Goodbye & Good Riddance To 2020

For most of us, the year 2020 would be a good one to block out because it hasn't been a good one and considering it began with a threat of war with Iran after the killing of Iranian army general Qasem Soleimani via an airstrike and huge wildfires in Australia and it turned out it only got worse from there.   
In Britain Brexit finally got done and we got a taste of our future when 8,000 lorries parked on the motorway unable to get to the Dover Port but the big news was when someone got spat on by a bat in Wuhan, China and that set the tone for the rest of the year with lock-downs and Boris Johnson's 5pm News Conferences where he would explain his roadmap sorting out the Coronavirus, just that his roadmap took in plenty of Intensive Care Unit's on the route because the man leading the fight was the same one who boasted proudly about shaking hands with Coronavirus victims just prior to falling ill with it.
The UK Government has been awful but it isn't a patch on the United States Government which is run by a man who described it all as a hoax, blamed the WHO and China for his own inadequacies and then told people not to wear masks and to ingest disinfectant, before ending up in hospital with it.
Donald Trump is finished in the White House so thank goodness that's all over although he doesn't seem to think so which just makes it even funnier so we may yet see him outside Fourseasons Landscaping holding another press conference.
2020 was good for some though, right wing columnists, conspiracy theorists, billionaires and fascists did okay and the Pentagon released actual footage of a UFO which didn't get the recognition it deserved because it was in July and judging by the pictures, everyone in the UK was on a Beach after being temporarily released from lockdown.
Mother Nature got a well deserved respite and she dropped enough hints that something wasn’t quite right by increasing the severity of hurricanes, choking us off with putrid air conditions and burning significant portions of forests to the ground but when that didn't work she did the equivalent of sending us to our rooms and the air became healthier to breath, the lakes and rivers cleansed themselves and there was even fish in the canals of Venice for the first time in generations.
So all in all, the over-riding memories of 2020 will not be great but it only means that we can be certain that when we say Happy New Year tonight, we know it should be as we wave goodbye to 2020 with hands that smell faintly of antiseptic hand gel. 

Still Unsure About Meaning Of Efficacy

It is great news that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vacinne has been given the nod although the pathetic jingoism emanating from the Government about British Science being the greatest is nauseating.
For some reason the Government is going ahead with the plan to give two full doses with 65% efficacy rather than the half followed by the full one which gave 90% efficacy which doesn't seem right, even if i understood what 65% efficacy meant.
To my mind, it means that for every 100 people exposed to Coronavirus, 35 will still fall ill but then the Oxford trial figures of 24,000 volunteers taking the inoculation and with 131 still catching Covid-19, even with my dodgy maths skills and inept use of a calculator, that despite receiving the vaccine, 0.5% - 0.6% of the 24,000 volunteers still fell ill, giving it an efficacy rating of 99.95%.
I also made the mistake of taking efficacy to mean the same as efficiency, saying the jab is 65% effective but that's also not right because efficacy means the rate in controlled laboratory conditions, effectiveness means out in the real world where other things may have an impact and the efficiency rate will only be known much further down the line after people have been injected. That told me.
So i am still not certain what efficacy means but its giving me a headache trying to work it out so i am going with two thirds will be fully protected with the remaining third not quite so fortunate and will still fall ill. I think.

Astrology In 2021

At the start of 2020, nobody could have known what a pigs ear things would be by the end of it, well nobody except the Psychics who charge for this sort of information but i can't recall any of them screaming and shouting about what was coming following a bat sneezing on someone in China so a poke in the eye for them but we know what is coming for the UK in 2021 because Astrologer Ann-Louise Holland is telling us.
The problem with 2020, as it turns out, was that Jupiter and Saturn were in Capricorn and influenced negatively by Pluto and having two massive planets together in volatile Capricorn along with Pluto, was always going to spell trouble but in 2021 they are moving out of the troublesome Capricorn and Pluto and join the much more benevolent Venus in Aquarius which is an altogether much better proposition, Aquarius being a thing of change and renewal although it won't all be plain sailing.
The fly in the Astrological ointment is Uranus who is the planet of fast paced change and Mars who are now joining forces in Taurus and will cause sweeping, electrifying changes in all areas so when asked to put it all in a sentence, the message is big change is coming and many will be left behind.   
You have been warned, keep an eye on Uranus.

The Real Evil One In Wizard Of Oz

Every year The Wizard of Oz puts in an appearance around this time but despite watching it a gazillion times, i never really took much notice of just why the Wicked Witch of the West was the baddie and Dorothy the goodie.
Obviously having Wicked in your name is not the best start but as far as i could tell Dorothy landed a house on her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East, and then stole her slippers.
The Wicked Witch of the West never wanted to take them in order to rule the World like a Bond villain, she just wanted the slippers after some stranger had crushed her sibling to death.
Being a Witch, and an evil one to boot, she could have done anything to Dorothy, turned her into a toad, made her break out in boils or even made her head explode but all she did was pine for her sisters slippers.
To top it Dorothy, wearing the slippers like some sort of murder's mad trophy, then kills the Witch which means that in one day, she has not only killed a couple of sisters, one by landing a house on her head, but also stole their footwear so how is she then the goodie and how have i never noticed that before?

Brexit Deal Timing

Maybe i'm just being cynical and it really was a fortuitous bit of timing that the announcement of the Brexit Deal Agreement on Christmas Eve leaves just one day for Parliament to debate the deal being agreeing or rejecting it.
With 2,000 pages to digest, the deal between the UK and the EU is not something which can be glanced at over a long lunch so the full impact may not be known until days after we have left once everyone has had a chance to read it properly but there are some headline things that we do know will definetly happen.
Extra checks at borders for freight and travellers will have an impact immediately so expect pictures of long tailbacks of lorries and peoples at Customs, the European Health Insurance Cards (EHIC) will be invalid once they expire so you will need additonal health insurance when booking a holiday, mobile roaming charges will be charged if you use your phone in the EU and the UK will no longer have access to key security databases and you will require a 'green card' to drive in the EU.
The UK government's official, independent economic advisers have set out some stark warnings on Brexit including economic growth, inflation and higher prices and a hit to GDP of between 4%-8% on top of the already spiralling costs of the Covid-19 pandemic.
I'm not sure if the 52% of Brits who voted for Brexit are still happy with their choice but they will argue that it is still better than no deal but the truth is the best deal we could possibly have is the one which we had and have now thrown recklessly away. 

High Hopes For Oxford/AstraZeneca Jab

Of all the Coronavirus vacinnes being rolled out, i have my hopes up for the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab which is expected to be given the green light by the MHRA this week for meeting their standards of quality, safety and effectiveness.  
The reason i am hoping that the UK made immunisation takes top polling is not out of some jingostic flag waving, but because it is being sold for £3 a dose, the cost to manufacture it, compared to some of the massive mark-ups some other profiteering companies are charging, which means that the vaccine is affordable for nations without the deep pockets of the West and as it does not need to be stored at temperatures as low as the other vaccines, it makes it much easier to store and distribute.
As the Government's chief scientific adviser has warned that with a new Coronavirus variant which is 70% more transmissible, an even more stringent lock-down will be required in January and a Tier 4+ or Tier 5 is being mooted which will pretty much put us back into where we were in March with extensive stay at home orders with only an hour outside for exercise each day so a vaccine cannot come soon enough.
With some of the other vacinnes showing an efficacy rate of 90%-95%, the 62% rate of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was a little underwhelming but it was a happy accident that showed if the first dose is half a dose and then that is followed by a full dose 21 days later, the efficacy rate is 90% which must come as a relief to the government which has ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine.
The issue now, assuming that it will be green lighted this week, is the logistics of actually getting it into peoples arms, since 6 December 600,000 people have been given the first dose which breaks down to approximately 27,300 a day and with a population of 65 million to inject, it would take 2,380 days or 198 months or 16 years to immunise everyone at the current rate 1.8 million a week so to achieve the protection by April as the Government are stating, they will need to find a way to jab 5.4 million of us a week so with this UK Government showing they are the Kings of over-promising, i wouldn't be booking that Summer Holiday in June just yet.

New EasterMas Eve

With lots of people working from home still, the Christmas Party would have been a bit of a slow one although i guess some still would have knocked back some cheap Tesco Prosecco and scanned their own bum on their home scanner but we are now in that awkward bit between Christmas and New Years, it's not a holiday but it a few work days sandwiched between the holidays which is normally used for taking back and exchanging presents but that's out the window this year as the only shops still open are take away's and chemists.
Officially this time is called 'betwixt' but we have mangled that to become 'Twixmas' and if you are lucky enough to have booked these days off as Annual Leave then you can spend the week in your PJ's watching Box Sets while finishing off the last of the turkey in the fridge.
The next Event is New Years Eve which is generally the time to start drinking about 3pm and be on top of a table wearing something daft on your head to ring in the New Year at midnight before having another look in a shop doorway at the £50 worth of booze you had necked as it comes back up the opposite way to how it went down.    
Of course this year it will be sat at home with Jools Holland and some jazz singer nobody has ever heard of instead because Coronavirus has spoilt all that this year but at least we know that 2021 HAS to be better than 2020, well, once enough of us have rolled up our sleeves and been jabbed anyway which the Government is saying should be done by April in which case stay home, stay safe and we can have Christmas, New Years Eve and Easter all at the same time if the Bunny, Santa and Father Time all agree.

Special Guest Blogger: Roland the Farter

Ho ho ho. Okie dokie, my people, are ya having a good time? Watching football and eating turkey and wearing festive jumpers, huh?
I was the Royal jester to King Henry II and my job was to come up with a Christmas Spectacular every year to compete with the Jugglers, fire-eaters, storytellers and acrobats and i tried the usual jokes such as 'Hey Eleanor of Aquitaine, am I pleased to see you or did I just put a canoe in my pocket' but one year i really took it up a level by making use of the large thing between the King's ears, his nose.
I had many talents but as you can guess by my stage name, i am most well known for one of them but you see i was a farter by trade, or Flatulist to give me my proper title, and my artistic manipulation of flatulence included impressions, blowing smoke rings, extinguishing candles, and playing tunes all performed with my arse but for the Royal Court i designed an act which ended with what i called a jump, a whistle and a fart which is exactly as it sounds, all three executed simultaneously.
Passing wind in the Middle Ages was a more complicated act than it is today and a good flatulist could earn a decent living, the king paid me 30 acres of land and a manor and when was the last time your boss gave you a house?
You see fart humor hinges on the unexpectedness of the fart but not just anyone could be a flatulist, it's a skill to be able to trump on cue and also to not produce too much of a stink and to not be so enthusiastic that you follow through and need to change your trousers afterwards, not pleasant.
Unfortunately, you don't see a lot of performance farting anymore, and that's a shame because it was a very underrated art form and there was no cameras to capture me in my pomp which is a shame but as it was all happening in 12th Century, the video would be like my party piece which was silent...but deadly. See, i still got it.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Stephen

For most people their only knowledge of me is from that Good King Wencheslaus song but the Feast of Stephen is more commonly known as Boxing Day in Australia, Canada and the UK which is mainly the day to return Christmas gifts to the shops and exchange them for the correct size, an alternative to the same value or make up stories about how it was broken when we got it and can we have the money back please.
I was Jewish to start with but religion isnt like picking a football team and you can switch sides whenever you want and i did, coming over to Team Jesus and i was one of seven deacons appointed by the Apostles to distribute food and charitable aid to poorer members of the community but that did not go down well with the Jewish community who said i was not evenly distributing the food, favouring the guys with the foreskins.
They argued with me, i gave a long speech with my central point being my God and Jesus would kick the arse of their God and Moses which was every bit as effective as it sounds and they accused me of blasphemy and dragged me off to a court of Jewish elders who said i had preached against the Temple and the Mosaic Law.
I was expecting to have a debate, then be told to behave myself than back home for a bit of a pray but it was the bit about the many mercies that God had given the children of Israel, and the ungrateful way in which they had repaid him by killing the saviour that really got up their nose and i said i would be sat at Gods right hand but i wasn't expecting it to be within the next 20 minutes as they dragged me out into the street and began stoning me, the other Saints call me the first rock star because a rock hit my head and i saw stars.
The Christmas bit comes in as my remains were found and taken to the Church of Hagia Sion on 26 December, making it the date for the feast of Saint Stephen but as Christians tend to do, they hold part of my right arm at Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius in Russia as a religious relic and us Christians do like a relic.
When you think of a religious relic, you probably picture a golden chalice, a sacred jewel or even a fancy dagger somebody once stabbed a mythical monster with but generally it's a saint's body part that was lopped off and put in a box.
To show how much of a sense of humour the Church has, i am the patron saint of headaches and stone masons and is often represented carrying a pile of rocks or with rocks on my head.
My message then is try also not to be dominated by your hatred and learn to forgive like I have learned to forgive those miserable, sadistic Jews so that you, too, can be inwardly cleansed. That and duck if a bunch of people wearing Shtreimel hats throws stones at you.

A Hallmark Christmas

Last week i was sent from the city to do an assignment on the local bakery in the small town where i grew up as it was celebrating it's 50th, and last, year as the owner, Mr Lassiter, was selling up.
My boss told me that if i put in a good report, i was almost certain to get that promotion to Chief Editor but my report had to be handed in by December 24th so off i drove and i was glad to get away, following my divorce this year i didn't want to be home alone and single at this time of the year.
I arrived in the town and stopped at the small coffee shop to grab a latte and ask directions but i have taken two steps when i was nearly knocked over by a runaway Golden Retriever and then actually sent tumbling by the owner who was chasing it.
It wasn't until he was apologising and helping me up that i realised that it Jed, my old college boyfriend i hadnt seen since i left the town 15 years ago.
He insisted on buying me a coffee as way of apology and we sat inside the cafe and talked about old times and i told him about how i was a big success in the city and almost certain to get that promotion and he told me how he had stayed in the town to run the family book-store after his parents had passed away.
He asked me if i would be around for the tree lighting ceremony on Christmas Eve but I told him about my assignment deadline and i needed to be back in the city by Christmas Eve to hand over my copy but i did say we should meet up again sometime but now i had to go see Mr Lassiter.
The kindly old man at the Bakery told me that after his wife had died, he couldn't face making the Christmas Cookies on his own anymore and she hadn't left him the special recipe for the cookies everyone loved so had decided to sell up to a large corporation who planned to pull down the bakery and build an office block on the site.      
I was sitting in the cafe typing out my report on my laptop when Jed came in and over a Gingerbread Latte, i told him about the bakery closing and he said that he thinks Mrs Lassiter had given his mum her secret recipe for the cookies one year for safe-keeping and it was in an old tin under the stairs.
So off we went and found the tin and spent all evening in the kitchen making the cookies following Mrs Lassiter's secret recipe.
It was during this time that i realised that the Jed i knew at college had actually grown into a great, and beautiful soul and while we were waiting for the last batch cookies to cook, he confessed that he had never really gotten over me and still loved me but he understood that while he had stayed in the town, i had gone on to bigger and better things and had outgrown the town and it's people.
I broke the awkward silence by throwing flour at him, he threw it back and with us both laughing, he chased me around the kitchen and caught me right under the doorway, where the miseltoe was hanging. I admit i did think about kissing him as we looked into each others eyes but the timer on the oven pinged and ruined the moment.
The cookies were a brilliant success, Jed decorated them with handfuls of tiny, silver and gold stars and we both helped out in the bakery shop selling them but my deadline was looming and my boss had already phoned me to ask how it was coming along and to remind me it had to be submitted by Christmas Eve if i had any chance of getting that promotion.
Jed asked me to go to the outdoor skating rink but i told him i really had to get the assignment finished so typed away but all the time i was distracted by the thought of Jed and how much fun we had making the cookies so i shut down the laptop, grabbed my coat and went to the rink to surprise him.
When i got there i saw him laughing and joking with a group of the local people and i knew right there that it would never work, i was a big shot city girl now and he was still the small town boy so to save us both from heartache, i went back to my room and packed my bags and wrote him a note to say that it was the fairest thing for both of us if i left before our feelings grew any stronger.
I pushed through the letterbox of the book-shop as i left and with tears in my eyes, i began the long drive back to the city and pulled in to a service station for some coffee to keep me awake for the rest of the drive home.
I sat in a booth in the corner and thought of Jed as i watched the snow tumble down outside when an old lady asked me if she could sit with me.
She had a dog-earred copy of 'A Christmas Carol' and when i said it was an amazing book, she sighed that she always carried it as it reminded her of how, one Christmas many years ago, she had made the biggest mistake of her life.
She spoke of how her biggest regret was that she had put her career before her own happiness and that had cost her the one true love she ever known and she realised too late that love is based on being yourself not anyone else and the true meaning of Christmas is being with someone you want to be with and how she wished she could go back and do it again, so she could change everything.  
Outside the snow was really coming down hard and i thought about her words while watching a young couple walk past with their arms entwined around each other and when i turned back she was gone, and when i asked the waiter where she had gone, he just shrugged and said he hadn't noticed anyone there anyway.
My mobile phone rang and as i fumbled the phone from my coat pocket, i saw it my boss asking and she would be asking for my story but as i got the phone out, i also dragged out some tiny silver and gold stars which we had used to decorate the cookies with and i stared at them and thought of Jed, him with the flour on his shirt as he chased me laughing around the kitchen, as my boss reminded me that my promotion depended on this assignment.
'I know' i said before adding 'but it's the last one you will ever get from me because i quit' and i hung up before she had chance to talk me out of it.
I drove back to the town and had to fight my way through the crowd who were gathering in the town square for the tree lighting ceremony but i couldn't see Jed and the countdown had begun. 10...9...8...7...through the falling snow i glimpsed Jed standing at the side of the stage and made my way through the crowd.
...6...5...4...
'Jed' i shouted, running over to him.
'I read your letter and thought you had gone home' he said with surprise
....3...2...
'I am home' i replied and as the crowd got to 1 we kissed and the lights came on, illuminating our embrace to cheers from the crowd.
Mr Lassiter asked to go on the stage as he had an important announcement to make and said that he had decided to not sell the bakery but to give it to Jed and I to run if we were willing, as we made such a success of it and he knew it would be in safe hands,
'Of course we will' i smiled and turned to Jed and said 'what a great Christmas present!!'
'You're my Christmas present this year' Jed smiled pulling me tightly to him.
As the snow gently fell, and we held each other, i saw the old lady from the service station stood in the distance, she smiled, nodded and seemed to fade into the lights.       
The crowd began singing 'Silent Night' and it was only then that i noticed the angel on the top of the tree was holding a wand in one hand a book in the other, the book was 'A Christmas Carol'.   
I am sure, as the saying goes, we will live happily ever after.

Special Guest Blogger: Walter Kirchhoff

I was a middling Opera Singer, you wont find my name amongst the greats and nobody will recognise my name in this era but i instigated one of the most well known moments in the 20th Century.
I was a tenor and had performed London’s Covent Garden opera house in 1913, but i had never sung for a French or Belgian audience but that all changed one Christmas Eve in 1914.
I was accompanying the German Crown Prince Wilhelm on a Yuletide visit to the German Troops on the Western front in the time before Hitler realised that picking a fight with the entire world wasn't going to end well for him and as a morale boost, i was asked to sing for them and i began 'Silent Night' and the power of the carol and the contrast between the carol’s message of tranquillity and hope and the violence of war was compelling and the grimness of trench warfare was never so clear as on that night.
The British, French and Belgian trenches were 100 yards away in the clear, cold night of Christmas Eve, my voice carried very far and at the end of the song, they applauded me so i sang it again, this time in English and from across the wasteland between us, the Brtish began singing along, then a Scottish guy joined in with bagpipes.
The German troops had been sent thousands of 3-foot-tall Christmas trees, already decorated with candles and a couple of the guys lifted them up onto the top of the trenches and i climbed to the top and held one aloft and sang O Come, All Ye Faithful.
The British crawled out to see this chubby German standing on a trench holding up a Christmas Tree and i edged forward, so did they and then the German troops crawled out and both sides kept edging forward tentatively until we met in the middle meaning we gained more ground in one Christmas Eve piss up then we did in the whole of the war.
These men who had been seeking to kill each other for five bloody months refrained from dealing death and began trading gifts, drinking together,  singing and agreed a truce for the night to remove the dead and wounded from the no-mans land, they even had a game of football with tied-up bundles of cloth, Germany v England with the Germans winning on penalties obviously.
Both the German and Allied commanders made sure it never happened again, the German troops that had met with their enemy counterparts were taken off the front lines and replaced with soldiers who hadn’t been involved. The British ordered their guys to continue with their brilliant plan which involved them climbing out of their trenches and walking very slowly towards our machine guns.
I gave up my singing career in the mid-1930s and worked as a singing teacher in Berlin but the memory of that night stayed with me forever, the futile waste of life, some just children, and in my mind that Don Quixote quote of the dying soldiers having no glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning Why? Not that they were asking why they were dying, but why they had ever lived'.
Sadly, young men and women sent to fight old man's wars have been asking that same question ever since.

An Aussie Christmas

At some point, before i am old and dribbling down my cardigan in an old peoples home, i would like to visit Australia but apart from it being the place where it seems all the wildlife is trying to kill you, i wouldn't want to go at this time of year because an Australian Christmas seems wrong in every way.
Of course it isn't their fault that they are in the Southern Hemisphere and December falls in the summer for them but singing Carols and Christmas songs in 30C heat isn't really entering into the spirit of all things Festive.
Throw in that the original Pagan festival before the Christians conveniently shifted their guy's birthday to December 25th was to celebrate the longest night which in Australia happens to be in June just seems to add to the wrongness of it all down under.
My Aussie pal admits that the Northern Hemisphere folk do seem to be a bit more enthusiastic for Christmas than her fellow Aussies who chuck another prawn on the Barbie and go for a swim.
On the other hand, a British Christmas seems to involve it being cold, rainy and foggy so maybe it is us doing it the wrong way.
Nah, it's them.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Nicholas

Look, the last thing i want is to come across as is a grumpy old man, sure i appreciate the whole starting Father Christmas thing but in my lifetime i did so much more than throw money into a couple of prostitutes sisters socks.
I received a visit from the Virgin Mary herself, brought dead children back to life, calmed a storm at sea, saved innocent soldiers from execution and chopped down a demon possessed tree but mention the name Saint Nicholas and all i'm remembered for is the sock thing.
To make things even worse it led to the story of the jolly fat guy in the red suit who would replace my boss's kid as the face of Christmas and i'm not jolly or fat and wouldn't be seen dead in a red suit, i was always more of a grey smock guy.
At least the Beach Boys remembered me although at 5ft in my stockinged feet the 'Little Saint Nick' was a bit of a dig, you try clambering up on rooftops when your 5ft tall, not easy i tell you.
Anyway, at least i'm remembered all these years later, remember Saint Agathangels? Nope? There you go then, it's George, Valentine and me and i invented Christmas so that beats fighting dragons and zinging arrows into people butts.
As thanks for giving the World Santa, they made me the Patron Saint of Portsmouth and Liverpool for crying out loud. I know i'm a Saint with a hotline to the Big Guy but anyone who has been to either of those places know even i couldn't conjure up enough of a miracle for them, if i had known at the time i would have kept off the roofs and kept my coins in my pocket.
Still, enjoy the festive season that i gave you and remember me, the man who gave money to sex workers who then morphed into a fat guy with gout and high blood pressure who comes into your bedroom when your asleep and leaves you presents which isn't creepy at all.

Special Guest Blogger: Melchior Of The Three Wise Men

Anyone who knows their theology will know that three wise men turning up with presents is quite an old tradition, we popped up in earlier religions also at the birth of Buddha, Crishna, Rama and Confucius so when we heard of yet another saviour turning up in Judea, Belthazar, Gaspar and myself, Melchior, began to make arrangements.
First we brainstormed baby gifts but we hadn't been given much notice and it was early closing day so all we could scrape together was some Frankincense (buy one get one free so that's mum's birthday present sorted also). Gaspar says he had some Myrrh hanging around that he wouldn't ever use so he would give it that. Gold always comes in handy so we grabbed some of that as well.
Then we made the travel arrangements, obviously camel, but Gaspar's had been stolen from outside the Sandal shop but mine was a two seater so we packed the presents and set off in the general direction of Judea.
When we got there the place was a bit of a pigsty, literally, there were angels being chased by cows and the poor kid was in a food trough and an annoyed looking sheep was nibbling at the baby's blankets. Standing by the door was a group of slack-jawed shepherds who began babbling something about Angels and the birth of man's saviour but when you have seen one saviours birth you have seen them all so we left the presents by the door and quickly left them to it leaving the sounds of Mary shouting 'Oi, what am i supposed to do with 2lbs of Myyrh' behind us.
Despite the start, i'm glad things turned out okay for the kid, the Romans nailing him to a cross thing aside of course, but things have been a bit quiet on the 'birth of saviours' front recently but the three of us are always available for nativities, birthday parties and especially hen nights, Gaspar's elephant impression is amazing.

Special Guest Blogger: Odin

I'm a Viking, the tunaskin-goatskin boots may have given you a clue but not just any old viking, i was a Viking God and the guy your Father Christmas is based on, not some wussy Saint throwing coins into a couple of prostitutes socks, i was doing that years before, not the prostitutes socks thing obviously, my wife Frigg would have been wearing my testicles as earrings if i had been doing that, but the whole Christmas thing started with me, Christmas and also Wednesdays, the mid-week day was named after me.
I was the Norse God of death, war and battles but i was not all about the death and destruction, not completely anyway, i also had a softer side and on the Eve of the Winter Solstice, i would don my fur lined cloak, brush my long white beard and lead the Yule hunting party through the skies in my chariot pulled by my flying horse Sleipnir looking for Ice Giants to slay and children would place their boots near the chimney, filling them with carrots as a gift for Sleipnir.
When i flew by, i rewarded the little ones by leaving gifts in their boots made by my team of magical elves and dwarves who would make gifts back in the North Pole. They also made Thor's hammer and my magical spear but they also knocked out some toys for me to deliver.
Being a Norse God, i would punish the bad as well with a heavy dose of bad fortune and i knew who was good or bad as well as being a God and knowing all sorts of good stuff, i had two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who would report back to me most notably so i knew who to admit to Valhalla but it also came in handy with the naughty and nice present giving thing.
So quite how the one eyed, white-bearded God who rode the midwinter sky on his steed Sleipnir, visiting his people with gifts turned into a chubby, jolly man in a red suit with a team of reindeer who bounds down chimneys is beyond me.
The Present bringer you have now is for people who like the sort of things that go on in Christian Heaven, like singing, talking to God, watering pot plants whereas i on the other hand, the original Santa, was for people who like the other sorts of things you get in Valhalla such as adultery, pillage, torture, those general areas. My Christmas is for the type of people who like to eat, drink, fight and lay waste to monasteries and then vomit a lot later and that's the real Christmas spirit.

Special Guest Blogger: Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia

Firstly i was the real life Good King Wenceslaus sung about in that Carol, secondly i wasn't a king but a Duke in the Czech Republic and thirdly the Feast of Stephen, when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even was the day i was horrifically stabbed and dismembered, consider that while you're recovering from your turkey and pudding stupor, the jolly sights and sounds of the holidays don't seem quite so jolly while your gizzards are being forcibly dragged from your body.
I was the son of Vratislaus I, Duke of Bohemia and enjoyed the easy life during the early 10th century, until my father was killed in battle and in 10th Century Europe, being killed in battle was a pretty good outcome.
My grandmother, a Christian, became regent but she was killed by my pagan mother, strangled by her own veil because she was bringing me up as a Christian, so mum took the role of regent for herself and decided that she could get used to this whole ruling thing so set about ridding Bohemia of the Christian fad that was sweeping Europe but that backfired and she was forced into exile and i took control of the government.
My younger brother Boleslav the Cruel, was always a mummy's boy so when i was bringing beggars out in the snow gathering firewood into my warm castle for a cup of hot turnip juice, my brother was plotting to kill me, and you didn't want to spend time with your family at Christmas!
The plan was to invite me to a meal to celebrate the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian and to unify our family but the thought that he might not be handing me plates of Christmas cheer did cross my mind but i accepted the invitation believing that my own brother wouldn't really do that to me.
Wow, did i misjudge that because when i turned up, him and his goons all took it in turns to stab me to death and to make sure, ran me through with a lance and dismembered me. I always considered myself head and shoulders above my brother and i literally was, my head ended up on top of the gatehouse and my body in the moat but with hindsight, with a name like Boleslav the Cruel and the whole previous killing family members thing, i should have seen one that coming i guess.

An Urgent Message From Father Christmas

As we are up here in the North Pole, news may take a little while to make it up here but i am well aware of the Coronavirus that is going around the World and i have been getting some letters from worried children asking if i will still be able to visit this year.
Firstly, i'm a designated key worker and key workers are allowed to carry on working and as for social distancing, when i turn up with Rudolph and the rest of the gang to deliver the presents, everyone will be tucked up in their beds so that isn't a problem.
I have agreements with every country in the World that i have a special travel corridor so i won't have to self-isolate when i return so while it is true that i will be making a massive international journey all around the world and into many areas where the virus is, but being magic, i can't catch Coronavirus although the elves has fitted a hand santiser dispenser to my sleigh so i will use that before each house to keep everyone extra safe.
Actually the only thing i'm allergic to is badly behaved children but the antidote to that is being good so the answer is as long as you have been well behaved, then there is no problem with me coming as usual this year.

See you soon

Father Christmas xx

Special Guest Blogger: The Ghost of Christmas Future

Like most stingy people, you are probably constantly threatened by the thought of ghosts appearing in the middle of the night and screaming dire warnings of pain and misfortune that you will soon suffer as a result of all your morally dubious acts.
Due to fluctuations in the Spiritual Space Time Continuum, the barrier between our planes is always weakest during the holiday season, and not a Christmas goes by without someone being visited by ghosts, eager to show them the error of their ways and i'm normally the last one if the other two don't have any success and you are still wavering between being a proper person keen to now become the epitome of human kindness or remaining a tosser.
The Ghost of Christmas Past is, in my opinion a bit of a waste of ectoplasm, him showing you visions of things in the hope that this flood of  information will influence your behavior by showing you only things that have already happened in order to give you a chance to save yourself from the wretched path you are on won't work, you know what happened and you still became a horrible git.
The Ghost of Christmas Present shows you all the fun other people are having talking about you behind your back but humans beings, they just either sack them the first day they are back at work if they are the boss or just act even snottier to them.
I, The Ghost of Christmas Future, the one with the shroud and skeletal appearance, my job is to try to show you how much the world hates you when you're gone, even though it frankly makes less sense when coming from the future. When you're gone, you're gone, and if people want to slag you off or high-five at your funeral, let them. All that matters to you is that you lived like a king, sleeping on a mattress stuffed with tens and twenties.
The smart ones even take the opportunity, to find out who won the next 20 FA Cup's or Grand National's although i do enjoy my little joke when they ask how far in the future and i look at my watch and pretend to count hours. That one always freaks them out.
To be fair, my job is probably the easiest of the three, my main ploy is to just take them to the graveyard and show them their graves and point quite a bit and i do resemble the Grim Reaper, we are related and i stand in for him sometimes when things get busy, but mostly it's the standard be nice or when you will die people will be cheering but as i say, it's no bother to me, i'm dead and i got a job so knock yourself out for all i care, it keeps me employed.

World Leaders Covid-19 Jab Poser

The Coronavirus vaccine does put the World leaders in a bit of a quandry, if they are amongst the first to have it to show it is safe then they are accused of jumping the queue, if they don't have it then they will be questioned why tell everyone else to take the jab if they are not willing to do it themselves.
Of course some will be amongst the first anyway, our very own Boris Johnson is obese and 56 years old so is clinically vulnerable according to the Governments own definition which moves him up the pecking order behind NHS staff, care workers and the over 70's and over 60's.
Obviously if the likes of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro had got a grip on it from the very start like most of the Asian countries instead of ignoring the warnings about what was coming our way then maybe we wouldn't be such massive haste to get their citizens innoculated and the grim death toll wouldn't be quite so awful but they played politics and people needlessly died and continue to die because of it.
The Worldometer Website shows that as of today, there has been over 75 million cases Worldwide and 1.7 million deaths with the USA topping the grim death table with 318,522 deaths, then Brazil with 184,992 and India 144,914. The UK is 6th with 66,052 but with Winter and the coldest months only just starting, and with the Festive Season kicking off imminently, that number will unfortunately rise substantially.
Two Thirds of the UK is now in the highest Tier of lockdown but still the Government refuse to back down over their relaxing of the lockdown rules for 5 days over Christmas and with a figure of approximately 20,000 new cases each day in the UK, a more tighter lockdown is almost guaranteed
for us in January which only proves that our current Prime Minister should be the last person who should be in charge during a crisis and this bunch of Conservatives have been even worse than i imagined they would be, and i had the bar set so low for them that it was practically touching the floor.
As my area is in Tier 3 now along with many others, i don't expect us to be dropping down the lockdown scale much before late March and the vaccine has been jabbed into the 60%-70% of arms required to bring about the much heralded 'herd immunity' and then we can step out into Boris Johnson's new look Brexit Britain, so you may want to stay indoors anyway.

Special Guest Blogger: Pope Julius I

Okay, let's start with a spot of word association. When we say 'Roman' you say 'orgy'. Some of you might have said 'empire' and that's technically also correct, but for the purposes of this post, you said 'orgy' goddammit, because we all know the Romans were at it like rabbits and especially in late December during the Saturnalia celebration.
Now nobody likes to miss out on a great orgy with drink and food and having every inch of your naked body covered in pepper and then sneezed over (that one may just be me) and while the Romans were celebrating their Sun God, us Christians were sat at home staring at our feet and playing board games and charades and wondering why our God wasn't a party animal.
As Pope i decided that Christians should be able to also join in but the problem was our guy was less about the wine and frolics and more about feeding people loaves of bread and fish so i decided hey, i'm the damned Pope and i can get a bit creative and as nobody actually knew the date Jesus was born, i stood up and said oh silly me, i clean forgot, Jesus was also born on the 25th December so we can have a joint birthday Party for Jesus and whoever it is you Roman heathens celebrate and i officially moved Jesus's birthday to December 25th.     
The Romans HR Department didn't care as they were still able to drink themselves deaf and make inappropriate use of the slaves and the Christians didn't care that it would all end in that David Bowie and Bing Crosby festive sing-along centuries later, they were like WAHEY, i'll grab the butter, you go fetch that extra wide turnip.
As Christianity had copied and pasted our man into the pagan celebrations, conveniently appropriating the existing pagan shenanigans as a key Christian date, one of the most notorious shindigs in history turned into all the hype and excitement we all associate with Christmas today and when you are sat dozing in front of the TV on December 25th Evening with a full belly and an even fuller bladder, you can thank me and a vague date of birth in the Bible.
My own special thanks must go to my very good friend who had access to industrial amounts of pepper. Amen indeed.

Special Guest Blogger: Head Elf Shinny Upatree

Most businesses start small and Santa’s magical workshop is no exception, at the start there were only just six elves designing and making toys and dealing with the millions of requests children send Santa every year. Hundreds of years later us original six elves are still employed with Santa at the North Pole and i was the first and even co-founded the Magic Workshop with Santa.
I have been around so long that i have forgotten how old i am but i do remember that the North Pole Village was just one igloo when i got here and that had a fir tree inside it which grew and grew so i made it my home but had to cut a hole in the top and it took up so much room it blocked the door so I had to climb up it to get in and out, hence the name.
I met a jolly fat guy who had an idea of how to honour children at Christmas and it sounded fun so i contacted some other elves i knew in far-away lands who may have the qualities we needed to get the project off the ground and first to come was Bushy Evergreen who could make anything out of wood, he used to build ships so he knew what he was doing with a hammer and a chisel and he not only built most of the village, but also came up with the concept of Santa's sleigh but it was when Wunorse Openslae turned up with his magical gift for working with animals who made it so it could fly, he really did have animals in his blood, reindeer's especially, and not just in his blood, also on his shoes, on his trousers, on his coat, he trod it everywhere.
With the organisation becoming larger, next came a pretty little Elf called Mary, or Sugarplum Mary as she was quickly nicknamed due to her love of serving everything with Sugarplums. She helped Mrs Claus in the kitchen to keep us all fed with snacks, mostly toast and sugarplum sandwiches but her joke about making our sandwiches from shortbread became old very quickly.   
Now we needed some sort of administration so we hired Alabaster Snowball who is the nerdy geek behind the 'Naughty and Nice List' and Buzzlewitz who is the elf responsible for collecting the children’s Christmas lists and delivering them to Santa.
With the lineup complete we set about making Christmas and have been doing it for longer than i want to think of and we have seen a few changes, mostly the toys on the lists but a lack of chimneys on rooftops and the problems of passing over international boundaries into certain countries but to be honest, there are some countries that i wouldn't pass water over.

Banning Christmas

Religious folk are easy to make fun which is why, to be honest, i do it every opportunity i get but something i do like to remind them when they bang on about the war against Christmas is that historically it was actually the religious folk who banned Christmas.
Back in the early 17th Century, there was a small band of Religionists from the Midlands who decided that Britain was not Holy enough for them and packed up their Bibles and set off to cross the Atlantic Ocean and make their own country.  
The Pilgrims were strict Puritans and one of the first things they did once they set up camp was decide that Christmas and Easter was not Holy Days and 'They for whom all days are holy can have no holiday' and promptly banned all Christmas celebrations and fined anyone caught not working on December 25th or enjoying a sneaky feast for the baby Jesus.
Meanwhile in Jolly Olde England, the British Purtians under Oliver Cromwell were also banning Christmas and it stayed banned until Olly died and then under King Charles II, Chrimbo was bought back and the British Crown, who still had some jurisdiction over its colonies in the New World, told them to stop being so bloody stupid and reinstanted Christmas over there also.   
There was some hold-outs in the Colonies and Christmas was not declared a public holiday there until 1836 but by then a bunch of drunks had dressed like Indians and dumped tea-chests in the Boston Harbor and the Constitution had been written by a dude with wooden teeth and everyone had a gun and was merrily aiming them at each other so Britain had no sway over the direction it would go but when you American's eat your Christmas Cookies and you look on lovingly while little Hank unwraps that semi-Automatic gaily wrapped in Christmas Paper on Christmas morning, it's thanks to us Brits.
Oh, and next time you hear some Bible thumping nutjob talking nonsense about the war on Christmas and how Muslims and us Atheists are trying to ban Christmas, remind them who it was that actually banned it before.

The Nasty Party

Great Britain is the 6th richest nation in the World, our GDP tops £2 trillion so it should be to our Governments eternal shame that UNICEF have had to step in to feed hungry children in Britain.  
Obviously the Government will point towards the empty coffers due to the tens of billions spent on fighting the Coronavirus as they did when the question of free school meals was posed but that argument fails to hold water when a few weeks ago they announced an increase of £17 billion in the defence budget, no money to feed children but always money to pay for the machinery of war.  
How a Government decides  to spend its budget is a political choice, the Conservatives have decided to put Child Poverty towards the bottom of the list, much more important things to spend their money on obviously. Shame on the people who voted in the Conservatives but even more if they continue to support them still.

Special Guest Blogger: King Herod

While i am always portrayed as the big bad in the Nativity Story, it's about time i put my side of events across.
I would like to start with the story most associated with me, the story of the birth of Baby Jesus which begins with Joseph and Mary traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem and being turned away by a succession of inn keepers.
Of course if the Senate had taken me up on my offer for a total shutdown of foreigners entering Bethlehem or the idea to build a Border Wall around Bethlehem and make Nazareth pay for it as i suggested, then we wouldn't have had the problem to start with so as illegal immigrants, the inn keepers were perfectly right to turn the couple away.
When Nazareth sends it's people, they're not sending the best. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists although some, I assume, are good people.
As usual, one do-gooder lefty bleeding heart proprietor, instead of telling them to stop taking beds which properly belong to the Bethlehem people, allowed them to stay in their stable condemning his customers to the inconvenience of the faint sounds of the foreigner howling in pain as she gave birth, annoying even if she was a young and beautiful piece of ass.
Taking advantage, they not only emptied out the manger to make a makeshift bed for their child born out of wedlock, but they disrupted the animals and made a right mess of the hay, hay which had been paid for by hard working tax payers.
As usually happens if you let the foreigners flood in, chaos follows with a massive, bright star lighting up the stable further disrupting the inns paying customers sleep and the stable quickly filling with uninvited foreign men illegally bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh which they had smuggled through customs and would reduce the value of the commodities, further hitting the wages of Bethlehem's hard working shepherds.
The story does have a happy ending though as i upheld right wing values by first ordering all foreign children be snatched away from their parents at the border and held in cages but then upgraded it to slaughtering the first-born of all moany, whinging, liberal traitors and although many said it was harsh, well, let's say that if they hadn't been there then they would have been safe.
So everyone loved me and we all had a very Merry Christmas that year, the biggest and best Christmas i tell you, and if you hear any different about me then it's all fake news.

Special Guest Blogger: Archangel Gabriel

I was there when God created the Universe and everything in it and i saw the corners he cut and the shoddy materials he used in the rush job so he could have Sunday off which was not enough time for adequate safety checks.
The stuff he used for the Earth was substandard and the oceans were badly designed, the Sun going around the Earth was abandoned and because he left humans to last, he was running short of material so quickly scraped together some dirt in the vague shape of himself, blew into it's nostrils and shoved him quickly into a garden with some apple trees then he stood up, stretched and proclaimed 'Job done'.
Obviously it all went wings up so he allocated his son, Jesus, to keep an eye on the humans and told me to go down there and announce he was sending his only begotten son.
So leaving my cloud i grabbed my white robes, glowing halo, wings, and appeared blinking like i had a Christmas tree shoved up my bum into a field of Shepherds and after 30 minutes of telling them to stop screaming, i told them that their saviour was being born over there in a stable yadda yadda yadda.
To be fair my choice of people to appear to wasn't the greatest, they were shepherds and made a living sitting around watching sheep and personally i wouldn't trust them to sit the right way on a toilet but i left them instructions to follow the star and they would find a woman curled up on the floor next to a disgruntled looking pig, miffed that his food trough had been emptied and now had a baby human in it.
I went back to ripping out awesome harp solo's but i did happen to glance over at Earth occasionally and watched you turn the day your saviour was born into a celebration of a fat man climbing down your chimney. No wonder you humans never made it back into the Garden Eden.

Special Guest Blogger: Henry Cole

A Christmas card is a greeting card sent as part of the traditional celebration of Christmas in order to convey between people a range of sentiments related to Christmastide and the holiday season ranging from 'I wish you a very Merry Christmas' to 'I have no idea who you are nor care if you have a Merry Christmas or if your house burns down but you sent me a card last year so i am now sending you one this year'.
I began the custom of sending Christmas cards when i just couldn't face writing out long letters which was the custom of the time so i asked my designer buddy, John Callcott Horsley, to create a card with 'To' at the top, a nice picture with the usual season's greetings and 'From' at the bottom and i sent one to my grandmother and aunt.
That i had helped set-up the new 'Public Record Office', or Post Office, and was promoting the penny post service to get more people to use it had nothing to do with it, it was a an act of charity, for 1 shilling per card which me and Horlsey split.  
The first cards had general festive merryment pictures, religious pictures were a no-no back then but they evolved to include Santa's, snow scenes and all things Christmassy and cards had the bonus of being just large enough to stick money in the envelope which was a great way to let someone know that due to your jam-packed social calendar and the festive binge-drinking, you couldn't be arsed to bother buying them a present and care about them as much as the sandwich you grabbed while waiting in line to pay for the card in the supermarket.
I can then lay claim to two Christmas firsts, the card so you don't have to write to people and the laziest, easiest, least personal gift you can give someone which is also the one they look forward to getting the most because that removes all doubt about whether or not they'll get the right thing, cash always fits nicely.

Biden Slate Not That Clean

With Donald Trump packing away his XXXXL pants and confirming the removal van for January 20th, there is a sense that things will return back to 'normal' but when it comes to America, normal was not that great to start with.
Pre-Trump we had Obama and his Libyan adventures as well as arming the same murderous thugs in Syria that he had previously been fighting and backing the removal of the elected Ukranian leader and before him GW Bush who has a million Iraqi deaths and the Afghanistan debacle on his hands and in the seat before him Bill Clinton who got up to heavens knows what with female interns in the White House and starting wars in the Balkans.
Even before Biden has the keys in his hands and the return to 'normal', the scandals are already landing and it's same place that did so much damage to his immediate predecessor, The Ukraine.
Emails have surfaced which show that Hunter Biden failed to pay taxes on the $400,000 profit he received from Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2014 where, despite no experience, he joined shortly after the ousting of Ukraine’s president at the time Viktor Yanukovich, with the support of the Biden and the Obama administration.
Federal prosecutors in Delaware have said that they are investigating into Hunter Biden’s financial affairs as well as his dealings with China and the Biden supporters are saying it is a non-story as nobody voted for Hunter Biden and what he does has no connection to his father but if his father's shady actions got him into the position of being able to evade tax, it just shows that rather than America getting a new slate, it is getting one which may be be as mired in filth as the Trump one, but is just as grimy as the ones before him.

No Choice For UK Against EU

With the Government saying that Brexit negotitions are 99% complete, the final 1% is proving difficult to grasp so with the deadline and the devastating thought of crashing out the largest single market on the planet looming, what is the 1% threatening to consign the other 99% of everything else to the rubbish bin.
The first thing is fishing rights where the Government want to limit access to British waters for EU fishermen but they want to continue to sell the extra fish they catch to the EU, presently that 75% of their catch. The EU have said if there is no agreement on access to fishing waters for EU members, then the UK won't get full access to the EU market to sell its fish there.   
The second sticking point is the Level Playing Field, the EU wants the UK to stick closely to EU rules on things like animal rights, workers rights and environmental regulations so they are not able to undercut the EU in the future but the UK say the whole point of Brexit is to move away from EU Rules.
The Third point is who will oversee any deal they do reach, the UK do not want final jurisdiction to go to the European Court of Justice where they feel they will not get a fair hearing.
As Britain exports 51% of it's goods to the EU, with 15% of EU goods coming back the other way, it is Britain that stands to lose the most and with experts stating that Britain would need to make deals with 40 of the richest nations to just break even with what we would lose from the EU (we have currently signed 27 with only Canada and South Africa of the G20 nations), Britain is not in a position of strength in the negotiations.
With the British economy in tatters following the hit from Coronavirus, Britain can not afford not to get a deal with the EU which is why i am hopeful that at the last very second, despite the appalling Johnston bluster about warships in the English Channel, Britain will be signing on the dotted line because even someone as useless as our current Prime Minister is, he will know that the little rain-swept island in the North Sea just cannot afford to do otherwise and his position of Prime Minister will be untenable as the man who flushed Britain's economy down the toilet.

Covid-19 Very Profitable For The Pharmaceutical Companies

Much praise has been heaped upon the pharmaceutical companies who have came up with the much needed Coronavirus vaccines but as arm sleeves begin to be rolled up around the World, those same pharmaceutical companies are rubbing their hands as they see a couple of extra zeros be added to their
bank balances.
At the start of the pandemic, the vaccine developers were in no rush to go on the quest for the vaccine or at least not until governments and donors such as The Gates Foundation and Alibaba's Jack Ma began pouring billions of pounds into projects to create and test them because creating vaccines is not very profitable for these companies.
In total, governments have provided £6.5bn, donors £1.5bn and £2.6bn has come from the companies own investment but if the vaccine is a one or two shot affair then they will make very little profit from it, if it hangs around and becomes an annual shot like the flu virus, then the companies profit sheets will be very rosy indeed.   
Moderna have orders for 780m doses at £23 a dose, Sinovac's orders book has 260m at £15 a time, Pfizer/BioNTech have 1.28 billion orders for their $14 a dose vaccine, Sanofi/GSK are charging £12 for each of the 1.23 billion doses they have on order, Novavax will get £12 for each of their 1.38 billion orders, £9 a time will go to Curevac for their 410 million doses, Johnson and Johnson will make £7 for each of the 1.27 billion doses they have on order, Sputnik V will get £7 for each and Oxford/AstraZeneca have 3.29 billion orders at £3 a time.
The Johnson & Johnson, Sputnik V and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine makers have promised that they will only sell them at the price it cost them to make it which give us a ballpark figure of just how much it costs, and how much the other companies are adding on for profit.
The first moral dilemma then is that during a global pandemic which has killed 1.6 million so far, some of the pharmaceutical companies first thought was can we make a profit from this and only once someone else funded it, did they take an interest and some such as Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech are now looking to maximise their profit.
The second moral dilemma is that they developed the vaccine with what was essentially taxpayers money, in total £6.5 billion, but the innovations become the private property of these commercial organisations and the control over stays in the hands of the company, allowing them to keep the profits from the results.
So yes, we should be thankful for the scientists and medical teams who will hopefully end the Coronavirus, but then the same scientists and medical teams and their shareholders have profited very handsomely whilst doing it, thanks to us taxpayers.

Special Guest Blogger: The Virgin Mary

It does make you wonder why God chose me to aim his holy ejaculation towards, a teenage girl, unmarried, a virgin and in a relationship because there must have been plenty of other women he could of got in the family way but God moves in mysterious ways and all that and it was me he got in the club.
I always felt a bit sorry for Joseph. He was an older man with a teenage girlfriend who had just told him that he would never guess what happened today, i only got made preggers by God with man's saviour while he was out.
Luckily for me, i was shacked up with probably the only man in the history of mankind who went "That's nice' and then went about hiring a donkey to take me to Bethlehem. The donkey salesman probably told him it was a baby stallion. If he was around today he would probably be excitedly replying to emails from Nigerian Colonel's with a million pound to give him and requesting his bank details.
The Christian tradition is that i was a virgin and that Jesus is the son of God, not Joseph which is some way to rub the poor blokes face in it but i do clearly remember that cold December in a Bethlehem Barn.
I had just given birth and the sheep were nibbling at Jesus's blankets and the place was a bit of a pigsty, literally, when a bunch of shepherd's turned up followed by three wise men carrying presents.
The Gold was thankfully received but not so much the Frankincense and what the hell is Myrrh anyway but it set the very first precedent of men sucking when it comes to buying presents.
We left the Myrrh in the stable when we moved on but the baby was healthy and things turned out okay, well for me and my boy anyway but i could see in Josephs eyes, he knew that once i had been with God, a half bottle of wine and the Roman soldiers uniform just wasn't going to cut it anymore.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Boniface

When the average person thinks of a Catholic saint, i would venture to guess that it’s not a fearless, axe-wielding, hammer-breaking, oak-crushing, converter of pagans that comes to mind. And yet, that’s exactly the kind of guy i was.
In the early part of the 8th century, the Catholic Church wanted a hardass to go up against the Heathens Thor, that's the God of Thunder Thor if you please, and they looked in my direction.
I was sent into Germany as a missionary, with an aim of converting the pagans to Christianity and back in the pagan day, all inanimate objects were fair game for worship. Rocks, mountains, funny shaped sticks, whatever but some of them got it in their heads to worship a thunder god named Thor by ritualistically sacrificing humans and animals at the tree they designated 'Thor's Oak'.
I was working tirelessly in the country destroying idols and pagan temples and building churches in their place and using my Christian marketing pitch of 'Hey you pagans with your orgies and different positions, you take off your clothes for sex! Gross, right? Now, let me tell you about Jesus ... and it worked fine until one Winter Solstice when i happened across a group of pagans worshiping an old oak tree they called the Thunder Tree and before it a child about to be sacrificed to their false God.
Now if there is one thing the Catholic Church frown upon it is untoward behaviour towards minors so i grabbed the nearest conveniently placed axe and saying something cool like 'You are for the chop', i hacked down the tree, calling to the pagans to see the power of my God over theirs and a fir tree grew spontaneously in the oak's place.
The next year all the pagans in the area had been converted to Christianity and hung candles, nuts, cheese and apples from the tree to celebrate what they now called Christmas rather than Winter Solstice.
The legend spread and soon Christmas trees became the norm in the newly converted Bavaria, and then spread out to become the tradition of using an evergreen tree to celebrate the birth of Jesus and the tinsel strewn bauble hanging festival we know today and it's thanks to me that we have a tree in the corner of our room and not the dismembered remains of a human sacrifice.
I was later killed by a group of pagan's who were not so keen on me putting a stop to their orgies and Thor worship but by then i had introduced the concept of the tree so next time when you drag the dirty outdoors through your home, scratching floors, knocking over furniture and leaving a wake of pine needles that'll be showing up in the most random places until April, you have me to thank.

Special Guest Blogger: A Bethlehem Shepherd

Us shepherds are thought of as the lowest of the low, well, maybe a rung or two above the lame, blind and the lepers but we spent most of our time watching sheep on sparsely populated mountains sides.
Now sparsely populated mountainous regions in the Middle East are ideal locations for growing opium and khat, and shepherding can be a very boring job so while we watched our flocks, we would partake of a few khat leaves so that night when a bright glowing light turned up infront of us, it wasn't the first time.  
Obviously as it wasn't a hot blue alien with four breasts and three eyes this time but an angel, and a guy angel, we just shrugged and carried on nibbling our leaves.
'I am Gabriel and have been sent by God to spread the news that today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you' he said all glowy and floaty before Dave threw his shoe at him mumbling about giant moths but the Angel dude dodged it and said 'He is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a your Lord wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger' and pointed over to a stable.
We said we would go later and huffing 'whatever', Angel guy blinked out and Dave went to have a pee behind the tree when three men on camels stopped and asked us if we knew where the Stable with the Lord was.
We followed them over and when we got there they were handing out presents to a young couple and amidst some annoyed looking animals was a baby laying in the feeding trough, as the son of God i expected him to be a bit more luminous or something.  
The choice of gifts raised some eyebrows, too, Myrrh is used as an aphrodisiac and i did wonder how, if they ever wrote a book about this, how a bunch of shady, door-to-door sex toy salesmen showed up for the birth of Christ might need a rewrite Unfortunately, being part of the birth of Christianity didn't do much for us and the era of the Shepherd ended when farmers just figured out that the job could be done better and cheaper by a few bits of wood nailed together into a fence around their fields coupled with the sheep's below-par fence climbing skills, so there wasn't much need for us and with hindsight we maybe should have said or did something because our role in the Nativity became basically the role for children who's parents had a spare tea towel who can't be trusted with speaking parts.

Special Guest Blogger: Clement Clarke Moore

Christmas was not miraculously handed down as a fully formed holiday, complete with wrapped gifts and blinking lights, rather it is a rich tapestry woven from countless sources, one of which is my poem 'A Visit from St. Nicholas'.
My father headed the Episcopal Diocese of New York and the churchy set were not keen on Christmas being anything other than about Jesus and Saint Nicholas so anything popularising the festive season which didn't include a baby in a manger or a Saint clambering up on roofs to throw money into prostitutes socks was frowned upon so when my poem became popular i denied writing it, they said was it you and i said  no, no, I don't do it. No, really I didn't. Listen, I've told you I don't do it. Will you please leave me alone, I didn't write it! and when they pointed out it had my name on the bottom i said Oh... Ok then, i did.
I wrote the poem for my children but a friend sent it to a newspaper and the Saint Nicholas Society picked it up and used it in their cause to to make Christmas which was more of a feeding frenzy and drunken orgy more child friendly and put together my reindeer with their Sinterklaas and a legend was born.
My idea of Santa's sleigh being pulled by a reindeer is based on another poem, 'Old Santeclaus with Much Delight' but i gave him eight and named them Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder and Blixem although over time the last two became Donner and Blitzen and i hear there has been another one added since, Rudolph with a nasal deformity but i had nothing to do with that.
I also refer to Saint Nicholas all the way through, never Santa or Father Christmas, and even call him a jolly old elf at one point but as a professor of classics, up until that point my most notable work was a two-volume tome entitled 'A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language' and nobody remembers that but they remember the poem i dashed off in half hour in an effort to shut the kids up one night. Go figure.

Special Guest Blogger: Bethlehem Inn Keeper

There are no songs sang by Christians about me centuries later and my only line said by children with tea-towels wrapped around their heads in school plays is to say that there is no room in my inn but i played a pivotal role in the whole nativity thing.
Sure, if i had known that the man with the knackered looking donkey and the heavily pregnant wife banging on my door was carrying the son of God then i i would have found them a room but i set the whole thing in motion by letting them rent my stable and creating the second worst role after the shepherds in any children's Christmas play.
I did check on them later in the evening and everything seemed fine, there was some miffed off cows and pigs stood around as the boyfriend had emptied out the manger to use as a bed for their baby once it was born and for those who don’t know, a manger is somewhere where food for farm animals is kept.
That Mary and Joseph planned to placed their newborn baby, believed to be the saviour of mankind, in a container that animals eat out of, in front of the animals that usually eat out of it, at this point you have to wonder whether God almighty, in all his infinite wisdom, had chosen wisely when selecting potential parents.
My first inkling something was going on was when i nipped outside around midnight and saw a gathering of people outside the stable and a brightly lit host of angels above it and i said to the wife that looks important.
They did clean up the place before they left and before Herod's guys came looking for their baby but as i explained to them, their plan of killing as many babies as possible in the hope that one of them was Jesus was not a winner.
One, there are a lot of babies in the world, Two, the wholesale murdering of babies is the kind of thing that God tends to frown upon, and Three, Jesus is Jesus and therefore very difficult to kill, even in baby form.
They hauled me off for questioning for violating all sorts of health and safety protocols but i'd do it again only this time i might throw in a few more lines of dialogue to build my part up a bit.

Not The Easy Deal Brexiteers Expected

When it came to Brexit, i was always hopeful that at some point someone would realise that this was absolute madness and would call a halt to the whole shambles but nobody did, so we now face the prospect of the largest act of economic self suicide self by Britain ever in a few short weeks.
I was never sure if the 52% hard of thinking folks who voted for it really knew what they were letting us all in for, i am not convinced they do now and for all of the Conservative Party bluster about reaching an agreement with the EU 'should be one of the easiest in human history' which, by watching Boris Johnson panicky phone calls and trips to the continent, is proving a bit more tricky than they thought.
Other quotes the useful idiots who voted for fell for include: 'We hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want' and 'We’ll get a great result out of Brexit' and the classic 'Trade relations with the EU could be sorted out in an afternoon over a cup of coffee'.
The Boris Johnson claim in the 2019 election to have 'a deal oven ready' is turning out to be less than accurate because the Europeans are digging in their heels, refusing to be bullied into accepting a deal over fishing rights which seems to be one of the main sticking points.
The British want to stop anyone other than the British fishing in British eaters which seems fair enough, but then they sell 75% of what they catch to the EU so they don't want any tarrifs on their catch which will make them uncompetitive, a case of literally having their fishcakes and eating them.
I imagine we will end up with some sort of cobbled last minute together deal, Britain cannot afford not to crash out without a deal hence Boris Johnson pegging it over to Belguim today but the bottom line is we are leaving the World's largest trading block and single market and replacing it with a hotch-potch of deals from nations on the other side of the World.
With the usually tight fisted Conservatives making free with the nations cheque-book during the Coronavirus pandemic and tanking the UK Economy, the Brexit catastrophe due to make a massive dip in the Treasury coffers, i guess they they can hide the Brexit economic damage coming behind the Coronavirus economic damage already done.

Special Guest Blogger: John Elwes

When i heard that author Charles Dickens had written a story inspired by me i was quite excited but once i read it i was very disappointed as he never once mentioned any of my money saving tips in 'A Christmas Carol'.
I'm guessing i don't have to explain much about the plot of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, he did get the Ebenezer Scrooge Character right though, the ghosts not so much as i am sure i would remember them popping up in my bedroom but i was famously careful with money.
I was actually very wealthy due to inheriting a fortune but i really hated spending money and refused to spend a penny on luxuries like candles, a fireplace or clothes as i would pick up coats and things the beggars discarded. That's a tip, if there is more material than holes, you will have more warm bits than cold bits.  
I would go to bed at sundown to avoid having to pay for candles, i would buy cheaper spoiled meat and once fought a rat over the rotting corpse of a hen that it had dragged out of a river, i'd walk everywhere rather than hail a cab and would stay in whichever of the properties i rented out which never had tenant at the time.
So as Dickens never included some of my Christmas money saving tips, i will do it here.
Tell your friends and family you're going away for Christmas and will exchange gifts when you get back then lay low and buy all of your presents in the January sales for way less money or another twist is after they have given you your presents, announce you have converted to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who use the Julian calendar so Christmas Day for you is actually January 7th so you will give them their presents then and off to the sales you go.
If you make sure you time your visits to coincide with meal times when you visit family and friends, tell them how nice their cooking smells and your almost guaranteed to be offered a seat at their table.
It's basic economics people and if a dead guy called Marley turns up in your front room, unless his first name is Bob, ignore him and he will eventually get fed up and go away.

Special Guest Blogger: Alabaster Snowball

Hi, i'm the elf who runs the naughty and nice list and i have been doing this crap for hundreds of years and then last year it hit me, hit me hard like a massive bit of holly flying from a high building or a reindeer running over your foot, what's the point?
The nice list has been dwindling for years, Buzzlewitz shows me the 'I had been a good boy/girl this year' letters you send to Santa and you must think we are stupid? We see what you get up to all year and if i had my way you would all get coal in your stockings but the increases in fuel prices have made that a major expense that we just can't afford any longer.
As i also do the administration i can see what this operation costs, back in the day the toys kids asked for would be wooden trains or doll houses and hey, no problem, we have trees up the ying-yang here but these days you ask for iphones and laptops. Firstly how is a phone a freaking toy and secondly, have you any idea of the expense involved in the licensing agreements? No, and you don't care either do you as long as you get to play CandyCrush for seven hours a day.
The final straw was the equal employment commission hitting me with a discrimination case for only hiring white, boy elf's. Well whatever, that is now very far down on my list of give-a-tosses. I'm through spending the year cooking the books to try and keep as many of you on the nice list when you don’t deserve it.
Christmas is so stupid. Whoever invented it should be nailed to a cross so whinge all you like about Christmas being all about family or charity or kindness or the birth of God's one and only son. Whether any of those is true or not, it's sure going to suck when you don't get any presents and I DON'T CARE or else, i wouldn't except i have seen what you lot get up to in the world and i get three square meals of Sugarplums and candy canes here so maybe i will not go just yet, but i will go one year for sure.

Special Guest Blogger: Tom Smith

It's strange but you would have thought that if there was one country that would jump at the chance to introduce mild explosives to their Christmas dinner it would be the Americans but my Christmas Cracker idea have never really taken off over there and remain a very British thing.
Apart from the bang, the crackers you get now also contain a joke and a small toy which if you buy cheap crackers, will be a plastic moustache, or a tiny comb or a thin piece of plastic in the shape of a fish that curls up in your hand but originally i was a confectioner and it was a way to sell my sweets with the sweet wrapped in a message along the lines of a reverse fortune cookie.
They sold well enough but it wasn't until i incorporated the idea of having to pull them apart and they made a bang and that they really started to sell but i may have been a genius inventor but my naming skills sucked, i first went with 'Bangs of Expectation', then 'Cosaques' before settling on crackers, because they cracked obviously.
As the business expanded my sons suggested dropping the sweets and including things like paper hats, gifts and god awful jokes like 'Why did the turkey join the band? Because it had the drumsticks' and 'What’s yellow and dangerous? Shark-infested custard'.
How the rest of the World overlooked the idea of putting explosive gifts on highly flammable trees which are covered in hot Christmas lights i will never know.

Special Guest Blogger: Mithras

The mince pies are out and there is the smell of Christmas in the air. It's that time of the year when we sing carols and give and receive presents in memory of the small child born on the 25th December to a virgin and wrapped in cloth and placed in a manger with only shepherds in attendance.
The young baby who grew up to perform awesome miracles and lead his 12 disciples before sacrificing his life for the benefit of mankind with Sunday being his sacred day.
The young baby who grew up to perform miracles, and was crucified and resurrected yes, that would be me, good old Mithras who was one of the religious deities of the Roman Empire, you thought i was talking about who? Oh, the virgin, manger, shepherds, 12 disciples and dying for the peace of mankind bit. I understand now.
No silly, i pre-dated Jesus by centuries but admittedly all the similarities are a remarkable coincidence i suppose but Mithrasism was around a long time before Christianity so that makes it all the more remarkable that both our two stories are almost identical.
I had a feast day towards the end of December, part of Saturnalia, where we showed exactly how much humans kick ass. Every year, you see, winter arrived with the shortest day followed by the longest night of the year (aka the winter solstice), and us Romans celebrated that day with a feast, debauchery and a festival, although it was mostly the debauchery to be honest.
Christmas then started out as a celebration for us Romans and our array of Gods and if that bothers you, sod off back to your church and buy your own god a golden calf or something but i'm sure the early Christians never just took my story and embellished it by pasting their own guy into my story but anyway, just enjoy your mince pie and mulled wine and don't think too hard about it.

Our Father, Who Art In The Pub

The British do like trying to ignore health advice if it lets them get drunk which is why the Craxton Arms pub has renamed it's beer 'Substantial Meal' in an attempt to skirt the rules and stay open as it is complying with the rule that pubs can serve alcohol if it comes with a substantial meal.
A bar in Nottingham has registered itself as a Church and claiming it is a place of worship as places of worship can remain open although the Nottingham’s registrar general is unlikely to grant the application as Churches don't normally come with a bouncers, a Real Ale menu and a Pool table.
Maybe they should have gone with the Wine angle instead, wine being the blood of Christ and all that but it does say something about us Brits when the very first point on the Government's Tier system was whether pubs can open and what time you have to leave them by.

 

A Bit Warm

Since 2006, China and France have been working together on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactors HL-2M Tokamak, aka 'The Artificial Sun, which is a nuclear fusion reactor which replicates the natural reactions of our own Star.  
Today was the day of the big turn on and it worked and they did create an artificial Sun, actually they created 10 of them because the reactor heated to a temperatures of over 150 million degrees Celsius, ten times hotter than the core of the Sun.
An excited boffin in white overalls with pens in his top pocket said that this is the first step towards 'almost limitless clean energy' which is obviously a good thing but creating a machine that burns at the heat of 10 Suns!!
Nope, can't imagine how that could go horribly wrong.

Covid Vacinne Not Madatory But...

The first Covid vaccine has been approved by the UK government and it could start to be rolled out next week and the most common question have heard since is, 'Do i have to have it?
The vaccination is not mandatory so nobody who doesn't want it for whatever reason, is going to be forced to have it but there are cute ways the Government are currently considering to coerce enough people into it to achieve the 60%-70% needed to achieve the herd immunity required.
England’s deputy chief medical officer Prof Jonathan Van-Tam said there would be a digital record of which vaccine people were given and how many doses which suggests a database will be kept of who had been immunised and who hasn't and Wales has announced that immunisation cards are to be issued to show you have taken the jab.
The current technique is for the Government to reassure everyone that despite the vaccine being fast tracked, it is perfectly safe and they are wheeling out trusted celebrities to repeat their message and some politicians are offering to get the jab live on tv while some travel firms are saying that they will require proof of travelers having been immunised before they are allowed to travel with them and that could come with travel passes on the NHS app on your mobile phone.
One other way would be for the Coronavirus vacinne to be compulsory for performing certain jobs, such as Teachers, Care and NHS Workers so while the simple answer is no you don't have to have it but if you want to travel or in some cases keep your job, you are going to have to roll up your sleeve.

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Special Guest Blogger: Robert L May

Christmas is the biggest shopping holiday of the year so it's no surprise that companies spend every December bombarding us with ads full of cheerful, wholesome, uplifting messages to capitalize on all that goodwill and turn it into money but not everything in the Western World is based on some crass marketing campaign.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, however, was and that's how the story of a nasally deformed outcast reindeer came about.
My employer, department store chain Montgomery, would give away free colouring books to children around Christmas but they decided it would be cheaper to make their own book instead of buying them from publishers so i was asked to write a Christmas promotion story to be handed out, the only condition was that it had to be an animal story with a main character like Ferdinand the Bull'.
I came up with how a foggy Christmas Eve threatened to disrupt the Jolly Fat Mans sleigh trip but he used Rudolph's glowing, shiny red nose as a makeshift lamp to guide his sleigh therefore saving Christmas and becoming a hero.
The result was a bestselling children's book for which i was paid a nice round sum of zero dollars but i was given the rights to Rudolph a few years later as payment once the store thought they had exhausted all the reindeer stuff unaware that a Rudolph song, movie and a mountain of merchandise would soon be hovering into view as my little reindeer became a permanent addition to the Santa legend.
My brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, was a Christmas song specialist and wrote songs that you've no doubt heard every Christmas since you were born such as Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree and A Holly Jolly Christmas and he adapted my poem to music and had it recorded by Gene Autry and as the song says, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, he went down in history.