Letters from our readers.

Well, the response has been phenomenal. Here in the offices of Mechanically Separated Chicken, we are currently attempting to claw our way to the surface for fresh air, trapped as we are beneath fourty-four heavy bags of mail sent to us by people just like you. The teletext has been running hot, the phones are in disarray, and our resident psychic has even been driven to the morphine drip by our readers' constant telepathic demands for more information regarding Senor Hernandez. It is mayhem, but we are, as always, here to get drunk on the job and serve you as best we can.

As you no doubt know, news about this influential figure has been scant at best. Despite the many man-hours we've spent spent sifting through foreign correspondence reports, amateur video footage and fortune cookie inserts from the Tasty Taste Noodle House, we are still no closer to uncovering conclusive evidence regarding his whereabouts. Please be assured that this pains us more than it does you.

However, we are in possession of a few facts, and you have asked us about them. So, without further ado, let us proceed to Reader Letter Number One:

Hi Swanky,

Senor is being as elusive as ever. What of his childhood? Did his schooling prepare him for this shockingly fast rise to celebrity? What of the littlest senor? No mention from our favourably millened friend!!!! (sounds painful). So. Senor BITE ME.

Rinzee Soapagator

Firstly, Miss Soapagator, thank you for taking the time to write in. You have asked good, incisive questions - you honour us with your keen curiosity, and we shall do our best not to piss on it like an untrained house cat.

So, what of Senor Hernandez's childhood? Of this, little is known other than his fondness for boxkites and liqueur chocolates. His upbringing was by all reports joyful, carefree and completely lacking in adult supervision. Until the age of eight, he is said to have lived a tree-top existence in the jungles of Tasmania, descending from his leafy home only to collect fallen coconuts and visit the post office. By ten, he was in the foreign legion; by eleven he was appointed honorary Ham Inspector at the Ballarat Primary tuck shop. For a time, he was even head street urchin on Flinders Lane, leader of an unruly knockabout gang of part-time chimney sweeps with stars in their eyes and pockets brimming with other people's credit cards. Only his charming cowlick and insatiable appetite for club sandwiches served as early indication of the greatness which lay before him.

He had no schooling to speak of, but instead consumed great quantities of brain tonic as a child - and in fact, so effective was it that he accidentally memorised the scripts to every episode of Jem and the Holograms just by watching too much early morning television. In his late teens he had no choice but to undergo surgery to remove a third of his brain (grown now unfeasibly large) since the alternative - a skull too grotesquely enormous to be accomodated by his signature white fedora hat - was unthinkable.

I think it is safe to say that he was unprepared for his meteoric rise to fame (the details of which are, of course, so well known that I will not labour to reproduce them here) a fact to which his devoted but exhausted hairdresser at the time, Holly Manque, will attest. In the first few heady months of his celebrity, he was unnecessarily apprehensive about the public's affections and underwent a change of hairstyle roughly every three hours. "It's hard to convey the intensity of those early days," revealed Manque in his famous Playboy interview, "I've certainly never felt such professional fulfillment, not even during my tenure with Corey Feldman. Sometimes Senor Hernandez would call my mobile phone five times a night to come re-ruffle his quiff - and this is while he was alone in bed, with no media or cameras or anything. Eventually I just got a cot set up in his ensuite and slept on that to save time on travelling. He was very demanding. Of course he was. But all great men are."

Lastly, Miss Soapagator, I wish I could tell you more about the "littlest Senor," as you call him, but the code of journalistic ethics forbids me to descend to such levels - which is another way of saying that we are currently being restrained by a court order which, if violated, could tear our legal arses asunder. Indeed, last time we ran an article about the little one, we got slapped with a law suit the size of Bert Newton's forehead and it took us six months to get the photocopiers out of hock.

Senor Bite Me, indeed.