TREEHOUSE WHO'S WHO (MARCUS-STYLE)

Sub-atomic Katt (92)
wandered unexpectedly into a particle accelerator while still a small fluffy kitten and became radioactive. As a result she now glistens in the dark, has a half-life of 20,000 years and drinks and sleeps a lot. Sub-atomic Katt lives with a variety of other atomically altered life forms in a hostel run by Paisley Social Services, where she cooks and cleans, and looks out of the window. Independently wealthy from match-selling and gin-running, she is the author of two books, 'Making Sense of Football' (1988) and 'How to Meet a Strange Man' (2002), and several humourous limericks on lavatory walls.

Walter Fagan
is cube-shaped and lives in Wigan. Now 31, Walter spent much of his twenties panning the River Irwell for copper and found enough to give his wife Olive a rust-red coating which makes her highly visible - and very rarely misplaced - in snowy weather. Walter works in tele-sales and has annoyed the same householder every night for eleven years. Pretending to still be nine he plays third piccolo in the Wigan Little Theatre's Little Orchestra, who recently returned from a sell-out tour of 'Everything For A Pound' shops in Norfolk. Walter has two children, Sid and Nancy, and a stairlift.

Dangermouse
is brightly coloured and gay. Not gay in a sexual sense, just happy and jolly. He has lived in Pamplona for most of his 44 years and each August he is heard to say to his long-term companion, Winifred, "Oh no, not those bloody bulls again. I can't get my Mitsubishi Land Cruiser to the end of the road." Dangermouse plays Santa in a downtown Pamplona department store from September to March, though after Christmas there is very little demand for his bushy white beard and his sackful of goodies. When not playing Santa, or berating bulls, he eats crisps and rolls around.

Mickey Jupp
is the founder, driving force and full-time administrator of a tangled clump of silly string which hangs from a lamp post in Whitley Bay. Mickey, 24, was almost wholly responsible for the silly string being granted listed status in 1985 and receiving a sizeable grant from the European Union Silly String Fund ten years later, though he modestly acknowledges the unstinting support of Luke Skywalker. When not with his beloved silly string, Mickey likes to sing sea shanties to old folk and steal toasted sandwich makers from Boots. He owns a race horse which he keeps in a very big carrier bag.

Lightersideguy
is honorary captain of (and only player in) the Treehouse Tamigotchi-rearing team, in which role he has raised and kept healthy ten thousand of the endearing electronic creatures. This is not unexpected however. Born in 1976 and abandoned as a mewling infant in a cardboard box on the mean streets of Olympic-ravaged Montreal, Lightersideguy fought his way up to wealth and status, becoming Parks Commisioner in 1999 and then, astonishingly, the city's youngest and only non-French speaking Mayor in 2001. He lives alone, with crayons and one felt tipped pen.

Fink nottle
is a man of many faces, though mainly his own. The result of a back alley knee-trembler between a multi-millionaire Bolivian tin magnate and a beautiful continuity announcer on Radio La Paz, Fink nevertheless eschewed the trappings of wealth and fame to swim the Pacific Ocean dressed as Neville Chamberlain. Now 37, Fink is nearing the coast of Japan where a welcoming party awaits, consisting of Bernard Manning and Helmut Kohl, though fears that they plan to eat Fink rather than celebrate his momentous achievement have recently surfaced in the Tokyo press. Fink likes to eat krill and shouts a lot.

andrew/oafc
is the Treehouse's most prolific contributor, having posted over 79,000 witty one-liners. Born in 1925 into a troupe of travelling tax attorneys in the Texas panhandle, andrew soon longed for the bright lights and contraflows of the M62. He broke free of his stultifying past in 1979, sailed to Oldham and set up a stall selling sugar in the town's much vaunted salt market. Business was poor so he introduced a range of novelty underwear and the rest - as they say - is his story. Now the owner of 25 sex shops in the greater Oldham area, andrew is vice-chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and a keen falconer.

Monkey Puzzle
was named after the popular West African tree, the Silver Birch. Raised by Amish missionaries, Monkey had never seen an electric labour-saving device until 1994 when he found a buzzing conical implement under his wife's bed and whisked up a delicious egg and bacon quiche with it. So began his love affair with food, and he is now Head Chef at the "Kluckin' Hell Kentucky-like Chicken Kebab Kabin" in Poplar High Street. When not cooking, Monkey, 29, can be found beside the M25 holding up a hand-made sign saying 'You're Not Wanted Here. Go home!' No-one knows why.

Karl Eldridge
is known throughout his native Bolsover as 'The thinking man's pugilist'. Born Edgar Wallace some forty-seven summers ago, Karl had to change his name to get an Equity card. Then he rolled it into a short cardboard tube and blew dried peas at local estate agents. Arrested and then adopted by a kindly village bobby Karl began fighting at seventeen, alternating rapier like blows to the head and body with philosophical musings on the transubstantiation of the soul. Favourite for Commonwealth Games gold at Edmonton, Karl instead grew bleak and introspective and hid in a lorry.

Shaqun Asongoo
is the shadowy, svengali-like figure behind alternative electro-folk conspiracy theorists, 'The Dead Kennedys'. Known to his friends, and indeed to everyone else, as Shaq, the 52-year old former amateur jump jockey and Playboy centrefold, has come a long way from the backstreets of East Tilbury. He now lives ostentatiously in West Tilbury with his wife, Shanice, their twin daughters from previous marriages, Eric and Ernie, and a budgerigar called Bertrand, named affectionately after the eminent philosopher, Plastic. Shaq is currently touring Westphalia with ZZ Top.

Ivan
is constructed almost entirely of wood, with a small brass handle that starts up an internal motor. When activated, Ivan spins around slowly reciting passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the tune of Cyndi Lauper's 'Girls just Wanna have Fun'. Ivan is believed to have been built in 1965, when Banyan trees were ten a penny. Now you only get six to a penny and the bottom has completely fallen out of the market for wooden recitors of religious tracts. However Ivan has found alternative employment as the box on which Dame Vera Lynn rests her old threepenny bits overnight.

Barry Chuckle
is best known for driving every day to Leicester where he owns and manages a thriving fishmongers with a very limited inventory, called 'Just Cod-ding'. But this piscene endeavour is merely a front, for every afternoon at 1.30 - sometimes nearer to a quarter to two when the shop is particularly busy - Barry swaps his blue striped smock for a white suit, spats and a silver topped cane and promenades along the High Street whistling and raising his hat to Big Issue sellers. By the side of the Post
Office he drops onto all fours and scuttles around like a demented, er, scuttling thing.

Spud,
as his name suggests, is a bulbous root vegetable adding a valuable and varied supply of carbohydrates to many western dishes. No, I'm joking.
He's actually the love child of Robson and Jerome. Now 27, Spud was for most
of his formative years tied to a sausage mincing machine by noted geordie
japester, Chris Waddle. Aged 12, and a trifle confused, Spud ran away to
join the British Legion where he now works part-time behind the bar and
re-tips the snooker cues. He has a wife in Gateshead, a midwife in Wallsend
and a couple of bookends shaped like famous cartoon beards.

Bill Dukenfield
supplies much of the British film industry with clapperboards, which he makes in a cupboard under the stairs. When not making clapperboards in a cupboard under the stairs Bill, 62, has many other strings to his bow. Well, it's not really a bow, more a long stick with crepe paper tassles on the end and at weekends Bill shakes his stick and jigs around on the freshly mown grave of Acker Bilk. He has recently
admitted to friends however that jigging around on graves is no longer as satisfying as it once was and he may retire to a cul-de-sac in Littlehampton, or possibly Coventry.

Mike Jefferies
is the biggest man in the world! Not the real world of course, but a 1/16th scale miniature version of the world that Mike, and his wife Jello, have built from plywood and macademia nuts in their back garden. When his busy work schedule permits (he sits on numerous boards, and runs a successful dating agency for invisible people) 59-year old Mike struts around his miniature world wreaking death and destruction on any of the little residents who displease him. Sometimes Jello brings out freshly squeezed lemonade and they laugh heartily at the terrible make-believe power they wield.

LushAttic
believes himself to be the Treehouse's foremost pebble-dasher of stationary or slow-moving cattle and, as no fewer than thirteen other Treehousers are also pebble-dashers of stationary or slow-moving cattle, that's no idle boast! Lush, 28, also models slippers for the Grattan catalogue and eats discarded takeaways in bus shelters. In 1999, Lush recieved the Queen's Award for Gallantry when he flung himself across the bow of a hovercraft on Clacton beach to rescue a copy of that morning's Racing Post. Tellingly, he used the paper to select the winners of three
races at Hexham but forgot to put the bet on.

Sir David Attenborough
(no relation) is Deputy News Editor of top caravanning magazine "Look, There's My House! It's Attached to my Car!" So commited to his work is Sir David that, thanks to months of back-breaking labour and a complicated series of levers and pulleys, he has jacked up his two-up, five-down terraced bungalow onto wheels and plans, when climatological and slope conditions allow, to roll off down the street
screaming 'Yippeeee'. A man from the local noise abatement society is
carefully monitoring the situation though Sir David, 47, appears unfazed.

Simon T
is small, green and spiky - not unlike a horse chestnut. But whereas
you can split open a horse chestnut to reveal a shiny brown conker inside,
if you split open SimonT you would find only a miscellany of soft tissue and
internal organs. Though not - as romantic idealists would have us believe -
the bizarre and unexpected progeny of Mr T and Simon Templar - the Saint, he
is however the offspring of notable parents. His father was Clive of India
and his mother Diana Coupland, who played Sid James's long suffering wife in
'Bless This House'. SimonT is 55 on Saturday, though he isn't having a
party.

Inspiral Carpet
is the 19-year old wunderkind who is taking the world of stairlifts and stairlift accessories by storm. He made his name when barely out of short trousers - indeed he continues to wear short trousers, made of brown leather - by inventing a spring loaded mechanism that could launch Thora Hird into low level orbit in the blink of an eye. Now, by combining a stairlift and pre-existing catflap technology, Inspiral expects to be transporting old folk down the stairs and out to the bus stop in one easy movement by the year 2010. For relaxation, Inspiral emulsions Greek people.

Arpster
is the only member of the Treehouse to be wanted by police in fourteen countries for imitating a clumsy squirrel. Attempting to hide his winter nuts in the satchel of a Viennese motorcycle courier, Arpster unwittingly set in motion a string of random, non-chronological events that eventually resulted in the sacking of Constantinople in 1265. On the run for eleven years, Arpster is currently holed up in a cave in the Brecon Beacons where he makes a living by sandpapering clogs and mending broken sundials. His chilling cry, "You'll never git me alive, copper" echoes day and night across the valley.