Fliemoe

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In the time of Pteppicymon XXVIII and Chidder, he was the resident School Bully at the Assassins' Guild. He is described as big with a "face like the end of your boot" and older than Pteppic. (From inference in Night Watch, a previous post-holder was Lord Downey, although he seems to have mellowed out lately.) The Assassins' Guild Diary gives Fliemoe's first name as "Julian", and reports that he failed to cut it as an assassin, so transferred to the Guild of Lawyers.


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A "Flymo" is a proprietary brand of lawnmower in Great Britain, with a rotary blade underneath which is really thorough at cropping grass - and stray toes if the user makes the mistake of wearing sandals. Excellent at chopping weeds down to size...

There is an echo of Flashman, the School Bully in "Tom Brown's Schooldays", the quintessential novel of British boarding school life. Flashman toasts his victims by holding them over a roaring coal fire in his study. ("If Fliemoe invites you for toast in his study, don't go!")

In Tom Brown's Schooldays, and later in G McD-F's Flashman novels, the school bully Flashman has an equally brutish sidekick called Speedicut. Some time after the 1840's, a British lawnmower company called one of its products the Speedicut. Which leads us back to Fliemoe...


See also the Monty Python spin-off, 'Ripping Yarns, where one episode, Tomkinson's Schooldays[1], deals with everyday life at the harshest and most terrifying public school in England: here, School Bully is a paid career, where parents choose to send their sons to be bullied by the best in the country. Michael Palin and Terry Jones starred.