Rock and Roll!

I am delighted to present the second of our employee biographies. This time we focus on the legend that is...

Barry Monks

Like Adam, who we featured last time, Barry tells me that he is one of our younger employees. It is, therefore, perhaps surprising (not to mention disappointing) that he should choose to take out a court injunction preventing me from revealing his exact age.

Barry Monks (real name Barrington Aloysius Eastbourne von Monkstein) is our graphic designer. Not only is he the creative genius behind the stunning full-colour layouts of our groundbreaking FREE magazine, Regtransfers.co.uk: The World of Personal Number Plates, he is also responsible for the legendary Regtransfers press adverts. That's right: those interminable, eye-straining lists of car number plates that you've all seen in Exchange & Mart, The Sunday Times and Top Marques are all his fault.

Barry is a dreadful pedant. As if that weren't bad enough, many of the rules and facts about which he is most inflexible are actually ones he has made up, and which have little or no basis in reality. He is wont to make authoritative declarations of absolute fact which are similarly lacking in objective validity. These proclamations are known as "Barryisms", and include statements such as "C'est la Vie by B*witched is the greatest pop song ever written".

In his spare time (and, indeed, in his head), Barry is a rock and roll star. Like Adam, he is a guitarist. Unlike Adam, he doesn't need to buy more guitars to improve his playing proficiency. Barry has the apparent ability to play many different types of stringed instrument. Sadly, this is because he cheats, and tunes them all like guitars.

Barry has an inexplicable talent for "accidentally" acquiring personal number plates. He does this by buying cars bearing number plates which, by coincidence, vaguely resemble words. He claims that his last set of plates said "Legend". Personally, I thought it looked more like "L Bend", but I didn't have the heart to tell him.