Lamister

Mister Lamister is a tutor and member of staff at the Assassins' Guild school. He appears in the Assassin's Diary, and on several of the student rules:

6. Boys are strictly forbidden from teasing Mr Lamister.

12. Boys are expressly forbidden to use Mr Lamister's door as a target.

15. Boys may carve their initials once into their desk, and the leads on the roof of the Big School Building. Boys are emphatically not allowed to carve their initials on Mr Lamister's leg.

170. No pupil is to attempt to walk like Mr Lamister.

Uniquely he does not have an subject area at the guild, and appears not to take classes. Neither is he assigned as the head of any student house.

From his appearance in the staff iconograph he looks to be a worried man, with a droopy moustache and small round glasses. He would appear to have suffered a nervous breakdown similar to Dr. A. A. Dinwiddie at Unseen University. While he is not able to perform his role, he has become a fixture, and it would be unthinkable to have him removed.

He may well have left the Guild and re-trained as a priest in the interim between the Assassins' Yearbook and The Compleat Ankh-Morpork. In The Compleat Ankh-Morpork, in the Places to Pray section, mention is made of the Reverend Lamister. On page 55, in "Rules for use of the Temple of Small Gods", Rule 13 reads:

• No-one is allowed to tease the Reverend Lamister.

On page 56, the Reverend Mr Lamister is allowed space of his own, to write a religious homily similar in its well-intentioned vagueness to a BBC Radio Four Thought For The Day or a stereotypical Church of England sermon. He recounts an escalating catalogue of disasters in which, trying to free a utensil stuck in the kitchen drawer, he becomes more and more entangled in the draw and then the cupboard under the sink, that he has to be physically extracted himself. He asks himself "What would Brutha Himself have done in these circumstances?" without coming to the obvious conclusion that even Brutha might have tried praying to Anoia, who doesn't even get mentioned once.

Maybe Mr Lamister is one of life's natural victims, and not even Anoia could resist sticking it to him?

Annotation

In the TV series 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' there existed something called 'The Ministry of Silly Walks' headed by John Cleese. Given Rule 170, Mr Lamister could have been a member of that organisation. (Or perhaps thrown out because 'his walk was too silly')