Very few people know that the English phrase "to go bananas" is connected to one of the most fascinating and misunderstood characters in the history of unknown writers, Mr. Baldwin Birmingsworth.

Baldwin Balthazar Birmingsworth was born a long time ago in the little village of Kippledale-upon-River, where his family made a humble living off their banana orchards. When he was 23 he decided to leave the house and went to London, but he didn't know anybody there so he caught the first train back. Years later he wrote in a letter to an imaginary friend:

"The size of this place is mind-boggling, really. You get off the train and you are immediately run over by a dozen people you don't know and a woman pushing a pram. I remember that some of the buildings seemed larger than the Kippledale cathedral, and that you couldn't get a decent banana pudding anywhere. Horrible, horrible city."

After coming back, Birmingsworth decided he was meant to be a poet. Apparently he didn't actually write anything, but he used to go strolling in the banana orchards, mumbling and scribbling and asking everybody he met if they thought he looked like a poet. He became known in the village as "that crazy fella with the limp", but he never gave up his hopes to be a great writer. In his life he published a few things in the local newspaper, mainly recipes for banana pudding; he thought about publishing a poem once, but it was rejected by the editor, who preferred to publish an article about beekeeping instead. This rejection shattered Birmingsworth, and he started spending more and more time indoors, where he tried to perfect his rhyming and wrote angry letters to the newspaper's editor alternately. In a journal entry from that time he wrote:

"That stupid incompetent excuse for a newspaper editor. Probably doesn't even open my letters. Beekeeping... huh! What's so great about those annoying little bugs anyway? Make good rhymes though. Bee, see, knee, tree... many rhymes. Still haven't found reasonable rhyme for "banana". I need to read the thesaurus again, maybe I'll do so tonight. Maybe not. I think I should write another letter to the paper. God, I hate that ridiculittle [sic] paper!"

These jumbled thoughts repeat themselves quite often in his journal, and this sort of feelings may be the reason Birmingsworth decided to go on a journey to Africa to research exotic types of banana. Apparently, it was on this journey that he lost his sanity after eating a bad banana. He was sent home and put in the Kippledale Asylum, where he died not long later, leaving behind him this lone unfinished poem:

It is believed that Birmingsworth had written more poems, but they have never been found. Only this fragment remains, to show us what a genius the English literature had lost.

But the next time you go bananas, think of Baldwin Birmingsworth.