The Life of Mr Jumbles

Let me tell you a little about myself. When I was young I was the mischievous type - throwing rocks at birds, taking things that didn't belong to me, and all sorts of trouble. I was so good at it that I never got caught... well I did but not for a long time.

When I left home and went to live in a big city I fell in with a bad crowd. We would break into people's houses and steal anything we thought we could sell. We never got a lot because the people we were robbing were quite poor. We were poor too, and hungry all the time, which is quite traumatic for a hobbit, you know. Eventually we decided we needed to break into the big time and planned to rob a magic item warehouse.

What a disaster that was! We knew so little about wizardry that we were caught within minutes. Even worse, one of my friends was killed by a lightning trap. When the guards came to catch us I just sat down and cried and cried and cried. Eventually the owner of the warehouse arrived and took me into his office and started shouting at me. I was still crying and I told him "But I have to steal things! I'm hungry and I've got no money!"

The owner of the warehouse, who incidentally was a big fat human, looked at me and said "Look at me! Look at this big fat tummy! You tell me you've got nothing to eat and I've got plenty to eat and I don't steal anything! You're in the wrong business!" What he said made a lot of sense - he had his own business and was very rich. When he offered to give me a job I accepted straight away.

My first honest job then was selling magic potions in the market place. For a while he kept an eye on me, but then he started to trust me. I discovered I had a real gift for convincing people to buy things, and made quite a lot of money from that job. After only a few months I went to see my boss and told him I needed to get away from the city and take the job in the road. I bought a large supply of his most popular product - snake oil - and a cart and pony, and set off to sell snake oil to the world.

Ahh... that was such a long time ago, nearly 30 years. So many things have happened to me since then that you wouldn't believe. But those are stories for another time.