this page, unless you wanted to be very very worried . . .


Walter is the son of Tobias and Ethel Winterbottom. Tobias owns an empire of tripe factories and is bedridden, after falling into a tripe machine on various occasions, which cut off his hands and feet. He rules his family with an iron fist (figuratively speaking) and they are all terrified of him. Ethel is hideously depressed and takes forty Valium a day, smokes a hundred cigarettes a day and drinks all the time. They live in a house in the village of Kirkthorpe-On-The-Spleen in Yorkshire that makes the Addams’ family mansion look like a country cottage. It has no electricity or running water, since Tobias was too mean to install them.

Walter is the youngest of seven brothers, the others being Edgar, Charles, Cuthbert, Horatio, Neville and Cecil. He also has a younger sister Ermyntrude. After Ermyntrude's birth, Tobias was so disgusted to have sired a daughter, he cut off his genitals. This was quite difficult, because apart from the fact that they were microscopic, he had no hands. He tried to bite them off with his teeth, but strained his back and had to have several ribs removed, which he sold to the local butcher as spare ribs, a fabulous new delicacy the gypsies that visit Kirkthorpe had got word of. Ermyntrude and Neville both have unnatural obsessions with teabags. The brothers are betrothed to seven sisters: Felicity, Jemima, Primrose, Faith, Chastity, Charity and Prudence, the daughters of Charlotte Kibblewith, whose husband ran away with the postman. She went mad as a result and is now addicted to decorating her house. The brothers only see the sisters once a week, at church, where they are allowed to take a cup of tea together. The girls all wear chastity belts and never leave the house except for church. The weddings may not take place until Tobias dies.

Cecil is the factory foreman. The other brothers stay at home, waiting on their father. Walter is at UKC studying Actuarial Science (only permitted by his father for the benefit of the business). He has intentionally failed it several years running, to stay away from home and his fiancé Prudence, for not only is she the biggest ***** in the whole wide world, but he’s gay. Unable to pay to keep Walter at university, Tobias donated a large amount of tripe to it. This is why Rutherford food has gone so scanky of late.

All the sons will have to remain in the house after their marriages. They will still only be able to see their wives once a week at church. Every four weeks, one couple will have sex to try and conceive.

They receive two portions of tripe a day, and nothing else, except for a walnut at Christmas and Easter. Cecil still had to go to work on Christmas and Easter. He is sleeping with a factory girl and means to run away with her the day before his father’s funeral (which will also be his wedding day).

All of the boys were brought up by governesses. They were all called Miss Thribb. (They all went to the same governessing school, where the name was bestowed upon them upon graduation, never to be removed. Having said this, all these ones were called Miss Thribb before they went there.) This is the way the family has been operating since the eighteenth century.

When a Miss Thribb dies, her body separates into component parts, due to a blessing from The God Of Disintegration, Robert Smith. Then, a new Miss Thribb, phoenix-like, arises from her grave, with the parts in a slightly different order. The current one has feet growing out of her head and walks about on her intestines.

Their uncles all attempted to run away, but they all ran in the same direction, into a region where the earth meets the sky, and the sky is full of marshes, which are virtually impossible to cross. The only exception to this rule was Great Uncle Archibald, who is four hundred (despite the poor diet of Kirkthorpe and a tendency for its residents to die in freak accidents, those that survive tend to live for ridiculous amounts of time) and has a fetish for socks. He is a member of a religion which believes that you should cover all of your body with socks sewn together. His wife is twenty, brought up in a convent, à la "Quills". She is called Mary Immaculada Mary Perpetua Mary Teresa Mary Anna Mary Catherine Mary Martha Mary Frances Mary Margaret Mary Pamela Mary Salvador Mary Marion Mary Marie Mary Mairi Mary Maria Mary Mariah Mary. She insists on being called by all her names. Her surname is Quite Contrary and she hates gardening. She has several arson offences against garden centres.

When Walter was growing up, he was not allowed to associate with the local children. His friends were the rats. He talked to them, and he still believes he can talks to animals. He can still speak fluent Rat. (Because of this, he lost the ability to speak English (or Kirkthorpian even, since the dialect has not changed since approximately 17th May 1579). His father tried to send him to elocution lessons as advertised by Doctor Hownow-Brown-Cow, (a graduate in alchemy from the local school, the only other ones in the entire history of the school being Doctor Martens and A Frog Called Gerald McRibbit), little realising that the doctor had been trained in galvanism in 2125 (that is 'curing people by electrical shocks'). Consequently, the sign actually said "Electrocution Lessons" but Tobias could hardly read due masturbating too much (while he still had genitals), using his nose and the come got in his eyes. The electrocution lessons damaged the speech centres of Walter's brain, so when he learned to speak (as taught by Cecil, in the interest of gaining Walter as an ally) it was in a fairly standard accent. He is now comprehensible to the outside world, but incomprehensible to all Kirkthorpians, aside Cecil, Claudia and Susan The Pig. Ell knows this because she heard him speak once.)

Walter's best friend was called Squeak and he was traumatised when it died. He was five years old at the time and he still cries himself to sleep every night. Upon Squeak’s death, Walter, desperate to give us only friend a decent burial, he stole a handkerchief from Tobias and Tobias’s left hand (which had been cut off, but was preserved in a dodecahedral biscuit tin) as a shroud and digging implement. His father discovered him digging and was so incensed at this misuse of his property (especially as he had only been using the hanky for two years so it was relatively new) that, as he still had his right hand, gave Walter the thrashing of his life with a cat o’ ten tails (which he had been given by a very sadistic sea captain who had come from the sky marshes, for this is where anyone entering the Bermuda Triangle comes out. He had thought Tobias was an angel, for, like all traditional sea captains, his vision was somewhat impaired, and drinking gallons of rum didn't help his perception). This gave Walter a taste for S&M and he misbehaved from then on to be whipped more. Alas, when he was eight, his father lost his other hand. Thereafter the whippings were performed by Cecil; who didn’t want to hurt his younger brother and only gave gentle whippings.

Walter has absurdly small genitalia. We’re talking half an inch. (God’s way of making sure the family didn’t breed any more.) He saving up for a penis enlargement; he wants one which is eighteen inches long and six inches wide (when flaccid), not realising that this will be as useless as and more awkward than the present model. He is allergic to paper and penguins: even the sight of one brings him out in a rash. Handouts in lectures have to be on wax tablets for him.

His room at UKC is freezing, a fridge is open there, and he keeps cold water bottles in his clothes, such is his aversion to heat. He had a crush on the preacher at church in Kirkthorpe and knew he was gay. At uni, he discovered he was not unusual and spends hours looking at porn. He was kicked out of the Les Bi Gay society for being misogynistic (the same happens with gay bars and chat rooms). He runs far away from any woman who he thinks is looking at him. His aim is to puke in every taxi in the world. He likes sucking vitamin pill bottle at all times (as he had his dummy ripped out by his father at the age of two months. He never washes the bottle). He spends three hours a day building card hours but they always fall near completion. His favourite colours are vomit and diarrhoea and his favourite smells are vomit and poo. He has dreamed about Norman (don’t ask: anything else about Norman would be far too disgusting, even for the likes of this story. Sadly, he is real) and wants to but his lover. He went out with Mike The Beep (who is also real, alas) for a while, but before they could consummate their passion, they had an argument over who had the smaller genitals. It was a close thing. They haven’t spoken since.

Walter’s heroes are Chris Evans, Eminem and the Artful Dodger. He hates Brtiney Spears more than everyone else, and more than everyone else does (it that’s possible). His dartboard has a picture of his father attached and darts in painful places. He is trying to use voodoo to use on him.

He doesn’t know much. He hasn’t heard of most countries. He has seen two films in his life: "Life Is Beautiful" (which he hated) and "Scary Movie" (which he loved). His father bought him a place at university.

He fancies Ermyntrude’s best and only friend Agnes, but hates himself for it. She is only friends with Ermyntrude because she is (apparently) rich. Agnes has a huge nose and huge teeth - so huge that her mouth doesn’t close properly. She squints, but has a terrific arse. She smells like turnips. Her father owns a turnip factory which is always on the verge of bankruptcy. Her family’s only joke is "That’ll be a turnip for the books." She lives on Fuse Bars. She has size 29 feet and gets her shoes from a clown’s warehouse. She has inverse breasts (size AAAAAA - this is the only reason Walter can stand to look at her, as he hates breasts) and she fancies Britney Spears. She is bisexual and hates Walter and thinks he’s creepy. She would see Norman as attractive (well, he is positively attractive compared to the locals!)

Kirkthorpe-on-the-Spleen has a population of 137, all totally inbred and mad. The vicar is the only outsider to come in for two hundred years. The last vicar was the last son of the lord of the manor. He thought he saw a tripe machine going to fall on his head and wet his pants so much he died of dehydration. He was the last member of the ancient family of Krankenhaus. Now the old mansion is full of hyper-intelligent badgers making a plot to overthrow the government (who know they can’t trust reports from this village, so the badgers know they are safe).

The church is Anglo-Saxon. All the pews are arranged so their backs are to the altar as the priest is so ugly. The stained glass windows are monochrome with pictures of office equipment, seen in the visions of St Plogrig in 432. The Anglo Saxons found some stone which was from the future: not knowing it was radioactive, they built the church from it, but the radioactivity is making the congregation die of cancer, as well as madness. People’s Sunday bests consist of crinolins, Bermuda shorts and Puritan hats.

There are no trees for ten miles. Nor is there any grass, as the sexton cuts grass all day and every day. He sleeps on his lawn mower.

A bit about Prudence, Walter’s fiancé: She is seven years old and always wears pink. She has Tourette’s syndrome, as she heard her father swear at her mother while she as in the womb. She hates Walter. Like most girls, she has an obsession with ponies and Care Bears. She wants to breed them and see what she gets. She likes Britney Spears, Slipknot and Fred Durst. She is totally spoilt by her mother and has an ego the size of Jupiter. She is not house trained. She has golden curls and screams when her hair gets cut or falls out. She makes her own lipstick from her sisters’ blood (which she gets by attacking them with paper knives).

There is an orphanage in the village, run by Miss Harriet Bigglebum, Agnes’ great aunt. There are sixty orphans. Each wears a shapeless orange dress, regardless of their gender.

They sit on stools all day, doing absolutely nothing. If they sneeze, they are whipped. They have hymn practice in the morning, prayers in the evening and one hour’s sewing, and that is all their activity. They get porridge every meal, that is made from turnips and tripe.

The mattresses of their beds were sold many years ago to boil down in the tripe factory. They have never been replaced. They have on blanket each. They either have to share beds or have tiny cots. Every time an orphan dies it is sent to the tripe factory. However, more orphans appear every year so no one cares.

It was founded in 1782 by a benevolent lady of the neighbourhood who had a sadistic streak. The regime has not changed, only the orphans are different. No one ever adopts them, they never grow up and leave, they just die and new ones crawl out of the woodwork. The Bigglebum maiden aunts have been running it since the beginning. They are all exactly the same. Their breasts hang so low they often trip over them. The have no hair, so they wear bonnets in bed. They wear school type white knee socks, and nothing else. Walter wanted to go to the orphanage - it was a kinder place than his home - but he was taken back: they knew who he was due to his red hair.

Walter is the first person to have left the village in a thousand years. (All those attempting to run away in the opposite direction from the marshes got pecked to death just before escaping by flying flying buttresses. The only way to placate them is to feed them lots of deodorant.)

Cecil is planning to escape with the aid of the badgers who are digging a tunnel to Bradford. They are planning to give him full control of Bradford’s curry houses and elect him to local government. Cecil’s greatest ambition is to ride a penny farthing. He saw one in a picture book of his grandfather’s and thought it was the latest thing.

Kirkthorpe-on-the-Spleen has a prototype magic Nazi telephone box which dropped mysteriously from the sky in the second world war. Anyone who steps inside is immediately transformed into an Aryan by the mystical power of Eva Braun’s garters. Unfortunately, the Kirkthorpians didn’t know what to do with a telephone box so they build a shrine around it to C. S. Lewis in a mink bikini, worn upsidedown.

Things are brought into Kirkthorpe from the outside world by gypsies. One of these things was a computer with a ten-thousand-mile long cable connecting it to a phone socket in Hawaii. This way they learnt a bit more about the outside world and Walter learned of UKC. They also bring periodicals, which give the Kirkthorpians a little more knowledge of modern speech - but not much, since they’re usually The Dalesman, written in Yorkshire dialect, lahk, and Loaded, filled with largin’ it style speech. (The gypsies buy Loaded as that’s how they like their caravans - loaded with booty.) They keep returning to the village as they heard rumours of Viking gold buried there, but despite knocking down most of the buildings and excavating their sites, they have yet to succeed.

One of the gypsies - Mercedes Cognac (said the way it’s spelled - her mother called her that as they thought an exotic name would be a help in her craft of fortune telling, but didn’t know how to pronounce it) - had borne Tobias an illegitimate child: a hermaphrodite called Kellogg, who has no liver and glow-in-the-dark skin. His / her hair is like golden flakes of corn which people try to eat and someone who has heard about nu metal tries to listen to it. He / she has borne several children, with him / herself as both father and mother. They are all hermaphrodites too and called Pondweed, Pianola, Orifice, Tea, Pot and Perbelice.

Kellogg is an exotic dancer who can make men and women wild with desire for gravestones (which are also radioactive). She / he has orange eyes the size of saucers and can see into the future. Unfortunately she / he can only see two million years into the future, which isn’t much use since the only animal life is walking picture frames which eat cubic purple grapes dipped in ketchup plants.

Its children make stamps, from which they make a tidy profit selling to Kirkthorpians, who think they’re a form of LSD. They think it will make them rich. (Since, in old money, which the Kirkthorpians still use, being a thousand years behind the times, pounds are denoted by the letter L, shillings by the letter S and pennies by D.)

Pondweed, so called because he / she was born in a pond and weed a lot, has a playboy lover in Monte Carlo. He is bi and not sure which he likes best so Pondweed is perfect. He is called Cedric Sneer as he liked the character from "The Raccoons" who had that name. He likes eating undercooked filing cabinets with chocolate and beetroot sauce.

Walter tried to make a pass at one of the hermaphrodites once, but she / he pushed him down the stairs into the cellar, where he stayed for seven weeks drinking mildew and getting to know Squeak’s great niece. Alas, just as he was becoming friends with her he was dragged out to attend the St Bobthold Of Aramethea service at the church. St Bobthold converted the first member of Walter’s family and gave him the name of Winterbottom, not knowing what it meant.

The nunnery is in the nearby hamlet of Good Question, so called because when they decided to found it, someone asked the village headman, "What shall we call it?" He said, "Good question" and they were too thick to know any better. The nunnery belongs to the ancient Codswallopian order which used to run across the whole of the north of England until people began sieving their flour. (This way they got out fungi which acted as hallucinogens.) The Codswallopians follow the teachings of St Wallop who taught greed, disobience and lust. The order follows these precepts religiously. And the end of time, they believe St Wallop will come back with a lot of cod.

There are several garden centres in Good Question. One is run by humans. No one knows how it got there since the answer to every question in Good Question is "Good question". Nor does anyone know why there should be so many garden centres, because there is no grass, and nothing will grow on the harsh moorland soil. Another is run by gnomes: it does a roaring trade in selling garden humans (the businessman range is especially popular at the moment - although after September 11th they sold a lot of Arab figures). The other is run by fairies selling equipment for the fairies at the bottom of people's gardens - garden furniture and the like. Another is run by triffids and does a terrific (or triffic) business because everyone who goes in there goes blind and subsequently has no idea what they're buying or how much money they're handing over. All these establishments have wanted pictures of Mary etc Quite-Contrary in them.

Cecil is the only nice member of the Winterbottom family. Partly because he is a congenital idiot. But in a village of congenital idiots it means he is actually sane. Partly because when he was born, Ethel did not know the full horror of living with Tobias and her breast milk was fresh. It got sourer with every child as she got more and more depressed and sour herself. By the time Walter was born it was really sour and was pus yellow. Ermyntrude escaped this because after she was born her mother's breasts had pickled from the inside and she was fed on the milk of Susan, the family's pet pig. Susan is a very clever animal. She has used her brain to avoid being eaten by the family and has open university degrees in Anglo-Saxon, New Testament Greek, Astrophysics and Business Marketing & Management Communication And Media Studies With Economic Financial Science. She hates Walter and the feeling is mutual. He belives she contributed towards Squeek's death. However Tobias won't have anything done to her as she is the only one who will listen to him whine. Susan meanwhile meditates so she doesn't get bored listening to the same old stuff again. She is in league with the badgers and is training Cecil for a political career.

Cecil and his girlfriend Claudia have appeared in a film called This Filthy Earth which was based on Kirkthorpe. Cecil is the evil red headed guy and his girlfriend is the fatter sister. In reality she has freckles, but those were hidden by make up (although even with it she still looked totally hideous). To get the parts, Cecil lied to his father and said he was going on a tripe making course in Brid. Claudia just put her tape player on to fool her great great great great great grandmother.

Claudia's full name is Claudia Beshiba Clogworthington. Like Cecil she is a congenital idiot but is in fact sane blah blah blah. She is quite pretty with blond hair, freckles and a very giggly laugh. This earns the disapproval of all who know her as no one in Kirkthorpe ever laughs (except the Bigglebums at the turnip for the books gag). She lives with her great great great great great grandmother, who is blind. She says she sees with her psychic power (but this is totally useless which means Claudia can sneak out to see Cecil whenever she wants to. Claudia bought a tape player off the gypsies and puts a tape on when she goes out, on a cassette player that turns the tape over at the end of each side. It's always the same tape, the only tape in the village - the super-extended DJ Spoony megamix version of "Move It" by Reel 2 Real Featuring The Mad Stuntman which is five hours long - but as her great great great great great grandmother has a memory as good as a goldfish's it is of no importance whatsoever. The great great great great great grandmother likes singing along - "Ah lahk teh moove ih, moove ih!" - while operating her mangle. She is a medium and has a spirit guide who is a native American who lost his legs and can't move out of Navajoland. She hates everyone - especially Claudia. She spends most of her time eating woodlice that crawl out of the floor.

Claudia is a clever person. She had to leave the school in Kirkthorpe which teaches nothing but alchemy and straw brick husbandry when she was 7 to work in the tripe factory but she has a fairy godmother (sister to the fairy who owns the garden centre) who used to give her things like encyclopaedias and Chemistry sets for her birthday. She studied Physics with Susan the Pig.

Claudia's great great great great great grandmother is 210 3/4 years old and totally white. Her hair is pure white, as is her skin as she has not been out of the house for over a hundred years. Indeed, even her blood is totally bleached by now. She always wears her wedding dress, this is still pure white because it was so horrible and ugly no self-respecting dirt or decay wanted to go near it.

She is in fact a Winterbottom by marriage. When she was fifteen she married Cornelius Winterbottom. They went to the house her father had built for them for their honeymoon. That night, under the open window, they did what newlyweds do. Alas, she was menstruating at the time. Cornelius took this as a sign that he should have married the moon instead. After he had finished penetrating her he ran outside looking for the moon. He saw the reflection of the full moon on the village swamp, jumped on it and drowned. No one was that bothered as it was quite common.

From this brief marriage, a daughter was born. She was stunningly beautiful but so smelly that its mother sent it the nunnery in Good Question. Sadly she had a severe flatulence problem and so was christened Sister Fartybottom (as a witty pun on her surname). Her only achievement in life was winning the annual Kirkthorpe games wind-surfing contest, held on the local dried up duck pond. Nobody knew what wind-surfing was, but her fart managed to drive the board five miles. It burned up with the speed and caused several heath fires. (Kirkthorpe's achievement of having the world's first wind-surfing contest in the nineteenth century is not generally known.)

When sister Fartybottom was old enough she had to take her vows of lust. The only man who would oblige was a tramp who wandered into the village looking for scraps of food. He had inverse vision, so anything that was black looked white, anything that was tall looked short, etc, and so he only agreed to help the sister if he was given a chicken in return, because she appeared so ugly. It was rather tragic, because he couldn't stand to look at her face they did it doggy style. As soon as she came, she farted so badly the tramp was sent into orbit. He died of hunger after a few weeks, but his skeleton can still be seen passing over Kirkthorpe every 23.568 days.

Alas, Sister Fartybottom would not live long either. When her son was born she was in the infirmary and complained of toothache. The nurse bent down, holding a candle near the mouth to see. Sister Fartybottom burped and she was so full of methane that she exploded. Her femur was found twelve miles away.

The son (christened Magnesium Algernon) was sent back to his grandmother's house and as he wasn't as smelly as his mother, she grudgingly agreed to raise him. He had an uneventful life. He wasn't allowed to leave the house except with his gran and she made him wear a lead. He didn't mind this as he had all the personality and brain of a vegetable (a rather dense parsnip to be precise). When he was twenty four, his grandmother arranged for him to marry Carnelian Krankenhaus (the local scarlet woman). They lived together for eighteen years before Magnesium learned exactly what marriage meant. This absolutely terrified him as he didn't really like his wife (he was scared of red) and he had to be force fed sprouts to get his ardour up.

The result of this union was another daughter, Habbakkukkia. She was sent to work in the tripe factory (this was founded by Cornwallis Winterbottom in 1839. He sold the tripe to the gypsies for sixpence a pound and they sold it on for six shillings a pound). She worked there until she was twenty. She was then married to her cousin, Wassthiss (being the first thing his mother said on seeing her baby for the first time, as she was somewhat inebriated) Krankenhaus. Unfortunately for her he was gay and after their daughter was born, went to live with the fairies on the hill (very small gay men with fluttery wings). The fairies from then on were friends of the family.

The daughter was called Insurance, because the gypsies offered Habbakkukia some insurance in return for her child. Habbakkukia thought this was a good deal, since she owned thousands of pounds worth of primitive fire extinguishers. The insurance took the form of an uglier baby, but Habbakkukia had so little imagination that she referred to the baby as Insurance from then on. Insurance grew to be 7'5" tall and 2'6" wide and married a dwarf called Cider Restinpeace (the surname was taken from a tombstone, as was common), an orphan from the orphanage, who was 2'6" tall and 7'5" wide and was particularly talented at the bagpipes.

They had two children, Kermit and Penfold, of different genders, who became Siamese twins. They really liked each other, so at the age of five, they asked their local doctor, Doctor Martens, who was famous for having the only pair of shoes in the village (everyone else had odd shoes if any at all), to join them at the hip. Then, at the age of sixteen, they realised they were in love with each other, and the priest gave them a dispensation to marry, since no one else wanted to marry them. They had one daughter, named Moveoverabit! (since the bed in the hospital wasn't really big enough for both of them). Her parents died shortly afterwards in a tripe factory accident whereby a blind butcher who was slicing some meat separated them by mistake and they were so traumatised to be apart that they died.

Moveoverabit! was sent to live with her great great great great grandmother and they liked to play Noughts and Crosses together for hours on end and memorise the calorie content in as many products as they could get their hands on from the Mace supermarket underneath the garden centre run by the gnomes in Good Question. She met Claudia's father, Claude, at a celebration party of one of the Bigglebums giving birth to a combine harvester (they were hoping to breed them when they got a bit more rusty). She was impressed by his good looks and his wit (she was partially blind due to dodgy genes and he laughed at "That'll be a turnip for the books": it was the first time she'd heard anyone laugh and she found it attractive). She had to go and beg her great great great great grandmother for permission to him, because she thought he was too light headed and laughed too much and would not be able to sustain an erection and continue the family. Moveoverabit! proved this to be untrue to her elderly relative, but we won't go into details. Some things are so worrying that they lie beyond the scope of even this tale.

They gave birth to Claudia, who was born wearing a pair of frilly ankle socks. Unfortunately Moveoverabit! fell into a tripe machine shortly afterwards, while swooning over Claude's laughter, and he went to live in the nunnery to assist with their vows of lust. Fortunately Claudia was protected her fairy godmother who had been friendly with Wassthis Krankenhaus.

A primitive form of snooker called Kisson T'brown is very popular in the village, played over a common with sheep as balls, which naturally move around on their own accord. The cues are pitchforks, the holes are quicksand pits and the chalk is cow dung (they ran out of chalk when the gypsies took away all their talcum powder). The aim is for each player to kiss the sheep covered in the most cow dung (bonus points if tong(ue)s are involved). The village has a mass murderer, who happens to be the top Kisson T'brown player. He pokes people with a red hot pitchfork, rubs cow dung in their eyes and puts them in quicksand pits. There is one miracle quicksand pit, where the contents are spewed out several years after their entrance. Unfortunately, most of the sheep have died by that point, but it makes them easier to move about the common.

There is an oracle in Good Question which takes the form of a four foot high wooden werebear called Fums. Unfortunately, nobody has any sensible questions to ask it, and when anyone asks it a silly question, such as, "What colour is green?", it just replies, "Good question." So as not to let its oracley powers, it uses them to summon dope which it smokes constantly.

Tobias hates female voices. Ethel's Dad removed her vocal cords so he would agree to marry her. Ermyntrude virtually lives in the pigstay as she is a chatter box and prefers Susan to her mother.) As a boy, his governess was Miss Thribb, a former nun. She was expelled from the order because of the way she had been regenerated - her vagina was in her stomach so she could not fulfil her vows of lust. However, she never gave up her vow of chatter and when Tobias was naughty, she used to stick a plastic canoe paddle in his mouth. While she talked (about her boring aunts who did nothing but read turnip receipes all day), he could not, and he developed a Freudian loathing of women's voices.

The name Thribb comes from the verb to thribb - to weave through the bars of a crib. (Thribb being a cross between thread and crib.) They made thribble mats, which were ugly and uncomfortable. Kneeling on them is a common punishment in Kirkthorpe.

The reason all the Miss Thribbs are maiden aunts is because if they notice an admirer looking at something other than them, they get so jealous they kill the admirer in rage. And no admirer can stand to look at a Miss Thribb for very long, since, like everyone else in Kirkthorpe, they're hideously ugly.