the ramble dump

So why did I choose fatmanintweed.com? Where did the fat men in tweed come from? Such things would most suitably be answered in...

Part 2: The Fat Men In Tweed

So... there is this Tesco Value notepad I have, with only a few pages filled. On the first of these pages is a list of poems that never got written, bar one.

I'd walked in on my brother playing one of the Grand Theft Auto games on his laptop. The third one, I think. He was wreaking havoc with a rocket launcher in a cybercafé. I remember seeing a fat man flying up into the air. He may or may not have been wearing tweed.

I don't quite know what happened next. But then there was this idea for a poem. I'd been having lots of ideas for poems. Well, lots of images and concepts, that I liked, and wanted to make into poems.

There are seven ideas written on that first page. Only the first one got written. The third one says, Ten Fat Men in Tweed.

I'm standing on a hill. This is the image I had in my mind. I'm standing on a hill, the land vast and green and undulating all around me. And then, over the horizon, they come running at great speed. The narrative pays close attention to how they run, how their flab moves about, how the ground shakes. I start running.

Something something something something, the ten fat men in tweed. There was a rhythm to it. I remember that being part of the reason I liked it. It sounded good. It sounded like it would make a good poem. It rolled off the tongue. The Ten Fat Men in Tweed.

I never wrote the poem. But I liked the idea. It amused me. It intrigued me how you could make something like that so inhuman, and scarily powerful. How the hideous mass made it evil and repulsive. How this could all be processed in the mind, while accepting that they're wearing something as dull and down-to-earth as tweed. There was a novelty to this image, a weird paradox.

I liked it so much that the fat men in tweed ended up appearing in all sorts of places, in all sorts of forms.

ZimmaZoom™ flew across the conveyer belt, which was one of many in the massive network that ran throughout Tokyo. Of course, there were faster forms of transport: bean-shaped aircrafts flew around in the air above them, weaving their way through skyscraper tips (of which were neatly rounded as part of the Tokyo Sky-Safety Act of 2215).

Agaffa, Tokyo's notoriously grouchy elderly pensioner, sped up ZimmaZoom™ (zimmer frames were so outdated) and knocked over a dozen business people and a fat man in tweed. 'Muahaha!' she chuckled, patting her loyal machine. As Zimma (the name she gave it sometimes) slowed down, the conveyer belt passengers started to return to normal.

So Agaffa decided to reverse.

The fat man in tweed got his arm caught in the propellor in the back and he was spun round, making odd whimpers as he went.

-- From the drafts for the original Agaffa.

Not even evil horses could withstand such immense evil as this. It would break their backs and then poke their corpses mockingly. This evil: the Ten Fat Men In Tweed, forever drawn to the power of a new item of magical clothing: the Whatever Waistcoat. Tweed hats, jackets, trousers and black shoes so shiny you could see your reflection in them. Lord Winterseeson didn't know what he was getting himself into...

-- From The Pterry Board Epic.

Meanwhile, a hologram in the form of a portly man dressed in tweed appeared. He plodded over to the dead body which was sprawled untidily across the ground, sat down on it, and smoked his pipe. He had nothing to worry about.

-- From my GCSE English coursework.

As an image that still amuses me, fatmanintweed.com seemed only appropriate.

Labels: a history of development, agaffa, excerpts, fat men in tweed, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration, videogames

# posted by Chris @ 12:36 PM