Stef Dawson is fifteen foot eleven — give or take ten feet — and lives on the cusp of insanity. Turn left out of Basingstoke, past The Duke of Unpleasance and you’re there. He holds the record for typing the most wrong characters in a single sentence1. If he had a life, it would be called Eric. Tramps fear him; pelicans regard him with obvious disdain. He once cut his back lawn with a pair of kitchen scissors because the mower was broken. He also believes academia is too close to macadamia to not be nuts. In the past, his conquests included the Dewey Decimal System and Finland. From his vantage point overlooking the present tents, he enjoys the redundancy and ambiguities in the English language; finding that if you squeeze hard enough, sweat pours from the pores of the cat’s paws after a brief pause. One of his goals in future is to write several best-selling novels that are astounding only through their glaring omission of the word ‘hamper’. An award-winning journalist3 and clandestine anthropologist, he spends time writing about topics nobody cares about in the vain hope that one day somebody will adopt his worldview and call it Tim. He would appreciate the outside more if it were under cover and had sockets and network points at regular intervals. He’s translucent on Thursdays, which really confuses the local villagers, and takes great pride in being more unstable than strontium. He likes everything except all the things that annoy him; such as peanut butter, know-it-alls and car engines. He avoids tea, coffee and lighter fuel whenever possible. He admires people better than him yet has a healthy disrespect for authority. Eight out of ten cat owners said their cats preferred him. He has very little eye for style, and often wonders how Ethelred The Unready earned his name. His favourite anagram of his name is “Fat Nosed Swan” He often can’t get footnote references in the right order4. He has exceptional ears — sticky outy and incredibly useful for honing his music; he can spot an out-of-place cymbal to a density of 1143ppm and noticed that Chris De Burgh’s Lady In Red was both off-key and atrocious from the very first listen. Sculpting is not his calling in life. Nor is backgammon. His favourite place on earth is in the sweet spot between two large speakers pumping out fat breakbeats; or drum n bass that makes what little remains of his hair vibrate. He has been interviewed occasionally, though probably more out of pity than curiosity. His party trick is to unwittingly dance like a tetraplegic orang-utan. At University he helped co-ordinate a march against student apathy. Sadly, nobody turned up. Although tempting, he should not be confused with one of his many many other inanimate street-wise serial-killer-esque redhead doppelgängers. His DIY ineptitude is legendary. Perhaps the weirdest thing he ever witnessed was someone laminating an oversize chocolate chip cookie. Once, after a particularly searing bath, he pulled the plug out with his toe and laid there until all the water had gone just to see if his mass affected the direction of the water down the plughole. He speaks with a posh accent, which has somewhat diluted into a pretentious struggle between the Home Counties and Sheffield, resulting in a comedic hybrid pronunciation of the words ‘garaarrge’ and ‘garridge’. He’s currently typing this sentence. Now this one. He finds writing about himself in the third person strangely satisfying. Black is white2.
- a 12.
- a Except when it’s viewed from a jaunty angle
- a The Stef Dawson writing award for people called Stef Dawson who write in the style of Stef Dawson.
- a See?
