On walking back from college I noticed something new. Snooping around the park near Park Lane college is a statue of a man I remember hearing stories about in the local back street surgeries I frequented as a child.
His name was Gideon Bennet IV.
The main interest of his statue that differentiates his from others is that there is a huge fuck-off box on his head.
Now many people look at the time of this discovery and think "yeah, end of freshers week. Student nobs." But this runs much deeper than an elaborate freshers prank.
This is deeply warped and twisted myth that the rich and powerful in west yorkshire have hidden for years.
Gideon IV was born on a butchers slab in Headingly in 1810, his mother was a washer woman and local bicycle who suffered from memory lapses and his father was a narcoleptic, keen artist and part time surgeon.
His narcolepsy is said to have been at its peek at the time of Gideons birth and he was prone to staying frozen in a single position for hours at a time before suddenly reawakening and violently continuing whatever his previous pursuit had been.
If a modern day midwife is forced to vomit and empty her bowels at the same time in sheer disgust and shock at an unpleasant birth she is said to be "Throwing a Gideon."
Anyhow, Gideon grew up with unfortunate facial features due to his unusual birth circumstances.
I have a quote I dug out of the medical archives in Leeds University to illustrate what I cannot put in words myself.
"Arr Gideons face looked like a cross between horse and cart roadkill and baked apple with a crewdly drawn face stabbed into it with a spoon." - Gideons Mother
As a result, Gideon would wear a crudely crafted wooden box on his head given to him by the local headmaster, requesting he wore it daily to stop the local superstitious folk thinking that the dead were walking again.
At the age of 13 Gideon proposed to his parents that he would learn to be the best surgeon that leeds had ever seen. His father snored in approval.
By the age of 17 he had been expelled from medical college for conducting bizzare and unethical experiments on the university hound name of Hyde involving the Deans idiot sister.
Gideon was still however, in constant correspondance with an american plastic surgeon (the first of his kind) by name of John Peter Mettauer. He admired his work. Mattauer was inventing his own tools in order to repair the Cleft Pallet.
Gideon endeavoured to do the same for his face. So armed with a masonry chisel, several inflated chicken stomachs, some goo he dug out of the medical college pre-incineration bin and the mindless crazed enthusiasm of a speed freak he set about his ghastly affairs.
That night that there was a great storm. Thunder raged and lightning cracked at the university towers and church steeples. Some say the face of Pete Burns appeared in the clouds laughing maniacally and screaming the words to "Spin me right round" to the tune of "ring a ring a roses." Some say it was a very pleasant night all in all and dramatic devices such as these should be avoided at all costs as mindless cliches. Meh.
When the storm cleared a great fog loomed over the steets of Leeds and a dark shuddering figure paced the back alleys quietly giggling with the sound of 'drip, drip, drip,' accompanying his unsteady footsteps.
We'll never know whether or not his surgery worked, but what we do know is the first person to see Gideon shrieked with such force it caused her to have instant heart attack and in shock Gideons head exploded with an immense ferocity.
Gideons remains were buried with his box which was found some half mile away enscribed with the words "BECAUSE I'M WORTH IT."
Moral of the story is, Jesus Pete burns. What the fuck.. I mean really.
Sleep tight. x
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