Special Guest Blogger: Ne Win

Every generation comes up with a few new ideas that change the world and move things forward and i was no exception because i was one step ahead of the curve with fortune tellers and astrologers to guide me in my ruling of Burma.
I would go to them and ask them what would make me live to be over 90 and they rubbed their balls and looked into the sands and came back with bathing in dolphins blood would do the trick so i ordered the wholesale slaughter of dolphins and had the blood sent to my bathtub.  
They said that to ward off evil i should walk backwards across bridges, which i did and when i consulted them on what to do to stop the nation leaning politically to one side, they told me to change the entire country's roadways from left-lane driving to right so i waited until there was a 9 in the date and proclaimed that everybody had been driving on the wrong side of the road and ordered all the intersections and signs to be changed.
As the nations cars had steering wheels on the right, it made for some hilarious viewing although probably not so funny if you caught the bus because the doors were on the wrong side and passengers have to disembark in the middle of the road.
I had to wait until there was a 9 in the date because i was also told that it was my lucky number so i would only announce new policies on days that had a 9 in them.
I also shot my own reflection in mirrors if the clothes didn't look perfect but the policy that was possibly a step too far was when i changed the currency into denominations of 15, 30, 45 and 90 and that the old denominations would cease to be legal tender immediately and the entire country pretty much lost their savings overnight and the country flipped out.
I stepped down but after a failed coup, i was placed under house arrest which you would have thought the fortune tellers and astrologers would have seen coming but i lived to be 91 so all those dolphins who donated their blood never died in vain.

Special Guest Blogger: John Carver

American children are taught about how America was founded by men and women escaping persecution in England for their religion and that's true, we demanded that England become as fundamentally religious as we were, King James said no so we said right then, your persecuting us so we're off to make our own country but the first stop was The Netherlands.
My role was to raise the funds to get us over the Atlantic and it was a group of businessmen called the Merchant Adventurers who saw a business opportunity and funded us with the condition that we would trade with them once we got there.
With the funding behind us, we hired two ships, the Speedwell and the Mayflower and set off but the Speedwell sank before it was even made it out of the harbour so all 120 of us piled onto the Mayflower and tried again, Virginia ahoy.
Six weeks of disease, scurvy and stepping in people's sick later, we turned up 200 miles away from Virginia but everyone said for crying out loud let us off this damned boat so we landed and one of the very first things we did to celebrate our leaving behind all things English was to name many towns and cities after places in England and even named Plymouth where we landed after the city where we sailed from.
We also agreed that we were free to do what the English wouldn't let us do and banned Christmas and Easter and fined anyone caught not working on December 25th or enjoying a sneaky feast for the baby Jesus.
We were also able to now give our children silly names like "Remember', Truelove', 'Wrestling', 'Humility' and 'Peregrine' without the endless ribbing.
I was made the colony Governor and worked out a treaty of peace with the local natives but that first Winter was tough and many died although i managed to get through it only to die a few months later after lying down with a headache and not waking up again.
I am proud to have played a part in what would evolve into America with a Constitution written by a dude with wooden teeth and people coming to these shores to pursue the American dream of life, liberty and the chance to militarily exploit other nations for their resources.

Special Guest Blogger: Cliff Burton

Usually, when a rocker dies it's by a drug overdose, plane crash or choking on their vomit but i am the only one who can boast that they were killed by their own tour bus.
I quit college at 19 and my parents made me a deal saying they would support me for four years and if i wasn't making a living as a musician, i would have to get a proper job but within 18 months i had gone from a local band named after a local topless bar to one of the biggest metal bands ever, Metallica.
James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich head-hunted me and the whirlwind of fame started and fame was like a drug, but what was even more like a drug were the drugs.
We took industrial amounts of LSD, magic mushrooms, weed and pot but no matter how wrecked we were, it worked and we put out some great music to give yourself a headache to.
We played the Castle Donington Festival in Britain and were greeted by a hail of beer cans and plastic bottles of piss because to British metalheads showering you in their urine is the height of acceptance.
While in the UK i got stopped by a couple of Policemen who looked at me, saw the long hair and bumfluff facial hair and expected that if they patted me down they would find my pockets stuffed with drugs and they were, my cough medicine, the real stuff was in the tour bus, they did apologise afterwards though.
We were on our third album and things were really taking off when we were on the Swedish leg of the Damage Inc. tour but we had one of the most uncomfortable tour buses ever but some of the bunks were better than others and Kirk Hammett and i drew playing cards to see who got first choice of bunk, i won and chose the top one with the window while he went to sleep up front.
Whether the driver fell asleep or the bus hit an icy patch, the bus began careening from side to side and i was thrown out of the bus’s window down a siding, the bus followed me down and crushed me but fate decided that it wasn't enough to leave me at death's door, it wanted to kick it open and shove me through it because in an attempt to save me with a crane, they lifted the bus and then dropped it on me again.
Dying from having a four tonne bus land on you twice, it just doesn't get much more heavy metal than that!!

Things To Keep From Lockdown

The lockdown in Britain ends officially on June 21st but judging by the amount of people in town this weekend, many people seem to have heard a different date to me and decided that June is just too far away and March is as good a time to come out.
Can't say i blame them, i was deemed an essential worker and have been out and about since March 2020 anyway so have avoided the whole lockdown thing but i must admit i have enjoyed the fact that there was less people and cars milling about the town.    
If i could save anything from the past 12 months it would be the lack of queuing in shops and the availability of parking spaces, two things which i have always bleated about and know will come rushing back to give me a headache in June.
The Government are trying to tempt workers who have been setting up an office in their living room back into the Office and presumably back to Pret for lunch and the pub after work as we pick up exactly where we left off last March.
As i was told to stay and work local, something i have got unused to is the 300 mile commute on a busy, stupidly early train on Monday morning followed by a 300 mile commute back on a Thursday evening, something i am trying depsreptly not to return to although some people have missed their commute and the decompression time between work and home but as we come out blinking into the post-Covid World, there are some aspects of the last year that we could incorporate into our old lives.
I hope we retain the keeping a little distance, washing hands and wearing masks when ill with colds or flu, make more video conferencing calls to save on travel and just a general, slower pace of life and keeping the 'community spirit' of thanking those who we take for granted before such as the NHS staff, the supermarket workers, teachers and the Government and Council employees who have been working throughout to keep the cities and country going.

Prince Harry & Glass Houses

Prince Harry was never the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer as him need help to pass an Art exam when just throwing a pot at paint on a canvas and getting the cat to walk across it would get you a passing mark proves it but he is right about racism being a scourge and you can't fault him for wanting to stick up for his mixed race wife, but it wasn't that long ago that he being forced to apologise by Muslim leaders, the MOD and senior politicians for his own racist murmurings.
A decade ago, when he was third in line to the throne,  he was describing an Asian member of his platoon as 'our little Paki friend' and told another officer wearing a camouflage veil that he 'looks like a raghead'.
The Ministry of Defence said at the time that they would investigate the 'acceptable language' and 'launch a full investigation' but as usual, it got kicked ito the long grass and then left there but Harry is obviously a chip off the old block as his Grandfather has a not so proud history of racism, including telling British students inCHina that if they stay there too long they will all get slitty eyes and asking an Aborigine in
Australia if they still the spears at each other.
Prince Harry did apologised for his use of racist language and apologised for any offence caused, or rather he got a flunky to do it through a snotty statement, just as he did when he tastefully got out the swastika and Joesph Goebbels uniform a few years before.
His father should really sit him down and have a word with him about his own behaviour and if he is too busy, perhaps Prince Charles could do it.

Just What We Need, More Nukes

What with the Coronavirus thing ricocheting around the nation, the Conservatives have been concentrating on doing a not very good job of running the response to that and not so much on not doing a very good job of Governing the country, Brexit seems to have been forgotten or at least until things return to normal and everyone starts wondering why the Supermarket shelves are empty.
If the Government where not busy trying to ignore NHS Staff demanding a pay rise and the awful total of 130,000 deaths on their watch and persuade everyone that they did a bang up job, they would be doing the usual Conservative thing of hacking, slashing and cutting anything they could get their grubby hands on and i would be usually on here pointing out they always do that so what did you expect but when it comes to the military cuts, i'm okay with that, slash away Boris.
The latest defence cuts announced are a reduction of a further 10,000 personnel but an increase in the nuclear warheads we hold from 180 to 260 at a cost of an additional £10 billion.
As this comes on the back of offering an insulting 1% to NHS staff because that's all we can afford and a reduction of Foreign Aid from 0.7% to 0.5% for the same reason, to then splash £10 billion up the wall on a weapon explains why we cant afford it, those 80 new nuclear warheads are not cheap you know.
With the report nodding towards Russia and China as 'active threats', it cites that a 'credible, independent nuclear deterrent remains essential in order to guarantee our security and that of our allies' but if we had an extra £10 billion sloshing around to spend on more nuclear missiles, then why are we wasting it on a way of killing millions of people?
The justification that we need a nuclear deterrent is a red herring, we don't need one and would never use it anyway but meanwhile, other countries without nuclear weapons are spending their money on improving the lives of their citizens instead.

Picking A New Head Of State

I'm not sure that some of the people answering a poll of if they could pick anyone, who would they want as head of state if they abolished the monarchy really understood the question because Prince William topped the survey with the Queen third choice.
The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough was second and it comes on the back of that interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle who spilled the beans on what life in the British Royal Family was really like.
Also towards the top choices was Boris Johnson, Stephen Fry, Chris Packham, Joanna Lumley, Jeremy Clarkson and 4% even said they would pick themselves as the elected head of state and that would be my choice, Lucy P for President and i can step in and do the living in one of the many Palaces and drive around in a carriage waving at people every couple of days and appearing on the back of coins.
Maybe we can all take it i turns and have a week each but the Monarchy needs to be overthrown because it costs a fortune, is bloated, slow and largely clueless and that's just Prince Andrew.

Special Guest Blogger: Steve McQueen

Playing a tough son of a bitch was never too much of a stretch for me because i really was a tough son of a bitch.
I lived on the streets aged nine and was a member of a local gang committing various acts of petty crime and i was sent to a school for troubled juveniles.
After working as a lumberjack, carnival barker, merchant marine, and even a towel boy at a brothel, i got a break as an actor on the Western television series Wanted Dead or Alive and that got me noticed and i got an offer to act in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s but turned it down as i was contracted to do the TV show but when the offer for The Magnificent Seven came along, i got around that issue by deliberately crashing my car and taking time off to 'recover' from my 'accident' by going south to make the movie while i was on sick leave.
Breakfast at Tiffany's was a big film i missed out on but i also turned down parts in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Death Wish, Superman, Dirty Harry, Deliverance, Apocalypse Now, A Bridge Too Far, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It's not just the films i turned down though, i pursued the possibility of making a film adaptation of David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood but Sylvester Stallone got the part so i turned to a film involving a music star being protected by a bodyguard from a stalker with me and Diana Ross but the film was shelved, i just hope it stayed on the shelf and didn't get made later with someone wussy like Kevin Costner playing my part.
I lived next door to Keith Moon for a while until i shot out his bathroom light from my bedroom window when he wouldn't turn his music down.
My final film, and when i realised i had a serious illness, was The Hunter, i had run down the street and just couldn't catch my breath so after a check up i was diagnosed with lung cancer.
I flew to Mexico to undertake surgery but i died of heart failure after the surgery aged 50 but i came within a deuce of not seeing 40 as i was on my way to a dinner at Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate's place the night the Manson Family lunatics joined the party but i backed out at the last minute to go on a date with a woman.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Isidore of Seville

Saints are made Patrons of something which they usually have a connection to when they were alive but i'm jiggered if i know what a computer and the internet are but apparently, i'm the guy to turn to if your Computer gets possessed by demons.   
My brother Leander was a Saint and it was him who took over my education but i was a lousy student and there is only so much Trivium and Quadrivium anyone can take before your head explodes so i ran away but got hungry and come home again so my brother locked me in a cell and kept shouting things about triangles at me until swore if i ever bumped into Pythagoras i would punch him straight on the nose but it was mostly theology i learnt.  
They call it the Dark Ages for a reason. Anyone who dared to actually study the universe would be shut down by the Church, which thought all that nonsense was immoral and that the Bible was all the learning anybody could possibly need in that regard. They even thought the Earth was flat, for crying out loud.
After years of cramming all that knowledge into my head i decided that it would be a shame not to pass it on to other kids and became a teacher but not just arithmetic and science but also religion and i wrote a dictionary, history, geography, astronomy and biography books and an encyclopedia called the Etymologies.
I lived a long life and my encyclopedia was widely successful in educating people which is why i picked as the guy to become the Patron Saint of the Computers and Internet although we never had such things in WAIT, WHAT'S WRONG? WHY CAN'T THESE CAPITAL LETTERS TURN OFF? AHHHHHHHHH WHAT'S HAPPENING? WHY IS IT DOING THIS? HANG ON, SORRY I GOT TO GET HELP. OKAY GEORGES COMING AND HE'S A TOTAL GEEK.
Ah, that' better he fixed it. I think he's mad that he saw that I called him a geek to you, but whatever.
Kids today do wonder what we did before the internet and as i had 17 brothers and sisters i think that answers that but that's the story of how how i became the Patron Saint of Computers but if you have any questions for me about why the stupid thing won't do what you want it to, the Saintly advice is to just turn it off and back on again.

Special Guest Blogger: Giulia Tofana

Men! Cant live with them and inexplicably it's illegal to shove a bread knife in their guts so i came up with a way around that and i was getting away with it for decades until in a shocking twist, a bowl of soup bought about my downfall.  
During the Renaissance, in an era of arranged marriages that left no possibility of divorce, the only way out of an unhappy union was death. Women were often forced into marriage by their families without having a say in the matter and once married, the husbands had complete control over their wives and i heard tales of husbands beating and subjecting their wives to all kinds of cruelty so i made it my mission, and my business, to help aspiring widows murder their husbands.
I turned my makeup business into a poison factory, inventing and selling a deadly concoction called Aqua Tofana disguised as make up and the brilliant part was it never left a trace in the victims body.
Doctors and investigators would check and put the death down to some unknown illness or disease but doctors were not so good then, there was nothing they didn't try to cure with leeches. A leech on the ear for earache, a leech on your bottom for constipation which is fine until you sat down and squashed it.
Just four drops of poison, meted out over a matter of days or weeks mixed into food or liquid was enough to kill and the genius part was to disguise it as a typical woman’s face cream that would sit on the dressing table along with her other cosmetics and perfumes that nobody would suspect, i even put it in vials with an image of Saint Nicholas of Bari on the label.
Over the course of almost three decades i helped over 600 Italian women kill their husbands and my business was flourishing until the notorious bowl of soup when one of my clients got cold feet after putting the poison into her husbands soup and stopped her husband from eating it and confessed and pointed the finger at me as the miscreant who had sold her the poison.
I fled to a church and asked for sanctuary but they handed me over to the authorities who tortured me for a confession and i was executed but i knew over 600 abused wifes who thought i deserved a medal but unfortunately there always has been and always will be abusive men and until they make the bread knife in the guts legal, there will always be women coming to people like me so when you have finished abusing your spouse, enjoy your soup.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Agatha of Sicily

After Jesus's mum, i was one of the most famous Virgins and i said to all men keep that thing away from me, i want to stay pure and celibate for God so it would be a bit strong to say i hated men, a complete waste of time and space quite frankly and a disaster for the planet but i didn't hate them.
Unfortunately, a Roman prefect named Quintianus set his lustful eyes on me and when i politely turned down his offer to launch the meat missile he got the hump and threw me into a brothel.
Now as i was so damn pure that i didn't dare look down in case i noticed my own breasts, seeing what they got up to was educational and i learned a lot such as that men regard some women, as mere sex toys. Things for their amusement. It's appalling. And they run the world, oh yes, they run the world but the stint in the brothel didn’t change my mind and when Quintianus offered once again to tickle my tummy from the inside i refused so he ordered my breasts be cut off.
Now breasts on me was like a fish having a bicycle so losing them was no big deal, hurt like a bandit and the only anesthetic in the 3rd Century was positive thinking but Quintianus wasn't finished with me yet.
What with the whole saving myself for God thing, he had me arrested for being a Christian and made to appear before a judge, which was him, and ordered me be put to death by being rolled naked across a bed of hot coals.
While i was being tortured, an earthquake suddenly occurred and the walls collapsed, killing two of the men torturing me and then i was returned to my cell, where i died from my wounds.
Like most Saints, i do appear in some works of art, in many i am carrying my breasts on a plate as a reminder of what men are like but i doubt that men have changed much since my time, they still think that a woman's place is in the ktchen and i agree with that, mainly because that's where all the sharpest knives are kept!

Special Guest Blogger: Tennessee Williams

Authors, it is said, should wrote about what they know and i grew up with the perfect inspiration for the vicious tempered alcoholic Stanley Kowalski, my father.
When i was a kid i was bedridden with diphtheria for a year and it left me physically weak which disgusted my father but it gave me a chance to write some short stories, one of which i sent to the magazine Weird Tales and they bought and published it.    
Hang on a sec i thought, so i wrote another and entered that in another magazines story writing competition and won $5 and even when i went to University i carried on submitting stories into competitions and picking up small cash prizes but i never got to finish University as my father pulled me out of school to work alongside him in a shoe factory.
Luckily, my writing was starting to come good and my plays were being recognised and being performed and then i got a big break and went from obscurity to fame with my play 'The Glass Menagerie' .
In a span of ten years between 1948 and 1959, i had seven plays appearing on Broadway including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire.
One hopeful unknown young actor come to my cottage for an audition for Stanley Kowalski to find my plumbing was broken so he fixed the pipes before reading his audition for the play, getting the part and starting off on his career of being Marlon Brando.
Alas, all good things must come to an end and as quick as it started, someone changed what 'it' was in a play and mine went from being 'with it' to whatever 'it' wasn’t and everything i put out in the 1960's and 1970's slumped and my burgeoning drug problem never helped.
After the death of my long term boyfriend, several emotional breakdowns and a heightened drug addiction which saw me hospitalized many times during the 1960s, i became a customer of Dr. Max Jacobson, AKA Dr. Feelgood who was the physician for John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, and Judy Garland and if he was good enough for them, he was good enough for me, especially as he had a ready supply of amphetamines but unlike them, i stayed alive.
In my play A Streetcar Named Desire, i had the character Blanche DuBois remark, 'You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape' but it wasn't poor fruit hygiene that killed me, i said funerals are pretty compared to deaths and my death wasn't pretty, i chocked to death on a plastic bottle cap that got stuck in my throat.
As an author i always hoped that i would leave some magnificently profound last words but the manner of my dying denied me that and my last words as it turned out were 'Gawkh Gawkhhhhhhhhhh'.

A Mr Or A Miss?

There was a TV show a while back where men took challenges to win a date with a stunningly beautiful women with the kicker being revealed at the end that the woman was actually a man in drag and while watching Ru Paul's Drag Race this week, my husband commented that some of the men make such beautiful women that you could never actually be sure until you see them naked but if you have got that far then it is probably too late so i have devised some simple first date tests to see if your potential lover is a Mr or a Miss and without a gynecologist in sight.

The Picture test. Show them a picture of a beautiful, scantily clad woman. If your date starts drooling and a pervy grin appears across their face and they mutter incoherently when you talk to them, it's a dude. If they comment on how her roots need doing and those red shoes don't go with those black fishnet stockings, then it's a female.

The Grudge Test. Simply ask if there is anybody they dislike. If there are less than 3 then it's a he. If there are over 50 going back to that ginger girl who stole that red crayon from them at nursery school or the woman who handed them their change in a way they didn't much care for in Asda in 2001, then it's a she.

The Barbecue Test. Fire up a barbecue and leave the grill unattended for 30 seconds. If on your return your date is seated in the same place and showing no interest in the cooking burgers, then she's a lady. If on your return they are flipping over the burgers and warning people to stand clear as they squirt more fuel onto the glowing bricks, then he's a man.

The Car Test. Stand your date in front of a car and open the bonnet and ask them if they wouldn’t mind checking the oil for you. If they look blankly back at you and ask for the phone number of the AA, it's a lady.

The IKEA Test. Hand over a flat pack bedside cabinet and observe. If they carefully reads through the instructions and calmly constructs the cabinet, it's Miss. If they rip open the packaging, hits it about with a hammer, swears and complains that the holes don't line up for 20 minutes before realising that they have the wrong bit, it's a guy.

The Clock Test. Ask them to meet you at a designated place at a certain time. If they arrive fifteen minutes late, they are a woman.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Polycarp

Every generation comes up with a few new ideas that change the world and keep moving things forward but after Jesus was taken down from his cross there was worries that the whole Christianity thing would lose momentum and there was some big ideas being bandied about around how we should proceed but i stepped in and said that they risked jiggering the entire effing lot so don't change anything.
I decided that i would lead by example and although i couldn't knock out a dove tail joint like Jesus, i could do the other things like walk around spouting wisdom and telling people about God and Heaven and those types of things.  
The Romans had hoped they had put an end to the Christianity nonsense when they nailed up God's boy so me walking around Rome bigging up one guy who could do all the things the Roman's 200 Gods could do, it didn't go down well and one afternoon, when the local Arena was running low on Christians to feed to the lions, the crowd took up a chant of chucking me in there instead.
The Christians v Lions thing was never fair and i was gutted that i was being hunted, not as much as the Christians who had already been in with the lions obviously, so i ran off and hid at a nearby farm but they found me and dragged me back to the Arena.
The proconsul gave me a chance to renounce God because a frail, 80 year old man armed with a cross against a Lion would not be much of a crowd pleaser and i would be devoured quicker than a virgin at Lupercalia so he decided to set me on fire instead but the fire kept going out and as i stood there with nothing more than a slightly singed tunic, i prepared to say that God was protecting me and to revel in this Godly miracle and they would feel the wrath of my God unless they untied me but before i opened my mouth...they stabbed me to death instead and then burnt me which wasn't quite so miraculous.
Luckily, Christianity never really changed that much after me including the practise of there being a Saint for everything, and we mean everything.
I got handed earache and dysentery, to be fair i was hoping for something a bit cooler after the whole not burning thing but someone has to do it and considering what i did in my tunic when i heard they was going to feed me to the lions, it does make sense i guess.

Special Guest Blogger: Myles Standish

A man may fight for many things such as his country, his principles, his friends, the glistening tear on the cheek of a golden child but personally, i'd mud-wrestle my own mother for a ton of cash which is exactly what i was offered by the Puritans to act as their military advisor when they went to the New World.
Well, they called it the New World but it wasn't new to the natives who already lived there which is why they needed a military expert like me to tag along although i found the whole God thing a bit weird.
I had been hanging around in the Netherlands after the British war there when this strange bunch came up and told me about their plans to hire a boat and sail off and they wanted me to run their military which i agreed to because we would be armed with guns and the guys there had bits of wood to fight back with.
When half of the Pilgrims died on the journey and then we made land 200 miles away from where we were aiming for i thought this isn't going to end well but i headed a scouting party and got attacked by a bunch of the natives and i thought, hang on, people to shoot at without consequences so this may be okay after-all.
The religious guys set up a settlement and designed a fort but more pressing was not starving to death because the dollards had not bought any seeds or tools with them.
Now i am of the persuasion that if you give a man a sandwich you'll feed him for a day and if you give him a religion he'll starve to death praying for a sandwich which many did including my own wife who died while i was off leading a militia to attack the locals. That attack ended up with us storming the wrong house and shooting the wrong people which i am sure the modern American military would never do but it was the 17th Century we didn't have the top notch intelligence and weapons the guys have these days.
A different bunch of new arrivals upset the natives by stealing their resources and they were threatening to massacre us all so i was sent to calm things down and smooth things over so i invited the top Native to a meal and using his own knife, stabbed him and his guards dead, threat over.
My reward was a farm of 120 acres where i lived out my days until i died of kidney stones but the America we started went on to thrive and in a nice touch the American military has helicopters called Apache and missiles named Tomahawks, both names taken from the people we slaughtered and then rounded up into reservations while we stole their land, which is nice of us i think.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Patrick

Probably the most famous Irishman in History, i was actually English and when i was 16 or so, i was captured by Irish pirates and taken to Ireland as a slave to herd and tend sheep.
I was held captive for six years and then one day, while watching the sheep i heard a voice tell me to go to the coast and there would be a ship waiting for me to take me back to Britain.
Whoever the voice was, it obviously hadn't talked to the ships captain because he refused to take me but i used my charms and eventually he let me on and i arrived back home three days later.
I put the voices down to God, as you do, and joined the priesthood and then heard another voice telling me to go back to Ireland and covert the bally lot of them.
As with the sailors, the voices hadn't spoken to the pagan and druid loving Irish as i turned up with my mitre and crook and the first thing they did was refuse my ship to land so i had to keep going until i found a port where they wouldn't run my intestines up a flagpole the second i set foot off the ship.
Once there i worked my way into Irish Hearts but on a few occasions i also used my head to stop Irish clubs, rocks and fists and one time i was held captive and chained for 60 days by one druid tribe but i got chatting to the Chieftain and after the obligatory attempt to kill me first, listened to what i had to say and converted to my side.
After a rocky start, literally, i wandered around the nation converting people left, right and centre using a shamrock as a visual aid for the Holy Trinity but at some point i apparently chased all the snakes off a cliff after they attacked me which is a bit of an exaggeration as Ireland had no snakes but they didn't know that, they looked around, saw no snakes and said 'Wow, thanks Englishman'.   
It became a custom to wear a paper cross on St Patrick's Day but somehow that turned into wearing a big foam top hat shaped as a pint of Guinness, holding a pint of Guinness in each giant Guinness-sponsored foam mitt and spilling both pints of Guinness down the front of their Guinness St Patrick's Day T-shirt.
As one of the very few Englishmen to become a success in Ireland, i am probably best placed to pass on some valuable information on the proper use and care of any Irishmen you happen across.
It is highly recommended that you do not expose to sunlight as very bright red discoloration will occur and if you see an Irishman experiences trembling, administer liberal amounts of Guinness but most importantly never combine an Irishman with an Englishman as it may result in broken teeth.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Cyril of Alexandria

Generally a saint is a person who lived a life of virtue but sometimes handing out a good kicking in the name of Christianity will get you the gig also.
There was a lady named Hypatia Of Alexandria who was a genius teacher at the Platonic School teaching mathematics, physics, and astronomy and all the people would flock to her lectures to be taught that the secrets of the Cosmos could be discovered through studying the patterns in the sky and mathematics.
You know who wasn't a fan? The local Christians and particularly me because i wasn't going to have anyone using logic, mathematics and common sense to try and dispel the idea that a man in the clouds created all the Earth, the Universe and everything in it so i organised a couple of violent mobs of monks to roam the city attacking anyone who listened to Hypathia and didn't believe in our God.
The Christian governor of Alexandria was unsure what to do, on the one hand he couldn't condone anyone speaking out against his own God but then he couldn't have gangs of religious zealots whacking up the locals either so i made things easier for him, i accused Hypathia of witchcraft and it ended exactly like you think it's going to.
Hypatia was riding through town, when i directed a group of my fanatics to grab her, stone her to death, cut out her eyes, tear her limb from limb and then create a neat pile of her body parts and set them on fire.
With their brilliant head out of action, The Platonic School crumbled and all that was left was a pile of smouldering body parts for which the the Catholic Church made me a Saint because i was protecting the Christian view that God made the Universe and us humans as we are today six days later and there is no room for science or mathematics explain it and besides, God once killed almost every person on Earth with a flood while i only killed one non-believer so i don't think he is all that fussed.

Special Guest Blogger: Marie De’ Medici

I had it all, the wealth, the fame, the beauty and the most set of powerful parents in Italy until my mother died falling down the stairs and my father died of poisoning but with both beauty and the big bucks, Europe’s most influential suitors came knocking for me and a marriage committee was set up to find me a husband but i rejected them all until King Henry IV of France came along and with thoughts of becoming Queen of France, i agreed to wed him.
My courtiers were not sure, 'but he is French' they all exclaimed, 'yes' i replied 'but so is eating frogs, cruelty to geese and urinating in the street' but Henry was a royal catch although i never actually met the King until after our wedding but what i didn't reckon on was the French King having an official mistress, Henriette d’Entragues and what a cow she was, on our first meeting she called me 'fat' and said he only married me for my money.
I was the bigger person and grew even bigger when i got pregnant and gave Henry a son, Louis, and thought that now that he had an heir, he would make me Queen but the French court were not on my side and regarded me as a foreigner and although we went on to have six children together, i had to nag Henry for a decade before he give me my coronation and made me Queen.
Unluckily for Henry, the very next day after i was made Queen he was assassinated when his carriage got stopped in my post-coronation traffic and the fortuitous  timing meant that i was named Regent for Louis and the French being French, got all uppity and rebelled to try and remove me from power and even when Louis was old enough to take power himself, i refused to budge so he exiled me to a remote Chateau and took power himself.
I escaped and tried to start an uprising against my own son, now King Louis XIII, and he exiled me again this time to Spain but i did a tour of Europe to try and rise an army but before i could get it organised i died of pleurisy but it was wild ride and anyway the French later went and cut all the Royals heads off anyway so that seems fair.

British Cycling Success Tainted

Cycling has a history of drug cheaters so it is no real surprise that the doctor at the head of British Cycling, Richard Freeman, has been found guilty of  ordering testosterone in 2011 and passing it on to an unnamed rider although that shouldn't be so hard to work out because there was an investigation into a very famous British cyclist receiving a 'medical package' just before the 2011 Tour De France.  
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee said at the time that they were leading an investigation into it and that British Cycling have been able to provide a paper trail of how the package delivered to Bradley Wiggins was unable to provide give details of exactly what was inside the package.
Wiggins and all the other parties involved maintained that the mystery parcel contained fluimucil, a legal decongestant although the awkward question was asked why it it sent 400 miles to France when it could be purchased at local chemists although the investigation fell apart as they were unable to access any evidence to determine the case either way.
Freeman had already admitted to 18 of 22 charges leveled against him, including ordering 30 sachets of Testogel gel, lying to investigators and multiple failures in keeping and losing records.
The man who was British Cycling president at the time of Dr Freeman reign released a statement saying that he was: 'tremendously disappointed and saddened at the verdict' and the damage that his actions have done to cycling but it calls into question the golden era of British cycling over the past decade including Tour de France wins and the 8 Golds, 2 Silvers and 2 Brone medals at the 2012 Olympics and the 6 Gold, 4 Silver and 2 Brone at the 2016 event.  
That Freeman was working for British Cycling between 2009 and 2017 and at the dominant Team Sky between 2009 and 2015 dovetails a bit too neatly with the period of Britain’s cycling success.

Paying The Tax For The £500 Self Isolation Payment

HMRC are sending out the tax codes for the new financial year which begins on April 6 and quite a few people are looking at it and noticing that they have an adjustment in their tax code due to an underpayment of £100 tax in this current tax year.
After a bit of asking around it transpired that all of these people have been in receipt of the £500 Self-Isolation payment from the Government, a payment for anyone who tests positive for Coronavirus and is asked to self-isolate but are unable to work from home who will suffer financially by self-isolating.
There are no figures available for the exact number of people who were in receipt of the payment but 6.4 million people in England were told to self-isolate by contact tracers which gives us a ballpark figure of how many people were eligible for the payment.
HMRC are informed by the local Council of who received this payment and the Tax Man treats it as Additional Earnings and as it is not taxed, lump it in with your other earnings for the year and if you have earned above the £12,500 limit, 20% tax is due on the £500 which is where the £100 underpayment comes in.
HMRC have confirmed that if if the underpayment cannot be collected through your Tax Code for any reason, you can make regular payments through your Personal Tax Account until the amount is paid off but maybe the Government should have made it clear that the £500 was taxable before they began pushing people to apply for it.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Julian the Hospitaller

When i was born a coven of witches cursed me, they didn't give me a donkeys head or webbed feet or anything, the curse that they laid on me was that i would kill both my parents.
Apparently my father wanted to just put me outside the door and leave me to the wolves but my mother wasn't having any of that which turned out to be a bit of a mistake.
They did tell me i was going to kill them both so to make sure i couldn't, i moved away, got married and had no contact with them.
Twenty years later i got back from hunting and heard noises coming from the bedroom so i crept up the stairs and peered in the door and through the gloom saw a man and a woman bumping their squishy bits in our marital bed and assuming it was my wife and another man, i leapt up on the bed and started hacking and slashing until both lay dead.
Feeling pretty good with myself i went back downstairs to wash up just as my wife was coming in the door and saying 'Your parents have come to stay for a while, i said they could have our bed, that's okay isnt it?'  
Racked with guilt in this weird twist on the Oedipus story, i resolved to do a fitting penance so turned our house into an inn for travelers and built 27 hospitals for the poor and needy.
One night a scabby faced leper turned up at the door and asked for a room but we was full so i said he could have my bed which was very fortunate because the leper was an Angel sent by God to test my fitness for Sainthood which to be fair was kinda shaky after the whole horribly murdering my parents thing.
They made me the patron Saint of hotel keepers, travelers and murderers, should you ever need one so everything turned out well, except for my parents obviously, they were hacked to hundreds of little pieces by their only son.

Special Guest Blogger: Shirley Temple

I was two when my mother enrolled me in a Dance Academy, the same one as Judy Garland as it turned out, and my first movie role came a year later when i was 3, a role which had me appearing as a lingerie-clad burlesque dancer who flirts with two toddler-aged boys, America in the 1930's was a very different place!
At age 6 i had a movie deal and was on $1,000 a week but it wasn't all plain sailing, despite the fame, fortune and adulation, when i misbehaved, i was made to stand in a cold puddle and if that failed, i would be sent into a dark room to sit on a block of ice and that never harmed me at all, well, not that much anyway.
In Bright Eyes, i got to sing what became my signature song, 'On the Good Ship Lollypop' which was a bit bizarre as the ship was an airplane but i looked cute so nobody quesioned it too much.
Such was my cuteness, i was earning more from endorsements than from movies, i flogged Quaker Oats, General Electric and cars for Packard Motors and i had my own line of talking dolls.
I did hear i was considered for the role of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz but it went to my former classmate Judy Garland as they felt her singing was better than mine, but whatever, i had other things to worry about, mainly the accusation from the Un-American Activities Committee that i was an 11 year old agent of the Communist Party but as my later political career would show i was a right wing Republican and i spent my adult life campaigning for right wing causes.
I sought the Republican nomination for California saying society doesn’t owe you anything and the government has better things to worry about than poor people, like killing innocent people in foreign wars!  
My policy of sending more American Soldiers to Vietnam was not a vote winner when most of the nation was protesting against it but President Richard Nixon knew a good right winger when he saw one and appointed me as a delegate to the UN, Chief of Protocol for the State Department, Special Assistant to the Chairman of the President’s Council on Environment, and Ambassador to both Ghana and Czechoslovakia.
Nixon was a friend and he got an awful press but by questioning him, the journalists were just giving aid to terrorists by reporting on unconstitutional activities by him.
Okay, i don't wanna know what the government's doing, they're doing it right and that's all we need to know. 
Sometimes you have to go outside the law to catch a bad guy and when you do, make them sit on a block of ice in a dark room, it never did me any harm as i died aged 85, finally ending a 20-year run of people saying, 'What, Shirley Temple is still alive?'. Nope, not anymore.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Blaise

Your home is constantly under attack from Atheists, and we all know what Atheists cause; Dyslexia and Leprosy. Thank goodness there's Christianity.
Christianity sends Atheists running, just add a few tablespoons of Holy Water to your child's bath, and put them in the tub of scalding hot water and Hey Presto! That tingly sensation is awkward questions about reproduction and dinosaurs dying. Now your child has rosy red skin and is 100% Atheist free which means little John and Jenny will sleep peacefully, free from any thoughts of questioning their beliefs and you can trust me because i was a doctor.
Back in my day people had a strange habit of getting things stuck in their throat and after a career of sticking my hands down peoples neck and pulling out all manner of things, i decided living in a cave and praying was a better use of my time so that's exactly what i did but people still came to me which alerted the Governor of Cappadocia that one of the iffy Christian's was spreading the Word of God so he had me arrested.
On their way to the jail, a woman set her son before us, the poor boy was chocking to death on a fish bone so i did my thing and yanked it out and saved his life.
The Governor was impressed and i thought that i may be able to press my advantage and said something like 'C'mon, try a little Christianity! It won't hurt ya. You're not a nerd, are you? All the cool kids are praying' but he gave it a moments thought, then beat me to death with a stick, tore off my flesh with iron combs and beheaded me, so i took that as a no.
So if you are having a meal and a bone gets stuck in your throat then i am the guy to pray to although personally i would call the hospital first, there is a reason why heart attack victims are taken to an emergency room and not a Church.

Special Guest Blogger: Wild Bill Hickock

People did seem to have a problem with my name, i was often called Haycock or Hitchcock and my first name was James but the Bill bit was because my nickname was 'Duck Bill' because i had a big nose but i began calling myself “Wild Bill” instead because it sounded cooler and i was wild because people kept trying to shoot me, so anyone would be a bit wild.
The first thing that tried to kill me wasn't even a human, it was a bear which was in my way when i was working for the Pony Express so i shot at it, the bullet ricocheted off its thick head and it suddenly became uninterested in stealing picnic baskets or honey pots or whatever it was doing and came to horribly murder me instead but while it was chewing on my arm i managed to slash its throat.
My first of four arrests for murder and subsequent acquittals happened when some guy was demanding money from the station manager and we both shot him and the jury said they couldn't prove which one of us actually shot him.
I moved to Springfield in Missouri and got a job in the law offices checking hotels’ liquor licenses and got into an argument over a watch with a gambler named Davis Tutt who was one of those people who would be enormously improved by death which he was as it turned out as he drew his gun but missed but i never. Arrested and acquitted again.
Not long after, in Ellis County, two troopers from the 7th US Cavalry pinned me to the ground but the gun they held to my head misfired, giving me chance to take out my gun, injure one and killing the other.
Around the same time was the first ever case of someone saying 'Hey, look over there' when the town drunk aimed his rifle at me and i looked past him and demanded that he not be shot in the back so he  turned around to see who was threatening before he realised that i had given him a bright new hole in his temple.
I was invited by Buffalo Bill Cody, to try acting in his cabaret show and that kick-starting an acting career that spanned all the way from the morning to slightly later that morning as i shot out the spotlight with my Colt 1851 as it was making it hard to see.
My Colts were cool, i had two with ivory handles with my names on them and i wore them with the butts pointed forward just to be different but i did get a lot of practise drawing them which led to another arrest and clearance when as deputy i ventilated a couple of guys after they refused to settle down in a saloon.
In Nebraska i challenged four men to a draw and you would think out of the four of them one of them would get me but nope, useless, the four bullets were all mine and the bits of brains laying on the floor was all theirs.
Then there was Phil Coe and another arrest and acquittal but while shooting him i accidentally also shot and killed my Deputy so they sacked me as Marshall which is why i ended up in Deadwood playing cards that day with Jack McCall who was drunk and losing spectacularly in the process.
I felt for the old rummy so i offered McCall some money so he could buy himself some breakfast and i dont know how bad the breakfast was he had but he decided to get offended by my offer and came back later when i had my back to the door and didn't see him come in but he introduced himself by shooting me in the back of the head at point-blank range.
When they scraped the bits of skull off the playing cards they saw i was holding two black aces and two black eights which became known as the 'dead man’s hand'.

Bye Bye Piers

Piers Morgan has long led the crusade against Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and he once called them 'a pair of repulsive, deluded narcissistic tools' and as a repulsive, deluded narcissistic tool himself he would know but he wont be polluting our early morning Television anymore because he has flounced off and handed in his resignation.  
His big girls blouse moment came during a debate with weatherman Alex Beresford over the Harry and Meghan interview with Piers continuing the tirade and dismissing the claim that the question from a senior royal to Harry asking if he was 'worried about the colour of his baby's skin' was racist, Piers said
no and then made the claim that none of the Royals are racist and therefore conveniently forgetting the many examples of Prince Philip's racism.
The thing that got under Morgan's skin was when Alex bought up how he was sore at Meghan over the way she had 'cut him off' from their relationship and the sound of nails being hit on the head was deafening.
It wasn't that long ago Morgan was tweeting Meghan was 'perfect princess material' and 'a lovely lady; smart, warm, funny and more than a match for Prince Harry' so what happened?
Seems Piers and Meghan were pals on Social Media back in the days before she met Harry and then after she came to England and they went for a drink together and then, in his words, 'I never heard from her again. Not a word. I'd been ghosted'.
So the reason he hates her and has carried out a nasty and sustained campaign against her is because she hurt his feelings but if he didn't want her to know just how much of a repulsive tool he actually is, he shouldn't have met her and confirmed it.
Anyway, if anything good comes out of this it is that Piers Morgan is no longer on the TV when we are eating our cornflakes and if ITV have got any sense, they will promote Alex Beresford to take his place as the shows host beside Susanna Reid.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Francesca Romana

I was a Benedictine oblate which means that i lived a religious life but never took any specific religious vows but my ambition to become a nun was paused when i got married to a wealthy local man and him being a man, he wanted sex.
Now the Christians have a very strict policy when it comes to sex, if it is two men or two women it's stoning time, if it is a man and a woman then its okay as long as it is not too often and none of the people involved actually enjoy it and they got straight back to concentrating wholly on things of the spirit straight afterwards.  
The Church even put out a list of certain positions which were banned so no sex standing up, the woman shouldn't be on top, no doggy style or oral and not on fast days, or feast days for a saint, or on Sundays.
Now as a good Christian, i wanted to make sure that i could sexually satisfy my husband while not enjoying it so i came up with the whizz of before having sex with my husband, i would heat pork fat and burn my vulva with it, ensuring i would remain in extreme pain throughout the sexual act, which not surprisingly it did.
He was later hacked to death by invading Neopolitans so i put the pork fat away but would whip myself daily and wore an iron belt with studs digging into my thigh as a reminder that i was a Christian and was not meant to be enjoying anything.    
I did have some weird and wonderful visions of demons trying to horrify me with images of death and decay but i began using a scooped out human skull as a drinking cup to show they didn't scare me.
So if you are looking at the calendar and thinking its not a fast day or a Sunday so it's okay to bump fuzzies and test the matress springs, put away the Wonderwoman outfit and baby oil because today is my Feast Day and we will have none of that today thank you very much.

Special Guest Blogger: Rudolph Valentino

My real name was Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguella so you can see why the studios went with Rudolph Valentino instead.
I make no bones about it, i was a spoilt brat, spoilt as a child and spoilt as an adult and i would stamp my tiny feet if i didn't get my own way so i bid Arrivederci to Italy and went off to America aged 18 to find my fame and fortune in movies but my first job was bussing tables in a restaurant but being Italian, i was never a hard-working boy and got fired from the job for, well, not doing my job.
Then i moved onto a dance partner for hire and that's how i met the very much married Chilean heiress Bianca de Saulles and we began an affair which ended in divorce and then while arguing over the settlement, she shot and killed her ex-husband.
I did land a few minor film roles and a wife, actress Jean Acker who was actually a lesbian who married me to escape a love triangle with two other actresses. Did this end well? I’m sorry, did you just read that last sentence? Heck no!
On our wedding night, she locked me out of our room and refused to see me, we divorced shortly afterwards just as i landed the role of  Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan in The Sheik.
Being the era of silent movies, i was big on grimacing, staring ominously and making that face you make when you really have to pee but it was mostly my Latin looks which were obviously close enough to audiences to play an Arab and for a brief time i became the most famous leading man in Hollywood.
Of course, the women loved me and not just because they thought i was packing the kind of tackle that you'd normally expect to find swinging about between the hind-legs of a Grand National winner, but men not so much, and rumours went around that i was gay, one journalist said that i was a pink powderpuff.
Now logic says you can just ignore it, it shouldn't be a big deal, names can't hurt you but my Latin brain went KILL HIM!! so i challenged the writer to a duel, but he refused so i offered a boxing match instead and beat the living tar out of him.
On the set of Uncharted Seas, i met costume designer Natacha Rambova and we started a steamy affair and we got married and then immediately arrested for bigamy, turns out i was i was still officially married to Jean Acker.
I very quickly went from being on top of the world to being on top of a hospital bed with perforated ulcers and underwent a routine surgery, then developed infections and complications, dropped into a coma and my American adventure came to an end aged 31.
Despite the fact that i became a household name in America, i never became an American citizen and never officially immigrated to the country.
This hot-blooded Italian stayed Italian. Ciao Bambino.

Harry And Meghan v Buckingham Palace

Monday has already been penciled in as the day when the whole news agenda is going to be dominated by the Harry and Meghan interview although Buckingham Palace have tried to pre-empt some of the damaging fallout by agreeing to an investigation from complaints made two years ago that Meghan bullied her staff in the short time that she was a member of the Royal Family.
There are also other negative stories emerging including claims that the Duchess of Sussex wore earrings lent to her by the tarnished Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
What we can glean from the advance clips of the interview is that there will be complaints of the  
media scrutiny the couple faced and Prince Harry drawing parallels between the treatment of his wife by the media of his mother, Princess Diana.
There will probably be mention of racist attitudes towards Meghan and there will be Harry and Buckingham Palace camps blaming each other but i really don't care about either because as a Republican all i can think is fantastic, keep it up because it can only hasten the downfall of the whole awful lot of them.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Perpetua

When you think of people with famous diaries you probably thinking Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf and Bridget Jones but i was the first diarist in recorded history, keeping a record of my hopes, dreams, and fears and how my slave Felicity and i spent the time in a Roman prison along with four other people awaiting execution for the crime of being Christians which in 2nd Century Rome made us about as popular as a floater in the public baths.
Our arrests took place as part of a larger persecution of Christians in the years 202-203 under the emperor Septimus Severus.
I was a new mother and nursed my newborn son while awaiting execution but Felicity was initially exempted from the death penalty because she was pregnant and it was against the law to kill a pregnant woman, torture was fine but you couldn't kill one, but two days before we were due to be put to death, she gave birth and so was then allowed to join in the fun and games of being executed.
At the trial, my father publicly begged me to recant my faith, he actually raised such a ruckus that he was beaten by the guards for disturbing the hearing but the governor sentenced us all to death by wild beasts.  
The men were dispatched by leopards, bear, and wild boar, but the powers that be ordained that the animal that should do for Felicitas and i, us being women, was a cow.
On the day of our execution, we were first whipped and then led into an amphitheater, where a heifer charged at us and knocked us around a bit but amidst a lot of the cow mooing and pooing, the Governor decided it was taking too long so decided to quicken proceedings by lopping off our heads instead.
I made a speech about how by executing Christians, it meant our God and his followers were victorious although to everyone else, being ripped apart by leopards and bears was more of a defeat and i'm sure some asked if your god is so great, how come you’re head is about to be rolling across the amphitheater floor?
Poor old Felicity was first and her execution went smoothly but i had the village idiot doing mine and he missed so in the time honoured tradition of it you want something doing, don't ask a man, just do it yourself, i grabbed the man’s hand and guided the sword to my own neck.
Not enough that i winded up revolutionizing literature by inventing the diary, Felicity and i are the patron saint of lesbian couples which is ironic because we were probably the women with the biggest cajones in history.

Keep Boris Away From Nazanin

Finally, the five year prison sentence of  Zaghari-Ratcliffe inIran is about to end on SUnday and her family are anxiously awaiting news that she is coming home but more importantly, hoping that Boris Johnson isn't involved whatsoever.
While Foreign Secretary, during negotiations to free her, Boris Johnson somehow managed to get her sentence increased from two to five years when he blurted out that she was in Iran to 'teach people journalism' blowing a huge hole in her 'i was only there on holiday' alibi.
Mr Johnson's comments were then seized on by the Tehran regime, as they had jailed her for 'teaching a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at training people to spread propaganda against Iran', retried her with Boris Johnson's comments as evidence against her and increased her sentence.
As Boris can't be trusted to do or go anywhere without a responsible adult, best to make sure he is nowhere close to this on Sunday.

 

The Nasty Party Remember

It's not until the Conservative Party do something utterly despicable that people seem to remember just why they are called the Nasty Party.
After a year of praise and clapping them and heaping praise upon the NHS staff, the Government had decided to say thank you to them by giving them a pay-rise of 1%, £3.25 a week.
NHS Providers said that the Government were going back on a long-term plan set out by the government of an annual pay rise of more than 2% for healthcare workers in 2021/22 but the Government are sticking to the 'we can't afford to pay them more' and the 1% is the 'amount set by the regulator' lines.
The regulators, desperate not to be the ones left holding the blame, have come out and said that actually, they only rubber stamp the amount decided by the Government so the 1% is what the Government are recommending.
The largely useless privatized Track and Trace operation got an additional £15bn in the budget. That's 535,000 nurses salaries which makes the sight of Boris Johnson clapping for the NHS last year even more insulting, the same Boris who said 'The NHS has saved my life, no question.'
And yet they still get voted in. Time and again with today's polls showing they have a 13% lead in the polls over Labour which amazes me and makes me wonder just who are these people looking at Boris Johnson and his Governments awfulness and thinking they are doing okay?

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Brigid

Have you ever put a curse on somebody? Like if you came home and found that your roommate ate your Pringles and you got annoyed and told them you hoped it gave them explosive diarrhea and then it actually did and you felt really bad because you didn't realize your own powers?
I was a bit like that but not with Pringles and not with diarrhea but before i get to that, a quick run through of my childhood.
When my father found out my mother was pregnant with me, he graciously sold her to a Druid landowner but when i grew up and after the episode where i gave away her whole store of butter, i was sent back to my father's home.
I did have a penchant for giving things away to the poor, my father, not the type to give away anything including his daughter, took me to the King of Leinster with the intention of selling me to him while he still had some furniture left but as they discussed it i gave away the kings dagger to a passing beggar and the King suggested he just let me go, probably because nobody would pay money for a person who gives all their stuff away.
Now free, i went back to my mother who was in charge of a dairy and obviously, i often gave her milk away which didn't make me popular with her so she sent be back again to my father who then arranged a marriage to palm me off on someone else but i said i wanted none of that and prayed that that my beauty be taken so no one would want to marry me.
I've always been fascinated with the world of men, revolted of course, but fascinated and one man said he didn't care that i resembled the back end of a cow and would marry me anyway so i said his eyes will burst in his head, and guess what happened, he found salvation through true love - just kidding, both his eyeballs exploded.
Now good and proper fugly, i was ordained by Saint Patrick himself and asked the King for land to found a monastery. Being a sarcastic git, he said i could have as much land as my cloak could cover so me and three sisters took a corner each and ran into separate directions, the cloak opened up and covered acres so the King called us back and said he would give us a decent plot and to be fair he did and we built the Church of the Oak.
One of the miracles attributed to me was that i could turn water into beer and remember that this is in Ireland, so that one was very popular.
Another one was very similar to one of Mungo's where a woman dropped a silver broach into the sea and she came to me for help and i ordered a fisherman to haul in a fish which, when cut open, had swallowed the broach. Now i'm not saying Mungo nicked my story but...nope, that's exactly what im saying, which was pretty brave considering i exploded the eyeballs of a man for wanting to marry me.

Special Guest Blogger: Salvador Dali

I am known mostly for the moustache, the painting with the melting clocks, the chuppa chups logo i designed and being as mad as a box of frogs but there was only one Salvador Dali, well two if you count my dead elder brother, the original Salvador Dali who died before his second birthday, nine months before i was born. My grief-stricken parents then went ahead and gave me my dead brother's name, because why let it go to waste?
My work was known for exploring fantasy and the subconscious and being thought-provoking and iconic but mostly for being very, very weird but then i made Yoko One look like Einstein.
Actually, talking of her, she asked me for a strand of hair from my mustache, she never said what she wanted it for but i picked a blade of grass and put that into a fancy gift box and presented it to her though it wasn't really a gift, i charged her $10,000 for it but she didn't complain, or if she did i never heard her because i was too busy chuckling on my way to the bank with her 10 grand.
I was very tight with my money, to get out of paying for things i would pay by cheque and draw a doodle on the back and as nobody wanted to cash in a cheque with an original Dali on it so they never, and aloha, another free meal.  
Much has been made of my most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory, i was asked by one art critic if it was an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time or maybe a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order and i replied that actually, it was inspired by a lump of cheese on my table that had melted in the Sun. They thought i was joking, it really was.
They really looked too much into my antics, when i showed up to deliver a lecture wearing an old-timey deep-sea diving suit, it was just me wearing a diving suit and the time i drove around with my car full of cauliflowers, it was just me in a car full of cauliflowers.
Something i never looked into was ladies reproductive bits, they scared me so for most of my marriage, the clocks were not the only droopy thing but while most artists find fame and fortune by dedicating themselves to their art with a singular mind and purpose, tirelessly exhausting themselves, i found just being weird and wearing a diving suit also got you the rewards my magnificent moustache deserved.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Casimir

It isn't very easy eschewing a life of luxury when you are a Prince and surrounded by luxury and riches but i did my best but even harder was being a pacifist when your fathers main hobbies were slaughtering and invading the neighbours and taking over their lands.
With twelve other brothers and sisters, i managed to keep my head down for much of my childhood and it was easy to resist the natty, fashionable clothes and preferring the hard bedroom floor to my invitingly comfortable royal bed but it all came to a head one day when i was 13 and my father, noticing i wasn't as big on the whole invading thing as he preferred, sent me as head of an army to take over the throne of Hungary.
I tried to make my excuses but he played the Dad trump card of 'You're going and that's it' so i agreed to go but didn't want to and as it turned out, the soldiers didn't want to go either and when Pope Sixtus announced that he was against it also, the soldiers started deserting and i was only too glad to listen to the advice of the officers suggesting we turn tail and go back home.
My Father though was not quite so happy about it and banished me to a castle and i even rejected a marriage alliance my father tried to form but my main concern was a hacking cough which seemed to get worse so i went to see a doctor who suggested sexual relations with a woman would cure my illness and if you live in an age during which most medicine is just positive thinking and flushing the toilet means throwing a bucket out the window, a lot of stuff seems entirely more plausible to you but i said thanks but no thanks and i would stick to praying and studying.
They say the greatest tragedy is when a father outlives his son but if you are the father than frankly i can see see an up-side to it so my cough got worse and i died before i reached my 25th birthday but every March 4th the residents of Poland and Lithuania raise a glass to me, a man who refused to go to war and then refused doctors orders to have sex to try and cure his cough.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Paul

The next time you are in a museum looking at some ancient statues, take out your penis. If you don't have one, find a man, preferably a Jewish one and ask him to show you his. Now compare it to the statue. Notice anything missing?
Christianity was growing popular and i could see which way things were going so changed sides but as Christianity was spinning off from Judaism, a common question amongst the new guys was just how close they had to steer to the Jewish ceremonies and one in-particular which involved a very sharp knife and a prayer that the guy had a steady hand.  
Knowing that the promise of wafers and a drop of wine every Sunday wasn't going to be enough of a draw if it meant dropping your pants and holding your breath, i declared foreskins were safe under Catholicism and for good measure threw in that women must never hold authority over a man and she must be quiet. Unsurprisingly both went down well with 50% of the crowd but the Bible was never particularly clear on the whole circumcision thing, somehow managing to both imply support of the Judean way of circumcision as a part of every Hebrew man's duty to maintain the covenant with God and oppose physical circumcision.
It was nice of the Christians to accept me actually, considering that i was previously persecuting them and was actually traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus on a mission to arrest them when Jesus appeared to me in a bright light that blinded me for three days and when i regained my eyesight, i decided Jesus was the man and all the rest sucked.
My story doesn't have a very happy ending, i went to Rome and the Jews didn't like what i had been saying about Moses sucking so they attacked me and the Romans arrested me.
Opinion was divided on the subject of executing me. I said no but everyone else thought yes and Emperor Nero was not as forgiving or reasonable as his fiery public speeches and penchant for murder led us to believe and he had me beheaded.   
So remember that God loves you so much that his only son died on the cross so you don't have to have bits of your old chap sliced off.

Special Guest Blogger: Indira Gandhi

There is an old saying that you should choose your friends wisely but i would add choose your bodyguards even more wisely because the guys protecting my life were the one who ended it.
Obviously, due to the physical differences, there are some things that men are much more better at so they will always beat us ladies at anything which requires physical strength or speed or the ability to pee the highest up a wall but their strongest asset is also their downfall, higher levels of testosterone. You only have to flick through the stats of serial killers, murders and war-mongering types to see the female half of the population are very under represented, so i did my best to address that.
When i took over as the Indian Prime Minister, my first act was to take on the uppity Pakistani's and went to war with them and created millions of refugees. India beat Pakistan, forcing a surrender of East Pakistan, which led to the formation of Bangladesh.
I oversaw the suspension of democratic rights and violations of human dignity by instituting a 21-month mass sterilization program but no political career is entirely a triumph, and i was removed from office by charges of corruption but i returned to office in 1979, and ruled until my Sikh bodyguards decided my body wasn't fit to be guarded anymore and shot me due to conflict between the small Sikh minority of India and the Hindu majority.
One of them i had known for over ten years and i should have known not to embrace this unholy arse to my Prime Ministerial bosom, i should have kept my bosom free of arses but it's too late now.
We need less testosterone filled swingers on the World stage and if you pardon me being a hairy legged, bra burning feminist, i think the planet would benefit from more women leaders.
Either elect more women to office around the World or make with the nut crackers at the next summit meeting!
And no, i'm not related to the other, more famous and altogether more peaceful Gandhi.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint David

Being the son of a Saint, you would assume i had a head start in the religion stakes but i was the product of my Mother, Nonita, being unhappily seized and exposed to the sacrilegious violence of one of the princes of the country, or raped. by Sanctus, King of Ceredigion.
I was destined to be a Churchy type and i was ordained a Priest early on and set about doing missionary work and founding a number of monasteries which i ruled over with extreme religiosity including rules the monks must plough the fields themselves and not use any animals and they were not allowed wine or beer, only water, they couldn't eat any meat, only bread and salt and then spend their evenings in prayer, reading and writing.
I am the Patron Saint of Wales and us Saints and miracle workers are a pretty elite group. We are the ones who say we have been touched by God, given powers of healing and sent visions in which we claim to see the future or the truth. Occasionally, though, the bar is set a little bit lower.
In order to become a Saint, my miracle was when i was preaching to a large crowd at Llandewi Brefi, those on the outer edges could not hear me, so i spread a handkerchief on the ground, and stood on it to preach and then all could hear me.
Not great i agree but Wales and the Welsh are so much more than a man who stood on a snotty tissue and shouted, they are known for daffodils, leeks, many, many sheep and place names devoid of those pesky little vowels the English language relies upon to make words work.
With towns named Bwlchgwyn and Ysbyty Ystwyth, you may think that the towns were named by a cat walking across a keyboard but we do have the pride of having the most unpronounceable place in Britain, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.
Everything was awesome. Except for the English. They're dicks because the Welsh and the English have a history and they were always trying to conquer us so the life of the clergy wasn't always easy but Wales is a land of beautiful rolling hills, peaceful dales and the strained bleating of sheep emanating from beside red faced farmers so Ladies and Gentlemen, i give you the Welsh and their Saint with snot on the soles of his feet, diolch a hwyl fawr.