2002-04-13 - 8:55 a.m.

An occassional series: Me and my friend like to make up fictional biographies.

Fetherton Prett (1780-1816)

Nobleman and inventor of proto-brassiere "The Bapsack". Prett believed his reputation in England to be one of a popular and rambunctious bon-vivant but he had his critics. As Dr. Johnson noted in his diaries "That tit Prett was out on the lash again last night. God, how I hate him" Indeed, Prett's popularity seemed to reside only in his own head.

He also had the unique distinction of being the only man in the history of England to have two dates of death recorded on his tombstone. The first was in 1813, three years before his actual passing. This first internment was the result of a game he had invented and liked to think he popularised called, "Arse Cannon", in which he recreated The Battle of Waterloo by inserting a billiard ball into his rectum and firing it out at anyone passing that he suspected to be French.

On one grim occasion Prett misfired and was thought to have suffered a seizure as the ball clogged his lower intestine. He was declared dead by an overly eager local physician and buried with full military honours. Within days Prett had regained consciousness, passed the ball and had managed to claw his way out of his premature grave. That evening Prett walked into his local tavern. and was greeted with fear and hostility by the locals before he explained that if it hadn't been for the bottle of absinthe placed in his coffin by his manservant, Peevel Fled, he would not have been fortified with enough strength to make his escape. He was then informed that tragically Fled had hanged himself that same morning, so inconsolable had he been at his master's demise. Prett duly consoled himself by drinking the tavern dry and inviting the locals back to, as he puts it in his memoirs, "get fucked up".

Diarists from the period record how that evening he inbibed approximately nineteen glasses of absinthe and seven double brandies; the effects of which led him to become convinced that he was the Greek god Pan. He then proceeded to ravish any living creature within his personal vicinity.

Absinthe, it seems, had been the abiding passion of his life since the age of four. In his memoirs he describes how "Bloody Byron and all those other fairies go all swoony and poetic and la-di-dah but I just neck it. I can't help it. It's Bloody ace."

In rare moments of sobriety he reflected that his social popularity might not have been as high as he liked to think. Another memoir extract reveals tellingly, "No-one likes me. You're all cunts. Yer fuckers. Arrrg-eh. Fucker"

His final demise came not after a game of Arse Cannon but another self-invented game that he named "Irish Roulette". One afternoon he ordered his new manservant, Pilton Spenge, to throw potatoes at his head and face until one finally exploded. This final, fatal game was immortalised in the verse of the little known poet, Francis Nib, and this extract describes how;

For seven long hours, young Spenge did toss,

For Prett gain was all but loss,

Until, at last!

Spud spread across beard,

The young lord dropped dead

With his eyes all weird.

Prett was just two days short of his 36th birthday.

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I go home now to confront my parents with the ongoing news that they're still not going to be grandparents.