Prince Harry Wants Best Of Both

I was kind of hoping that once Prince Harry and his family moved away, we wouldn't have to keep hearing about him but he is back in the news again bemoaning his lack of privacy, whilst giving an interview on board a Double Decker bus driving around Los Angeles.
I would be the first to admit that some of the British Press is less than honourable, the tabloid press are still settling lawsuits and paying out millions for hacking celebrities phones which shows just how heinouis they can be and the coverage of Meghan Markle from some of the right wing was outright racist, despite how much they try to deny it.
Harry therefore has a legitimate claim against some of the Press but the rub is that while condemning them, the couple also courted them for their projects such as the Invictus Games and it is a very taut tightrope to try and walk if you are complaining about the coverage of the press while simultaneously craving the publicity from the same people.
What it says to me is that Prince Harry and his wife only want the 'right type' of publicity, none of the awkward questions which the likes of James Corden and Oprah Winfrey will certainly not throw their way so either step back from the spotlight entirely or take the publicity and good and bad from the the double edged sword of press coverage.
 

Special Guest Blogger: Saint John Bosco

When i was a kid i would play with the other kids but my family were God fearing church goers but the other kids were more interested in playing in the dirt and climbing trees so whenever i tried to bring God into the conversation, they would just ignore me and continue sticking worms up their noses.
Kids, it seems, are not interested in learning about God and that Churchy stuff and my approach of 'Hey, lets build a tree house and did you know Jesus died for our sins' wasn't a winner but i saw a traveling troupe of circus performers and was enthralled by their magic tricks and i realised that if i learned their tricks, i could use them to attract others and hold their attention long enough to ram religion down their throat, so that's what i did.
I would put on shows for the neighbours and developed an act of pull a rabbit from a hat, guess the card and then a bit of a pray.
I left home and worked as a hired farm laborer and as a grape picker at a vineyard before joining the seminary and following six years of study and preparation, was ordained as a priest.
I went to work in the slums of Turin and went into the streets and started to meet young men and boys and used my pick a card, don't show me and have you noticed how great God is method and it worked a bit too well because other kids from other areas would come to see my performance and other priests without my knack for making a pet disappear complained that i was stealing their flock.
I pioneered the art of what became known as Gospel Magic to engage the youth so think of a Grey animal in any country beginning with the letter D eating a Green vegetable. Got it? Now, i don't know if Jesus every ventured out to Denmark and saw an Elephant eating a pea but if he had...Thank you, i'm here all week, all month and for all of eternity actually.

Special Guest Blogger: Aeschylus

A small handful of great individuals are not content to get their names in the footnotes of history and then quietly expire. No, there are those brave few who achieve greatness and then top it off by kicking the bucket in a way so ridiculously implausible that people would have talked about them for years even if they hadn't done anything else.
I was a big hitter in the tragedy genre but before i picked up my quill as a playwright, i was working at a vineyard until the god Dionysus visited me in my sleep and commanded me to turn my attention to writing.
Not one to turn down the son of Zeus who could turn people blind and mad, i began scribbling away but it didn't start off as planned, at one play i was chased out of town by the audience for asebeia, a criminal charge in ancient Greece for the 'desecration and mockery of divine Gods'.
I did get better and became an absolute beast at writing plays that ended tragically but my own ending was a tragedy that even i wouldn't have written as unbelievable.
I began losing my hair at quite an early age and as every bald man knows, if you're balding you might as well kiss your love life goodbye.  
Even if you’re 16 and have a full head of hair, women can tell if you’re going to go bald and that spells trouble. Let’s face it, women hate bald men and it was a woman who told me that she had seen me being killed by a falling object so i played it smart and stayed outside as much as possible to avoid anything crashing down on my head indoors.
One afternoon, why sat outside writing, an eagle mistook my bald head for a rock to crack the shell of it's prey and dropped a tortoise on it, killing me instantly and although nobody could name two of my plays today, it made sure my name is remembered millennia later and i'll take that.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Francis de Sales

You can always tell when it is a slow news day because you end up with headlines such as 'Dog Gets Head Stuck In Railings' or 'Squirrel Steals Knickers From Washing Line' but those are the days when i get a call because i am the patron saint of Journalists.
My father wanted me to be a judge and sent me to the best schools in France to prepare me for a lifetime of wearing powdered wigs but i always felt a tug towards the Church, only i was too scared to tell my father that so i took lessons in the gentlemanly pursuits of riding and fencing until i got up the nerve to tell him he had wasted his money.
What made me come out of the Catholic closet was falling off a horse three times and everytime i fell my sword came out of the scabbard and came to rest on the ground in the shape of the Christian cross.
A vision or even a dream would have been a lot less painful but i decided to take it as a sign and come clean to Dad that i didn't want to dress up in black, judge people and tell them what to do for a career, i wanted to be a Catholic Priest.
Pulling strings like a marionette's puppeteer on opium, he got me a job at with the Bishop of Geneva which just happened to be next door to Calvinist territory and boy they didn't like us Catholics.
The Bishop decided i would be a good choice to head into their territory and try and spread the word of Catholicism but after the first few assaults, doors slammed in my face and rocks bouncing off my head, i decided it would be safer to slip pamphlets extolling the virtue of Catholicism and how we are all one under God and Catholics are awesome with their wafers and wine and no amount of lotion would sooth a pitchfork up the backside in hell.
It worked, sort of, some shifted back to our side but it got me the job as Patron Saint of Journalists but even i cant do anything to make Rupert Murdoch's Newspapers readable, i'm just a Saint, for that you would need a miracle worker.

Special Guest Blogger: Colonel Harland Sanders

Most people probably thought that white haired man on the KFC shopfront was a corporate logo but that's me, Colonel Sanders, and i was a real person responsible for bringing slabs of meat from the factory farm to your plate and showing you why America is so respected culinarily across the world.
I wasn't actually a Colonel in the military sense, the title was an honorary one and selling chicken only happened after i tried my hand at being a farmhand, street-car conductor, steam engine stoker, insurance salesman and studied law by correspondence and practiced in justice-of-the-peace courts in Arkansas until a courtroom brawl with a client derailed my legal career, and then finally a filling station operator and then began selling fried chicken from old family dining room table wheeled into the front of the service station during the Great Depression.
I developed a 'secret recipe' and it sold so well i opened my first KFC shop in South Salt Lake, Utah in 1952 and embraced my Colonel title and tried to look the part by growing facial hair and donning a white suit, which helped to hide flour stains nicely, and bleached my mustache and goatee to match my white hair.
I painted advertising signs on barns for miles around but a rival kept painting over one of my signs so i put down my chicken, picked up a gun and got into a bit of a gunfight, wounding him but my charges were dropped after i was arrested.
I sold the Kentucky Fried Chicken name to to food conglomerate Heublein and once the cheque cleared, began to deride the chain’s gravy as' slop' and its owners as 'a bunch of booze hounds' although they kept my image as the public face of the company
I developed plans to franchise “The Colonel’s Lady’s Dinner House” restaurant which i opened with my wife in Shelbyville, Kentucky as a competitor and when Heublein threatened to block the plan, i sued for $122 million but we settled out of court for $1 million and a chance to give a cooking lesson to Heublein executives in return for my promise to stop criticizing Kentucky Fried Chicken’s food.
There have been protests from the tree hugging vegetarian mob but they can all can go to hell, the chicken is born to be chopped up and put into a fryer so what if the chicken’s short life is a sorry state, pumped full of chemicals and filled full of hormones, at least we no longer slip in a rat so eat up and if you enjoyed it, the chicken didn’t die painfully in vain!

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Pope Fabian

Most of the important positions in World History were made by dedicated people of singular mind and purpose, tirelessly exhausting themselves and their resources to achieve a clearly defined goal. Then there are others who by luck, find themselves stood in the right position at the right time and fall into major roles like a fat kid at a skating rink. I am the second type.
I was a simple Farmer and went to Rome after Pope Anteros died just to have a bit of a nosy around during the Papal election and there i was stood in the square along with thousands of other people when suddenly a dove come and sat on my head.
Now to anyone else i was a guy stood in the square with a bird on my head hoping it didn't crap down the back of my neck but to everyone else it was a sign that the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, had chosen me as the next Pope.
The prize for limbo-ing under that low bar was the Church agreed and i was handed the funny hat and told i was now Pope and to sort out the Roman's who had been persecuting Christians.
Luckily my time coincided with the mild mannered Emperor Philip who agreed that the bad blood between us and them was not a good thing and called a halt to the attacks on us, unfortunately he died not long afterwards and was replaced by the not so mild mannered new emperor, Decius, who wasn't quite so keen on the Jesus crowd and ordered all Christians to deny Christ.
Of course we said no and suddenly we were facing a horde of Roman Centurians with swords and the Christians looked towards me for leadership and help to keep out this vast army of lunatics, so i prayed.  
Obviously looking skyward and saying 'little help please?' is not the most terrifying obstacle to a large group of heavily armed men waving around very sharp and pointy swords and it turned out that it was about as frightening as a hamster with the word 'Boo' painted on its nose because they lopped off my head and the heads of pretty much everyone else they could get hold of.
Still, could have been worse, stood next to me that day in the Square that day was an ancestor of King Herod and that wouldn't have ended well.

Special Guest Blogger: Orson Welles

I am probably remembered for writing, directing, and starring in what is generally referred to as the greatest film of all time but i hardly made it out of childhood.
What with Malaria, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, asthma, sinus headaches and congenital anomalies in the spine and if that wasn’t enough, i also had flat feet, which led to problems with my feet and ankles and i spent much of my childhood bedridden but i did meet Harry Houdini who taught me a few magic tricks and i thought i could be a magician if the acting never worked out, i went from your basic sleight-of-hand tricks to sawing a person in half.
During the Second World War, i went over to Europe to help entertain the troops, bringing along star Marlene Dietrich to saw in two but for some reason the men preferred her in one piece but appreciated the effort nonetheless.
Before the film for which i would become most well know, i did a radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ short story, The War of the Worlds, which scared the living crap out of people who thought it was a real alien invasion, my idea to make it as realistic as possible with shockingly authentic newscast-style version and eyewitness reports, making it seem like Earth truly was being invaded by Martians.
Strangely HG Wells was driving through San Antonio, Texas not long after the broadcast, when he had to stop and ask for directions. The person that he asked was none other than me and we spent the rest of the day hanging out and laughing at the furore his story and my radio broadcast had created.
Although Citizen Kane has gone on to become recognized as one of the greatest films ever, if not the greatest, my portrayal of real-life publishing tycoon, William Randolph Hearst really wound up the real Hearst who refused to allow any mention of it in his newspapers and refused to publicize the film in his papers which drove people away from seeing the film and it bombed at the box office.
I then had a well known falling out with Hollywood after they changed the ending of one of my films and i went into self imposed exile and went on a tour Europe and ate, i did eat a lot and at my death i topped 300 lbs and suffered diabetes and died in the same week as Rock Hudson and Yul Brynner and that made all the newspapers.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Sebastian

Statistically speaking, about 75% of you are either Christian or Jewish, and about 75% haven't read the Bible so to you it's probably explains why the book has a reputation for being some nice stories about how you should stop cursing or a man living inside a whale but i am probably best known for being in the REM video, that's me tied to a tree with an arrow in his side.
I was a Roman Prison Guard but i kept quiet about being a Christian to avoid ending up as lion food but i would allow people to visit their relatives who were imprisoned due to their beliefs.
The local prefect had a daughter who was mute and i prayed that she would speak again and she did and i decided this was my chance to come out of the religious closet so to speak and announced to the prefect that i had prayed and God had used his awesome power to get his daughter to speak and he was so thrilled, he changed to Christianity and released all the Christian prisoners and resigned therefore losing me my job and bringing in a new prefect, one who was not quite so keen on Christians and ordered me killed.
Yep, that's me in the corner, that's me in the spot-light, losing my religion and the feeling in my limbs as archers filled my body with arrows but they made the fatal mistake of not checking i was dead because when they came to bury me, they found i was still alive and a woman took me home to nurse me back to health and i decided that when i got my strength back i would go see the Emperor and demand he stop persecuting Christians.
So there we stood, two men of honour, who have jousted together in the religious glory of our maker, face to face and how often i had rehearsed that moment of destiny in my dreams. The panoply to encapsulate the unspoken nobility of a comradeship but what i didn't think was that he would seize me and beat me to death and throw my body into the sewer.
Not the ending i was considering but it got me into one of the most famous music videos of all time but if i had prayed a little harder i always wonder if i could have got into a Gun N Roses one.

Special Guest Blogger: Natalie Wood

Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko is not a very all American name so my mum changed it to Natalie Wood and it was her who pushed me to perform, my first role was in Happy Land and i was only four years old at the time.
That led to Tomorrow is Forever and then Miracle on 34th Street where i was asked to cry in a scene and for authenticity, my mother helped me out by ripping up a live butterfly right in front of me.
Hollywood makes you grow up fast and while idling around sets i picked up some very adult habits, such as smoking like a train.
I made the leap from child star to teen idol when at 16 i appeared in the James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause as the surly teenager Judy, i was then dating a wannabe singer called Elvis Presley.
I always had an intense fear of water after almost drowning in a river as a child and wore a large bracelet on my left wrist to hide an ugly bone protrusion.
For my 18th birthday, my studio arranged a present which would affect the rest of my life, they arranged date with Robert Wagner, the man who i would marry twice and played a big part at the end of my life.
Hollywood decided i was washed up at 25 years old as i wouldn't make the transformation from child star to fully fledged actress and I also had a few 'personal problems' which included getting my stomach pumped three times after sleeping pill overdoses.
Despite that i got the the role of Maria in the film version of West Side Story, beating out Hollywood heavy hitters like Audrey Hepburn and Jane Fonda for the part.
On November 29, 1981, fate came for me when in the middle of filming Brainstorm, my husband, my co-star Christopher Walken and i decided to take a weekend boat trip on Wagner’s yacht Splendour.
A few drinks, some painkillers, an argument with my husband, a big scream for help and one big splash later and what the poilce officially called 'drowning and other undetermined factors'.
The last i heard the police had listed my husband as a person of interest in the case, maybe just a wild grab in the dark which, incidentally, is exactly the last thing he ever gave me. 

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Seraphim of Sarov

Do you live in the boring suburbs but dream of living in a lonely hut on a windswept moor? Do you long to trade in your suit and waistcoat for a smock? Do you eat microwave dinners all the while wishing you were munching on grass? Yum Yum! Is your next ideal home improvement a bucket under the hole in your twig roof? Well get ready because i'm the Saint for you!
After being ordained i wondered what could i do to prove to the man upstairs that i was on Team God and nothing says i'm with you big guy then going to live in solitude in a hut and eating nothing but grass.
Twenty five years i lived in that shack and people would keep turning up to ask me questions because living alone in a ramshackle log cabin and eating Grass in 18th Century Russia somehow qualified you as a wise man.
So people would arrive but rather than give me a potato or a turnip to go with my grass, would ask me weird questions like why did God make mosquitoes and if God sees everything, does he watch me peeing?    
One day, while chopping wood, a gang of thieves attacked me with the handle of my own axe but what they expected to steal from a man whose meals are grass i don't know but all they found was a whole lot of empty hut but it forced me to rethink my whole strategy because obviously living in a hut for a quarter of a century was obviously not enough for God so i decided a hut was too glamorous so packed up my grass and went to live on a rock and just for a special touch, i spent 1,000 successive nights in continuous prayer with my arms raised to the sky.
Still people came to ask me questions and i got a reputation for answering the questions before they were asked but that bit was easy, some fat guy waddled up and before he would open his mouth i would say 'Because you eat too much' or a man with pus filled pustules on his face would roll up and i would say 'because mirrors haven't been invented yet' but generally the generic 'because God will's it' did the trick.
I died while kneeling and praying before a picture of Mary and Jesus which came a quite a relief, not the religious moment, but because my arms were killing me.

Special Guest Blogger: Liberace

While most childhoods are spent staring at cartoons over bowls of sugary breakfast cereal, some kids are more focused on things like mastering a musical instrument and i was playing the piano aged three and by seven i was performing all the difficult pieces of classical music.
My aim was always to play classical music with the boring bits left out which was surprisingly easy to do, most hour long symphonies you can cut down to 5 minutes of the decent bits and to be fair and the good bits is all anyone knows. Mention the 1812 Overture and all anyone remembers is the last bit with the canons so why subject them to the other 55 minutes when all they want is that final bit.
I began using my real name, Wladziu Valentino Liberace but as the intern said to the President, that's quite a mouthful so i changed it to Walter Busterkeys and began out playing jazz piano in bars and nightclubs which never went down with my parents until they saw how much money i was pulling in.
My secret was to not only play the piano in such a extravagant way but to dress in such a way that nobody ever forgot seeing me. I changed my name to Liberace and introduced some trademarks such as a candelabra and the regular tuxes and tails soon swapped places with costumes like a Faberge egg, a 150-pound mink cape, and one particularly flashy one was a flame costume with mirrors studded all over the cape on metallic fabric and featuring 600 electric lights.
One was so blingy it almost killed me, i had spent all day in a room polishing the thousands of little mirrors on it with a cleaning chemical and the fumes caused me to black out and the doctors only gave a 20% survival chance. Ventilation, very underrated.  
1950's America was a great place unless you were black or gay and as i ticked one of those boxes, i denied it despite mincing more than a butcher, and even successfully sued a few newspapers who tried to out me as a homosexual.
Obviously i was but nobody could say for certain but when i tested positive for AIDS, i kept it a secret and didn’t seek any treatment for it which turned out to be as effective as it sounds as i died 18 months later.

Use Your Own Damn Lip Balm

According to a new poll, once we are released back into the wild with an armful of vaccine, there are all manner of everyday occurrences which we won't be doing post pandemic but luckily most of which i never did anyway.  
Top is use someone else’s lip balm which i never knew was a thing, how long have people been sharing lip balm for the lip and the same with number 2, take a bite of someone else’s sandwich and number 3 is use department store makeup samples.
Luckily i have never used anyone else's lip balm, taken a bite from their sandwich or used the samples in a department store so i am quite happy to not do those things ever again.
Further down the list is share crisps in a pub, use gym equipment after someone else and check your hair in someone elses sunglasses reflection which i will hold my hands up to doing although there are plenty of other reflective surfaces which are not directly above someones mouth and nose to check the do out in.
Go to shopping Centres is featured which is not what the shopping centres want to hear, those with any shops left in it come summer anyway but surprisingly near the top, but not the number one, is kiss a stranger.
Obviously it is the height of folly to kiss a stranger right now, that’s the equivalent of licking the hand rail in the hospital but like Hawaiian shirts and tank tops, it is a fad which will soon pass because while there may be some nervousness now, by Christmas we will probably be behaving in the same reckless way we always did.
That said, it's the perfect excuse for avoiding John from IT at the Christmas Party who cruises the room armed with the mistletoe although the  'Sorry John, i'm afraid i don't want to kiss because of Covid' excuse is a lot less stinging then the usual 'Sorry John, i’m afraid I don’t want to kiss you because you're a terrible person' excuse.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Kentigern Mungo

After Mungo Jerry and the dog from Mary, Mungo and Midge, i am probably the third most famous Mungo in history but my story begins before i was even born.
My grandfather was the King of Lothian and my mother was a princess but when she got pregnant with me out of wedlock, my grandfather being as grumpy and cantankerous as basically everything else Scottish, threw her off the top of a hill but rather than killing her and her unborn child, she survived so he put her into a coracle and pushed it out to sea.
Rubbing his hands together and saying 'job done', she drifted across the Firth of Forth to Culross in Fife and months later little old me came screeching into the World.
The Picts were not the most hospitable people, even the Romans decided against taking them on and instead built a wall to keep them in so my Church was not the most popular place despite me once restoring life to a robin that had been killed by some of my classmates but eventually the horde of ginger bearded maniacs armed with swords made me an offer i couldn't refuse, not if i wanted to keep the top half of my body in the same postal area as the lower part i couldn't anyway, so i moved to Wales where i met up with Saint David for a while until i was invited back to Scotland where i performed the miracle that i am most well known for.
The Queen Languoreth of Strathclyde was suspected of infidelity by her husband, King Riderch, who demanded to see her wedding ring, which he heard she had given to her lover but in reality the King had sneakily thrown it into the River Clyde.
Faced with execution she appealed to me for help and i ordered a messenger to catch a fish in the river. On opening the fish, with a flourish and a shout of 'TA-DA' produced the ring from inside the fish, a bit like when your uncle produces a coin from behind your ear but anyway it allowed the Queen to clear her name and keep her head off a pike.
There was also a miracle about a fire going out and i got it going again but the fish one is much more cooler. 

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Sometimes you have to give credit where it is due no matter how much it hurts and i have to give credit to the UK Government because although they have got many, many thing wrong during this Covid pandemic, they go the vaccination part of it exactly right.
They may have paid over the odds but they were one of the very first nations to reserve a wide range of vaccines and through more luck than judgemnent, most of them have come up Trumps so we have a large range of vaccines coming our way, 20 million of them already coarsing through the veins of the population.
The idea of vaccinating the most vulnerable first was the right way to do things and the decision to give one vacinne to as many as possible to at least give them some protection before the second dose and gave full protection was something i was shouting about before they made the decision.
The final coup de grace was the decision to get NHS, doctors, vaccination centres and pharmacies to give the innoculations which is why the top four cohorts have been injected ahead of schedule and the roll out to the rest is about to begin which also has the fortunate effect of bringing the 12 week gap between
jabs down to 10 or 11 weeks.     
When the inevitable inquiry comes the Government will get a richly deserved kicking, their initial response was worse than awful and the grim death toll is down entirely to them but nobody will be able to pin any blame on them for the vaccine purchase, distribution and implementation. 

Special Guest Blogger: Johan Sebastian Bach

Being famously hired to make music that sends people to sleep isn't the greatest achievement to boast about but that was how i got my break, Count Kaiserling, a Russian diplomat living in Germany and suffered from insomnia and commissioned me to create something to help him fall to sleep so i wrote the Goldberg Variations.
All my family were musical and when my parents died when i was 10, i went to live with my brother who was working as a church organist and taught me how to play the organ.
I heard that one of my favorite composers, a man named Dieterich Buxtehude, was living in the northern German city of Lubeck and i was so interested in meeting the man and hearing his music that i walked 280 miles to get there.
At the time, Buxtehude was serving as the organist of St. Mary’s Church in Lubeck, and i had ambitions of taking over when Buxtehude retired. However, there was a condition attached to the job position, i would have to marry one of Buxtehude’s daughters to secure the position of organist. Putting it politely, they were not lookers, so i decided organist was not what i wanted to be and walked the 280 miles back for home.
I was hired by Prince Leopold, a German prince, as his director of music but he was a real religious type, any music i wrote had to be religious so i write 'In The Name of Jesus' on each bit and he was happy with that.
I landed a job as the choir leader for two churches in Leipzig, teaching music and giving private lessons and i wrote probably the tune i am most famous for, the The Brandenburg Concertos.
To hear it you would think i spent months perfecting it but actually it was a mix of six pieces of music i had previously written running into each other.
It wasn't that great a hit at the time but my son went on to teach piano, one of his prodigies was young boy whose father said he had great potential, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or something, i do wonder sometimes what ever happened to him.
My health was declining and i lost the use of his eyes due to cataracts and had surgery to try and cure it but the surgeon was a fraud and actually made my eyesight worse.
I did hear that i had three piece of music put onto the Voyager Golden Record and launched into space as an introduction for any intelligent life out there which would be nice because if they ever make it to Earth, they will notice there isn't too much intelligence down here.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Hilary of Poitiers

My philosophy was that just because you can't prove something ever existed, that doesn't mean it never existed, it just means we should maybe question why we think it existed based on a total lack of evidence so i disagreed with the majority of people around me who thought that the purpose of life was only to satisfy their desires.
'We are not beasts grazing in a pasture' i would explain usually followed by 'can you at least stop doing that when i'm speaking to you'.
I thought that human beings should rise above their desires and live a life of virtue but i was very much in the minority on that one, if the choice for a Frenchman is a cold shower or making unofficial use of the animal shed with Naughty Nicole, then it was always going to be move that sheep out the way.  
As i was popping up at inopportune moments and ruining the moment for many people by querying if they were aware that the course to a blissful existence was by not doing that with the Monroe twins, the local Church received many complaints and it exiled me to the Orient.
After just three short years of me, the Emperor told me to do one also but rather than go straight home i took a detour through Greece and Italy to spread my theory that the path to God did not include having to wipe down the surfaces afterwards.        
Saint Patrick may have stitched up the whole Snake Saint thing but i am the patron saint of snakebites because while in Geneoa, a young boy had swallowed an Adder while sleeping and he was bought to me where i made him vomit up the serpent and saved his life.
Telling people to stop porking each other was never a good way to get people to listen to me but saving lives was and i rubber stamped my new found fame by writing hymns although none you would have ever heard of, they were not exactly banging tunes, but i am recognised as the first hymn writer in the West so next time you feel the stirring in your loins, write a hymn instead, you will feel much better afterwards and nobody has to fetch the mop and bucket.

Special Guest Blogger: Roy Orbison

Let’s start with the elephant in the room, i was not blind, i simply performed with dark sunglasses on, a great swath of the public came to the conclusion that i was visually impaired, but i wore them to start with because i suffered from severe stage fright early on in my career and they went with my dark image.
It all nearly never happened for me, i quit performing at the start of my career as i thought the record company were being unfair but rock n roll music was just taking off and i wanted to be part of it so after 7 months i stopped sulking and started up again.
Early in their careers, both Elvis Presley and the Beatles served as the opening acts for me and i beat Dave Grohl by 40 years with the broken leg on stage thing, i did that 40 years before him when i fell off a motorbike and went on stage with my leg in a cast.
One of my first hits was 'Running Scared', putting words to Ravel's 'Bolero' and people would ask me how i could pen such heartfelt songs, well your wife and children dying would help, my wife died in a motorbike crash aged 25 and two of my children died in a fire two years later.
Encouraged by the string of hit films that Elvis Presley had starred in earlier in the decade, MGM decided to try get me into movies but i made one, The Fastest Guitar Alive —in which i was a Civil War-era spy who could shoot bullets out of a guitar which kick-started an acting career that spanned all the way from 1967 to slightly later in 1967, my movie career was one really bad film long.
I had a strong fascination with cars and a thing i would do was if i spotted a car i liked heading down the street, would be to follow it, approach the driver, and offer to buy it from them on the spot. It never occurred to me how the person would get home.
Despite having been a star primarily in the 60s, i did experience a resurgence in popularity just before the end of my life as part of the Traveling Wilburys supergroup and some original new recordings.
Ironically, it was because my career was peaking again that i never got around to making a doctor’s appointment after a month of chest pains and i died aged 52.

Howdy, Ahlan and Nǐ Hǎo Mars

 If there is any intelligent life on Mars they will be sick to death of us Earthlings by the end of the month as three of our Space thing land on their planet.
After six months of careening through space, first up is the Hope Orbiter launched by the United Arab Emirates which is at least staying in the Martian sky where it will study the planet’s atmosphere and weather but right behind that is China's Tianwen-1 which is a 3 in 1 affair, consisting of an orbiter, a landing pod and a rover to study the Red Planets surface.
The final piece of Space equipment is NASA's Perseverance which is also a Rover but contains also a helicopter which will attempt to fly around the surface but there was almost a fourth but the European–Russian Mars mission has been delayed by two years due to the Coronavirus outbreak.
The Hope Orbitor is already in position and sending back pictures but the other two will be arriving shortly and have the additional problem of sticking the landing in Mars thin atmosphere.
The scientists all say that the missions are about gathering information and analyzing geology but it is hard to deny that the only thing we all care about is any evidence of life on Mars, and if there is, it will be saying stop polluting our planet by sending all your crap here!

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Valentine

Valentine's Day celebrates the idea of love, expensive dinners and racy lingerie which is a cheap and cheerful Christian version of Lupercalia which was a pagan festival running from the 13th to the 15th of February to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility by sacrificing a goat and a dog but like all things Roman, it turned into an orgy of food and sex.
Actually, thinking about it, sex is a lot like food. The less you have of it, the more you want it and once someone has put their penis into it, you're decidedly done for a while but while the Romans were running around naked and giving their womenfolk something to hang their towels on, the Christians were sat at home wondering when their new relgion was going to find a way to okay some of that sweet action.
That idea is based on the story of me, St. Valentine of Rome, a priest who married couples against the emperor's orders, because married men couldn't be drafted and therefore attempting to foil the Emperor Claudius Gothicus' plans to build an army.
That went down about as well as it sounds and he just changed the law so that married men could be drafted anyway and i was arrested and put in prison where i got chatting with the jailer who said that his daughter was blind and if i could have a word with the big guy upstairs to restore her sight, he would convert to Christianity and free me.
I placed my hands onto her eyes and her eyesight returned and with that the jailer freed me and all of the Christian inmates. I left a note for the jailers daughter and signed it Yours Valentine.
Now free i went back to banging on about God and Jesus again and i was quickly picked up again and hoping to appeal to the Emperor's better nature, attempted to convince Claudius of Christianity. Claudius became angry and sentenced me to death saying either i renounced my faith or be beaten with clubs and beheaded.
I figured that my God wouldn't allow me to be beheaded but i did think he was leaving it late when the executioner was lining up the back of my neck with his axe and on the second bounce as my head went skittering across the tiled floor i realised he wasn't saving me. True love may never die but i sure did!
Obviously i am the Patron Saint of happy marriages, love and lovers but also epilepsy and the Plague for some reason but remember me if you are planning on sipping champagne out of our partners shoes and eating oysters by candle light, but if you are single don't fret, you can always find a cup of tea with a game of bingo afterwards down at the local Catholic Church.

Special Guest Blogger: Jesse James

I seem to have evolved into a Robin Hood type figure which is half right, i certainly did the first part of stealing but i never gave to the poor, i spent my money on whiskey, bullets and Zerelda, my wife Zeralda that is, not my mum Zeralda.
That did get a bit confusing, having a wife and a mum with the same name but it was a family thing, her being my mum's niece and my cousin.     
Our gang, the James-Younger Gang was one of the most well-known and most wanted criminal organizations of our day committing robberies across 10 states but we started out as part of the irregular military forces called Bushwackers and when General Robert E. Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Court House, we just carried on fighting and we killed the Union soldiers sent to track us down and mutilated their bodies.
When i got shot in the chest, i was nursed back to health with the help of Zerelda (not my Mum) and we were married soon afterwards and then my brother Frank and i joined up with four Younger brothers and off we went but as our actions were considered the South continuing the fight against the hated North, the South loved us, one Newspaper calling us their equivalent of Lancelot and King Arthur.
We first gained notoriety when we robbed a bank in Gallatin and shot the teller and then moved onto robbing trains for which we would dress up in the white robes of the KKK which got the Pinkerton lawmen on our backs and they raided our family farm and threw an explosive into the farmhouse and killed my brother and blew off one of my mum's arms.
Our gang came to a bloody end when we attempted to rob a bank in Minnesota when the townsfolk decided they didn't want us to steal their money and fought back, killing the Younger brothers with me and my brother Frank being the only ones to survive.
Frank took it as a sign to hang up his gun but i recruited another gang and after another bout of robberies was hiding out in the home of the Robert and Charley Ford brothers.
Unfortunately for me, Robert made a deal with the law and to save his own hide, told me to look at a painting on the wall and then shot me in the back of the head but for what it’s worth, my mother made sure that my epithet read as follows: 'In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here.” At least she didn’t hold a grudge.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Raymond of Peñafor

You would assume that if the notoriously philandering King James of Aragon was to be accompanied on a trip to Majorca with the local Chaplain to preach about Jesus and the ten commandments, he would stand before the mirror and while knotting up his tie, he might have given himself a bit of a pep-talk.
A simple reminder to learn from his mistakes, not to say anything from which people would take grave offence and at least pay attention to a few of the Commandments, especially the Thou shalt not commit adultery one and leave the women alone at least while i was present… well, how difficult can it be? Very difficult indeed, would appear to be the answer to that particular query because he turned up at the Barcelona dock with his mistress.
All the way there they would keep disappearing below stairs to 'check the poop deck' but it was obvious by the sound of the hammock creaking that the only thing being checked was the King's floozy.
When we got to Majorca i told his Majesty that it wasn't good to tell the heathens to obey the Commandments if he is breaking it with someone who he didn't trade wedding vows with and told him to send her back home or I was leaving but he refused and threatened any ship captain who would take me back to Spain so i did what anyone in my position would do and spread my cloak upon the water, tied up one corner of it to a stick for a sail, made the sign of the Cross, stepped onto the cloak, and sailed along for six hours until i reached Barcelona.
To be fair the King did a pretty good job without me and between bumping squishy body parts with his fancy woman, managed to convert the people of Majorca to the Catholic Church and therefore making it a favourite destination for Brits to come and drink enough lager to drown a household pet each summer and i was one hundred years old at the time of my death and invented sail boarding so that's a result.

Trump: Impeachment 2

Japanese scientists challenged the ConceptNet 4 AI system to a IQ test and it scored an IQ of 85 or the same as 85 Donald Trump supporters who are still miffed that their man now has the word Ex-President in front of his name.
I haven't seen any of the Donald Trump impeachment trial but it would seem it's a pretty open and shut case, did he incite his supporters to riot which left people dead? Pretty sure that telling them to 'Walk down to the Capitol' after telling them the election was stolen and to 'fight like hell' is a very strong hint that they should go to the Capitol and fight like hell.
From what i have heard, he will probaly escape further censure because the Republicans won't vote against him, not enough to convict him anyway, so he will be free to run again if he wants.
Seems pretty shameful that the Party will be putting politics before prosecuting a man who caused so much pain and suffering but America does seem to have a right wing problem, and anyone with even the briefest glimpse of a history book knows where right wing politics end up.
What makes America even scarier is the absolutely crazy gun laws it has, a large group of demonstrators is scary enough but when some of them are armed with semi-automatic weapons it takes it on to a whole new level, and then you throw in the 'God' part as well, it's madness.
Members of the Guns and God crowd were spotted at the storming of the Capitol building and the FBI are warning that right wing extremism, they call it domestic terrorism, is on the rise and is the greatest threat to Americans, far outweighing the threat from Islamic Terrorists which have been the main focus for the past decade.
If Trump isn't found guilty then he gets away with it although he probably wont get another go at the White House, the list of Court Cases in his pending folder will keep him, busy enough but America should beware if someone a bit brighter, a bit more savvy and a bit less obvious rises up out of the Guns and God mob currently running roughshod over the norms.
Trump may just be the battering ram who has happened the door and normalised things which should have stayed firmly on the fringes.

Special Guest Blogger: Jack Kerouac

Before hippies there was the Beat generation, or Beatniks, who were all about berets and black turtlenecks, playing the bongos and writing crap poetry and they filled every coffee house and jazz club and part of their uniform was a copy of my book, On The Road.
I had been pitching books to authors for a decade with no success and then i sent in a semi-autobiographical book about a series of road trips me and my pal Neal Cassady took between 1947 and 1950, staying in some motels which were only slightly less terrifying than your average Bates Motel, and it became a success along with some urban legends.
It was written on a continuous roll of paper that i had taped together to form a 120-foot manuscript but the publishers wanted to add a further air of mystery and spontaneity to make it look as though i was one of those authors who could mash the keyboard with their fist and crap out a fully developed novel about a couple of guys driving around, listening to jazz, and doing drugs so they said i had written a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness masterpiece in an drug-fueled burst of inspiration that transcended conscious thought in three weeks, but it had actually taken 10 years.
My political leanings were hard to fathom out, i was fiercely anti-Communist but hated the Capitalism side of things so both sides of the political fence hated me which may be what got me beaten up by three men outside a New York Cafe but while it may have been my political leanings, or it may also have just been three dudes who hated all the crap potery that they blamed me for which was now spewing out everywhere.
Icons such as The Beatles, The Doors and Bob Dylan were saying that they really dug me but as my writing style was to consume enough alcohol and narcotics to kill an elephant and then just see where that took me, it didn't make me the most healthiest person in the world and i died aged 47 of liver cirrhosis. 

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Angela Of Foligno

I don't know what it is about poor people not being able to wash their own feet but that's one of the many things that i did to pass my day in 13th Century Italy.
Our family was very wealthy so i could have spent my time doing almost anything else but i received a vision one afternoon from Saint Francis who told me my life had no meaning and to go into town and do what i could for the poor people and i thought i could just pop into town and give some fashion advice, along the lines of a fingerless lacy glove would go really well with those dirty street trash clothing but these people had nothing and so for some reason i began the feet cleaning thing.
Now we lived in an age when flushing the toilet meant pooping in a bucket and tipping it out the window so disease was everywhere, especially leprosy and on occasion a scab would fall off into the water.
If you are of a squeamish nature you may want to skip this bit but one day, for some unknown reason, i tasted the water and it was really, really sweet so i took a bigger mouthful and a scab from the leper’s sores became lodged in my throat.
Being a lady, i couldn't just spit it out i so pretended it was a wafer from the Holy Communion and swallowed it. I won't lie, it didn't taste great and i didn't do it again.
When my husband died i gave away all my possessions and started a community devoted to the care of the needy and dictated a series of books about my visions and got made a Saint of Widows, presumably the position of Saint of eating scabs was already taken. 

Special Guest Blogger: Humphrey Bogart

My acting style was to consume enough alcohol to just about remember my own name and then see where that took me, it was a style that almost saved my life while filming African Queen.
I never really got on with much of the Hollywood set, one of the Warner Brothers, Jack, never liked me and never really wanted me in any of his films and i had slanging matches with John Wayne, James Cagney, Laurence Olivier and even Katherine Hepburn who said i was a drunkard but then it wasn't me with my backside hanging over the side of the boat every ten minutes when filming African Queen.
Like many members of the cast and crew, Hepburn came down with dysentery while filming, because she rather foolishly decided that drinking water was something she needed to do. As me and the director John Huston were two of the only members of the crew who didn't get sick, which was attributed to the fact that we drank only whiskey but if dysentery wasn't threatening the health of the crew, other things like malaria and dangerous wild animals were.
I was meant to be English in that film but i couldn’t do the accent so they made character Canadian instead, the problem was i had a bit of a lisp after while serving in the navy, i was escorting a prisoner to a naval prison in Maine when the prisoner struck me in the face with the shackles.
As well as a lisp i had most of my teeth knocked out in a car crash and wore a wig for most of my career due to my hair falling out from taking hormone shots due to a low sperm count.
Of all my movies, The African Queen is simultaneously arguably the best and the least seen, based simply on the fact that, for whatever reason, kids these days don't seem to want to watch black-and-white movies from 1951 about a man and a woman taking a boat down a river but Casablanca is my most well known film which is a bit of a shock because the script would change with each passing day so we never knew how the movie would end until we were practically shooting it, so how it become such a classic came as a great surprise to us people who'd made the damn thing.
I do owe my career to fellow actor George Raft, he turned down Maltese Falcon, High Sierra and Casablanca and all three lead roles went to me instead, cheers George.
Smoking two packs of Chesterfield cigarettes a day meant i obviously died of cancer but i never did bad for lisping, gummy slap-head.

What's The Problem With Covid Passports?

When the idea of Coronovirus Passports was first mentioned i thought it was quite a good idea, and not just for International Travel but for places which attract large crowds such as football matches and music concerts.
Some people didn't agree, stating it would create a two tier system of haves and have nots but if i was sat in a metal container with 200 other people on a six hour flight, then i would be happier knowing none of them are breathing out Covid-19 for the rest of us to breath in.
The Government took a break today from trying to justify why they are delaying, yet again, their hotel quarantine policy to say that they don't have plans to bring in the passport scheme and it is up for other nations to decide what they do.
Greece, Denmark and Sweden have announced that they are introducing such a measure and will require such a certificate to state that the visitor has been immunised before they will let anybody in which may cause a problem if Brit's want to go there but have no record to show they have had both the required jabs.
I would also be happy to know that we are not allowing people in who could potentially start the whole thing up again once we have gone through a year of lock-downs and 120,000 deaths to eradicate it so what we need is an agreement all around the World but it will probably fall to the airways to introduce the passports before people can fly although that doesn't stop people traveling by other means.   
The voices against it include a petition which states that: 'the immunity passports could be used to restrict the rights of people who have refused a Covid-19 vaccine, which would be unacceptable' but to me, restricting people who have not been vaccinated, is the whole point.
Most of us have the NHS Covid 19 app which could show the dates of vaccinations, we don't need to hand over our medical records to the Government, just something unique to each person to say yep, their safe and i have no problem with that whatsoever and am surprised that some people do.