monsters like hippos and gorillas he found quite tolerable.
It had all begun many years ago as a child, when his parents as
part of their university studies, had made him take part in an experiment
on Operant Conditioning: or the psychology of rats and rabbits. In one
particular experiment Erwin was introduced to a cute, cuddly little
creature like a rabbit or a kitten -usually called Rumpty or Ronald- and
allowed to coo blissfully over the little bundle of white fur for several
minutes as his new found animal friend. Then, to see, in the true spirit of
scientific endeavour, how Erwin would react, he was suddenly shocked
with forty volts of electricity, doused with ice water and smacked over
the head with a rolled up newspaper.
Naturally enough, this was to scream his little heart out and try
and hide underneath the carpet.
In no time at all, Erwin learned to scream and run away when ever
he saw anything even remotely cute or cuddly. This was considered such
a great achievement by the University, that the psychologist performing
the experiment was immediately awarded a Ph.D. by his faculty and a
law suit by Erwin's parents.
As a result of all this, Erwin had grown up absolutely petrified of
any cute or cuddly animal (as well as telephone books with yellow
coverings and torn pages, but that's another experiment), and had spent
most of his life hiding in multistory buildings with lots of glass and
concrete and no animals, designing bigger and better multistory
complexes , in order that he could live in them as well. Eventually he
hoped to cover the length and breadth of the planet with huge shopping
complexes and parking lots, effectively wiping out the animal kingdom, in
toto.
The fact, that his friends kept saying 'He's a total cement head' and
'He wouldn't know if it was Tuesday or Taiwan', never phased Erwin in
the least. As he had made abundantly clear, when at his acceptance
speech for the worlds worst architect, proclaiming,"I have a dream!" in a
deep senatorial voice, and proceeding to outline a plan of animal
annihilation unknown in the universe, since a small and rather obnoxious
species of primate had jumped down out of the trees and clubbed to
death, the first passing baby harp seal on the savanna. The primate
finding this gave it a great deal of satisfaction, kept on doing this for the
rest of its one million years of existence, before it finally wiped out the
entire planet over a disagreement about fishing rights off the west coast
of Jutland. Erwin's plan included, strangely enough, to build the world's
first two hundred story car park in the middle of Venice.
Also -for reasons he could never quite fathom- Erwin possessed an
unreasoning, undying hatred of just about everything and everybody
that came his way; although, his analyst suspected it was something to do
with his witnessing, at the tender age of 12, the death of his parents, as
