His great-great grandfather died at the Battle of Little Big Horn. He wasn’t with Custer though. He was holding a sprout-bake and tent meeting in the field next door and went over to complain about the noise. His great-grandfather (also a sprout farmer and man of the cloth) always wore weighted shoes while in the pulpit, to avoid any embarrassing levitations during moments of extreme rapture. His grandfather (lay precher, large sideburns, taste for sprouts) spoke only in rhyming couplets (to please the ghost of his dead wife) and owned a pig called Belshazzar that dined exclusively upon the aforementioned vegetables and did strange things on the back parlour wall. His father (an elder in the Sacred Order of the Golden Sprout) practised body-modification in an attempt to win a bet with his brother (a monk) that he could shin up the inside of a drainpipe. And there was him. And he was weird. Can this be Robert Rankin’s autobiography? He swears that it isn’t, but as a self-confessed teller of tall tales, whoever is going to believe him?
