About the Author

Born in 1837, the son of a nymphomaniac woman and any one of a group of fourteen sailors, Benjamin Zacharias Euphemia Rainbird was a stillbirth. However, people were made of stronger stuff in those days and, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, Rainbird won a scholarship to St. Asmodeus' College Oxford, studying taxidermonomy. This led to a job dusting the Royal Society's extensive collection of stuffed owls. His place in the world seemed secure, But things took a downturn at the age of 22, when it was discovered that he had been supplementing his income by taking rubbings of the owls and selling them to Hebrews.

"Rendering likeness or likenesses of Her Majesty's owls unto the licentious Jewry" was a High Treason offence at the time (comparable to the modern crime of failing to pay your TV license) and he was sentenced to death. Rainbird spent an unspecified number of months awaiting execution at Newgate prison, enduring many depridations, including the loss of his nipples in a horrific Badminton accident. Fortunately, a contemporary fad for extremely tall and spacious top hats meant that he was able to smuggle himself out of the gaol in an accomplice's headpiece over the course of several visits, gradually replacing himself with an albino simpleton who would go on to be executed in his place.

Although believed dead by the Crown, he decided it was best to leave the country until the shit had cooled off, and so enlisted in the Army, joining Rear Colonel Willie Long-Pinkshafte's legendary "Coventry Double-Enders" regiment, and going on to distinguish himself in the Glorious Welsh Punitive Bloodbath of 1851 by killing eighteen Chinamen and one duck, having evidently boarded the wrong train at Paddington.

Over the following year he continued to carve a one-man bloody swath across Asia, nobody having the heart to tell him to stop, as people were a lot more polite in those days. Eventually word reached him that the infiltration of the Zionist Global Conspiracy into the British government had caused a change in the law, and he was able to return home and reveal his true identity. Even better, albinos had been causing a lot of unrest in London at the time, and killing one by treachery now carried a substantial financial reward, so he claimed the bounty for the man he had duped into dying in prison.

This money, added to a windfall from decades of incapacity benefit fraud (he claimed inability to work due to laziness brought on by French ancestry), provided him funding for a successful campaign to take over the prestigious post of Professor Emeritus of Incorrect Shapes at Uttoxeter Polytechnic, a position he would occupy for the rest of his life.

He married his office bureau, and they had three medium-sized desk chairs together before he found his glasses and realised his error. He quickly obtained a divorce and married his assistant, as he had originally intended to, and together they had several mostly human children. It is not known what fate befell his bureau, but it likely ended its days peniless in a Temperance House for Fallen Furniture. Rainbird only once expressed any remorse for this, when he was heard to wistfully remark; "it was a very nice bureau". He continued to teach, and published several important papers including the now-famed Absolute Wrongness of the Quadtrapezohedrix.

Benjamin Rainbird died in 1903 in a Turkish whorehouse, after losing a long battle with obstinacy, and a rather shorter battle with fifty-eight stab wounds to the groin and anus. This was ruled to have been suicide, bought on by feelings of guilt for his office bureau. He died again in 1954, this time for publicity, and was not heard from again until 1996, when his bestselling autobiography, Life Ain't Nothin' But Bitches And Money, was intercepted by SETI as part of a garbled and extremely weak radio message, which had apparently emanated from an unknown point outside our own galaxy, at a time roughly sixty million years ago.

To date, Rainbird's autobiography is still unique among such works in that it can only be "read" by trekking deep into the desert and having it screamed at you by a maniac sitting on top of a pole, while savage Bedouin hill nomads try to blow your head off with antique rifles.

Now officially retired, he lives a simple, pastoral life in Hell with only his vast ego and seventy-two insatiable wives for company. He enjoys collecting mildew and his favourite food is the red Smarties.

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

"In a very real sense, Rainbird is the unsung villain of his age. A 19th-century dry run for the true monsters that were to come in the 20th, every bit as vile and self-serving as Stalin or Pol Pot, only loads better looking."
- TV Historian the Historian David Starkey (Historian)

"Avaunt! Here laid before us an inveterate poltroon, gad-about and lecchour, who verily doth still owe me fifty fucking quid!"
- William Shakespeare

"This is an incredibly safe car specified to a very high standard, but we could have expected that from Honda. The Legend’s real X-factor is the car’s handling ability which should put a smile on the face of most drivers."
- Adrian Higgins, Auto Trader (quote unrelated to the author)

"Last night was incredible. For the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a real man. Please, please call me."
- Allyson Hannigan.