Dodo, unsurprisingly, started in a very random way.
I am not sure where he came from but one minute he was wasn’t and then he was!
Dodo started life in Dixon’s in Liverpool, 1996 and i think it was a gray windy day.
I was looking to buy my first computer, as an aside i had been given an old laptop by a family friend but it had died, it used a floppy disk (and i mean floppy) as its hard drive and had a small green screen that made a Casio calculator look like an iPhone.I think it died of old age.
So in i went, not knowing much about computers, especially considering i had just buried the last one, my benchmarks were word processing, music and being able to play civilization!
I tried out a couple and played around on the keyboard, and the line came out
Once upon a time there lived a very fat rat called Bobo.Now Bobo was also very stupid and liked to try and eat his feet.
Thus Dodo was born, wrong name but definitely him.He stuck in my mind and as his personality emerged and as i started to think Bobo/Dodo like thoughts the corner of my mind where he had emerged from ( and only the gods know what else is still in there!) got too small and he needed some where else to go,So he did.He remained Bobo for about the first 6 or seven emails until i decided to see if the story had a bit more life.All of the initial stories became the start of book one, and after much um’ing and ah’ing i changed his name to Dodo.Dodo seemed to suit his character and place in life a bit better, and made him a bit more individual,there are other dodo’s out there, but they are all dodo’s!
Bobo is also more of a clown name, and okay you can laugh at him, but Dodo is no clown.He looks horrific in greasepaint and doesn’t go down well at kids parties…the curtains part to reveal a dirty overweight rat,his face has been smeared white and reddish marks cross his eyes and nose,his eyes are also very red as he didn’t close them in time when they ran the lipstick over him.A fading frill clings to his neck and round his waist,they look like they might have been a dish cloth, if your dish had been the inside of an oil tanker.
Dodo looks slightly bemused and bit self conscious, the frills were not his idea (not that the rest was!) and eating the rest of the lipstick didn’t help, nor did smiling at them.
The children are very still despite all the sweets and pop, and then they are not, there is no cheering and laughter except from Dead Vole by the punchbowl.
Flappy and Ogd are just out of sight and still holding the brushes they used to paint dodo, they are also trying not to wet themselves.Ogd still wants to hand out some flyer’s to the other parents, just in case.
Ultimately i think it was always Dodo, i just had not heard him properly when he told me.
The Dodo Engine 