Special Guest Blogger: Lieutenant Tomas

Most people get their name in history books for being the first to do something but i am in there for being the last and the only game in town in Europe in 1918 was the World War.
For four, long hard years we had been fighting against the enemy because the British wanted to stop Germany building an Empire, that is the British who at the time had an Empire covering a quarter of the globe so in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed with the British, French and the Russians on one side, and us and Austro-Hungary on the other with the idea being that two vast opposing armies would act as the other's deterrent but there was a tiny flaw in the plan, it was utter shite and war ensued.
Finally, the big knobs got round the table and decided that four years of death and madness was enough and declared a cessation of hostilities on November 11 at 11am and on that morning, while the world started to celebrate and word continued to filter down to the troops that the fighting would cease at 11:00am, i was holed up in a house in Germany.
Outside the house was a group of American soldiers just standing around doing what Americans do and a day earlier we would have popped their heads like ripe melons but we realised it was just a few minutes until 11 so we kept our guns on the floor and stayed put until we heard the chimes of the local Church bell indicating that it was 11am and the war was officially over.
Relieved to get through the whole show, i was thinking of how i could now find a job at the new BMW factory, keep goal for Karlsruher FC Südstadt,marry my beautiful Klara when i stepped outside and approached the American soldiers to let them know that, since the war to end all wars was over, me and my men were vacating a house and it would be available for their use.
Unfortunately, no one had informed the Americans of the Armistice and the dumpkopf's went and shot and killed me meaning i had survived everything only to die sixty seconds after the ceasefire and making me the last soldier killed that day and therefore in the Great War.
I did later meet up with the last Frenchman killed, he was shot at 10.58am while carrying a message to the front lines that soup would be served to soldiers shortly after the 11:00 ceasefire but i would like to think that as all this is over, we learned to practice kindness and become more generous towards our fellow man, a frictionless society based on patience and willingness to tolerate each other’s strengths and weaknesses because otherwise it was all for nothing and even us humans are not that insane to have another World War.

Special Guest Blogger: Marlene Dietrich

Being German in America during World War 2 was tough enough and i could really have done without Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels announcing they were huge fans of mine and my sister Elizabeth running a Nazi canteen and cinema in Bergen-Belsen during WWII.
No matter what i did, because of my rejection of Hitler and the Nazis, i was regarded as a traitor in Germany and the Americans were suspicious of me even after i applied for American citizenship, recording a number of anti-Nazi albums and help to sell war bonds, i even sang for the American troops on the front lines and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom but they never really got over me being liked by Hitler.
I was planning to be a violinist but got called up for an audition for The Blue Angel and as i wasn't bothered and didn't think i would get it anyway, i was very nonchalant and approached it as though i was bored and simply going through the motions. As it turned out, luckily for me, that was exactly what the Producer was looking for in the character, and i was hired!
One of the coolest things about being famous is that you get access to other famous people who are just as interesting and as randy as you. You meet up at illuminati picnics planning meetings for secret cities where you'll all move after we have tanked the economy but most importantly, you make odd friendships that normal people generations later would never have expected so between films i had affairs with Ernest Hemingway, Lupe Véle, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., James Stewart, Yul Brynner, Errol Flynn, George Bernard Shaw, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra Gary Cooper and John F Kennedy but considering that JFK was using Hollywood as his own private brothel, who didn't have a fling with him?
Kidney failure killed me in the end and i was buried in Berlin at a beautiful funeral attended by every world leader of the important nations but i did find the line 'She lived like a soldier and would like to be buried like a soldier' as a bit confusing unless i am very much misled about what goes on inside the barracks.

Special Guest Blogger: Crown Prince Sado

What makes a person fit to be a king? In some cultures mythology, it's as easy as pulling a sword out of a stone while in others, you have to go through the awkward process of killing your father and marrying your mom but in 18th Century Korea it was just a simple matter of falling out of the right mother, in my case the wife of the King.
I became the Prince Regent when my older brother died but being rich and famous and a divine gift from the heavens affords you a lot of perks, one of these is being able to do whatever the hell you want because being a god-king in the waiting, nobody could discipline me as that was considered a mortal sin so aside from some light tutting, i was untouchable.
I was having a wonderful time with the jam-packed social calendar, the binge-drinking, the ready-made excuses for slacking off and the obsession with clothes, the murdering of a concubine, sleeping with a nun, seducing my younger sister and holding no holds drunken bared orgies with the virgins from the village which sounds great then you get in there and remember there are inexperienced virgins and you're kind of like, no, don't put that there..., anyway, you get my point.
It was the daily emptying of the palace of dead bodies and walking around with their severed heads which proved a step too far for my father but as i said, if you can’t murder the staff and carry around their heads when you are the son of a God, when can you but i knew that no one was allowed to interfere with my divine body so i was expecting some more tutting but my father threw a sword at my feet and demanding my suicide.
I obviously refused and reminded the king that 'You can't touch this' therefore pre-dating MC Hammer by a couple of centuries so he had to go think outside of the box with his next idea of how to get rid of me without touching me, by telling me to get into a damn box.
With hindsight, stepping ito the empty rice box was a bit of an error but i thought an hour inside tops then i will be let out, i will mumble something about learning from my mistakes and apologising before going back to hacking up the kitchen staff but once i was in, my father sat on the box to stop me getting out and then ordered it to be sealed and never opened again.
Seven days of suffering from heat torture and food deprivation, i finally stopped making sounds and was declared dead with the official cause of death from starvation but my fathers half-arsed under-parenting was much easier to put up with than his half-arsed over-parenting but in the end he used his whole arse.

Special Guest Blogger: Khutulun

Once upon a time, in a land called Mongolia, there lived a Princess named Khutulun. She was not your average Princess, mind you. She was the great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan who you may have heard of but Khutulan may have been a girl but she was a just as hardcore a fierce and formidable warrior as he was, maybe even more so.
I grew up with 14 brothers and learnt to fight and wrestle and i loved running into battle and shooting my bow as unsuspecting bystanders,  had a knack for riding up to the enemy and basically kidnapping one of them to bring back and generally torture them but this all paled in comparison to my talent for wrestling.
I could wrestle with the best of them and would often take part in the wrestling matches against men and that skill kept me single and more horses than i knew what to do with.
My father had been attempting to find me a suitor for a long time, but i wasn't enthralled by the idea of marriage and wanted to just ride, fight and wrestling rather than partake in any wifely duties in the home so we made a deal that if a man were able to beat me in combat, i would marry him but if they lost, they would have to give me 100 horses. As i ended up with a herd of 10,000 horses and no husband proves just how good at being a badass i was.
The Khan family were split between riding, shooting and fighting like my father wanted and becoming a proper government and other things that bored the average Mongol to tears like my Uncle Kublai's idea and we fought many battles over the ideals.
When my father grew ill from dysentery due to some bad medication he'd been given, he chose me as his successor to be the next Great Khan which didn't go down well with my brothers who declined but instead offered me the role of military leader if i stepped aside, which i did.
I carried on warring and wrestling until i died aged 46, undefeated and leaving behind not only a string of broken hearts but also a lot of horses.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Mary Magdalene De’Pazzi

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be my name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in....oh, hello, you caught me in the middle of my evening prayer. I will finish it later because, to be honest, i don't know the rest of it but i know bread comes into it somewhere but i really should learn the rest of it, particularly as i am a fully canonized Saint now.
I set my sights on becoming a Saint early on but by the 16th Century the Church had more Saints then you could swing a cat at so i had to come up with something really extreme to show my devotion and humility to the cause and all the easy things had gone.
A life of abstinence was a given and some of the most extreme examples, such as St. Lucy who removed her eyes for a man who wanted to marry her saying something to the effect of 'You take these, then, and I'll keep my virginity. Now go away' so i had to really up the grossness, and i think i can safely say that i achieved that.
As a nun i became known for mortifying my body as a punishment for the sins of the flesh so i would whip myself, drip hot wax on my naked body, wore a barbed metal cilice and a home-made crown of thorns and jumping naked into thorn bushes but i felt that i still needed something more so told people that i could heal their leprosy and skin diseases and i did this by licking their open sores and suck any maggots out of their infected wounds with my mouth.
While it is true that my body was covered with putrefying sores and my gums became infected and all my teeth fell out before i took to my bed until i died four years later from any number of diseases i picked up, it proved my devotion to God although it took the Church 68 years to recognise me as a fully fledged Saint.
For a moment there it looked as though all those evening borrowing tweezers to pluck thorns out of my tender areas and picking maggots out of the few teeth that i had left had been all for nothing but i finally made it onto the wall of the Vatican and got handed the patronage of bodily ills and against sexual temptation and to be fair, if you are covered in weeping sores and are as gummy as a newborn and have maggoty breath, the sexual temptation bit really isn't that difficult.

Special Guest Blogger: Enzo Ferrari

Modena in Italy was most famous for being the birthplace of the best Balsamic Vinegar but then a local grocer and his wife gave birth to me, little Enzo Ferrari, and i changed the way the world looks at four wheels.
As well as selling apples and pears, my father had a sideline in metalwork, fixing the locals machines and cars and i would help out in his workshop and as a reward, my father would take me to see the car races at the Circuito di Bologna and i decided car racing was where i wanted to be, but the WW1 came along closely followed by the 1918 Flu Pandemic and i barely lived a bout myself but by the time i recovered the War was over and i ventured into the car industry and i got work as a test driver for Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali who built small passenger cars.
Working for C.M.N led me to being promoted to race-car driver and i became a big enough deal in the racing world that i ran my own stable of drivers, calling my team Scuderia Ferrari with a cool horse logo and we done so well i was asked to head up the CMN racing division and i won the Coppa Acerbo and Alfa Romeo and then stepped out of the driver’s seat and into a factory, that’s when the real magic began.
I broke away from Alfa Romeo to go it alone as Ferrari S.P.A. and the future looked bright as cars and racing were both getting more popular by the day but then WW2 came along to literally blow all of that to hell as Mussolini took over our factories to make instruments of war instead.
The problem is, when your auto parts factory starts making parts for the war effort, you might as well paint a giant target on the roof and Allied forces bombed our factory and utterly destroying everything.
Mussolini had a habit of touching his own testicles to ward off bad luck. Obviously, as he ended his days hanging upside down from a lamppost after being shot several times, it is fair to conclude that grabbing your own nads is not the best way to ward off the fickle finger of fate but it freed me up to return to building racing cars.
After winning the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans race, people began taking notice and we entered the Formula 1 World Championship.
I only cared about making racing cars, i was enthusiastic about selling cars in the same way that milk-lovers are enthusiastic about raising cows but we quickly found that you can't actually pay the rent that way so i was persuaded to start selling sports cars to the public purely as a way to pay for my racing careers but i hated the sort of person who wanted such a car, considering them show offs and compensating for other shortcomings but the company’s financial stability was not good and came within an inch of selling my company to Ford but instead i went into partnership with Fiat.
As well as Ferrari, i also had a hand in the Laborghini, Ferruccio Lamborghini built tractors and after buying one of my cars he kept breaking the clutch and he said it was shoddy workmanship, i said he was a crap driver and he said he would make his own cars and to be fair he did, so i can claim some input into Lamborghini cars also.
I died aged 90 from kidney disease but my cars were awesome, men who buy them as tokens of excess not so much so maybe we should have introducing a Ferrari that could seat four people so finally a way the whole family can benefit from the dad's tiny penis.

Nil Points From Montenegro Jury

It's Eurovision time again and as sure as Amanda Holden is going to have three quarters of her breasts on show when she reads out the UK results, the accusation of Bloc voting will rear its head as soon as the UK song begins its inevitable slide towards the lower end of the scoreboard.
There is some truth to the accusation as the Eastern European nations always seem to throw Russia some big points as do the Scandinavian countries with Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland relying on each other to bump up each others scores but while Britain may suffer from not being on the friendliest terms with our European neighbours, we have Ireland and Malta to look towards to ensure we avoid the dreaded nul points when the rest of the Continent poo poo us so we are not clean when it comes to 'friendly' votes.
Looking at the UK votes received since the compeition began in 1957, we can see who our real friends are with the most points coming from Luxembourg who on average gave us on average 5 points per competition until they stopped taking part in 1993, then Malta, Ireland, Austria and Israel and going the other way, we have handed out most points to Ireland, an average of 5.5 points in finals.
At the other end, the country that has snubbed the UK the most consistently is Montenegro which has failed to give the UK even a single point ever but Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia have only ever given us a single point each in the contest.
So we know who our friends are so we can say thank you to the juries of Dublin, Valletta, Vienna and Tel Aviv and hope that one day Luxembourg decide to get back in the game but to Montenegro we say we know your game and us Brits and Amanda Holden's semi-exposed breasts will be watching you very closely tonight.

I Blame Tinky Winky And His Gang

Last week there was another relaxation of the Coronavirus rules and one was that we can hug each other again but to us older Brits, hugging  has never really been a thing.
I blame the Teletubbies. In most episodes of the children’s TV show, following a minor accident such as a milk spillage or a lost balloon the call would go up for a 'Big hug' and the assembled company would huddle for a communal embrace.
Now everyone raised under the regime of Tinky Winky, Po and the rest seem to be hugging everyone but to anyone born after 1993-ish and raised watching the frolics in Teletubbyland may be perfectly at ease hugging each other but move in for an embrace with a Brit over the age of 25 and the recoil will be swifter than the elastic on Dennis The Menace's catapult.
Britain is a country of stiff upper lip and understatement, where we resolutely refuses to succumb to drama, excitement, or high emotion like the airplane captain who announced to his passengers: 'Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our best to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress'.
That's the way to do it, when Capt Oates left his tent near the South Pole to his certain death, he said: ‘I may be some time’, he didn't demand a group hug first.
To adapt the old phrase, no hugging please, we’re British so unless you are direct family then a hearty handshake or a friendly wave will suffice thank you.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Quiteria

In a time of ancient gods, warlords and kings, a land in turmoil crying out for hero's and up stepped me and my eight other sisters, a mighty family of girls forged in the heat of battle.
I was one of nine sisters all born at the same time but our mother was a lady of high rank and she was disgusted that she had given birth to nine children like a common animal and even more so that she had nine daughters and no sons who were far more valuable, them being all strong and stupid.
In a fit of rage, mother demanded that our nurse take the nine babies and drown them in the river but fortunately for us, the nurse wasn't also a heartless bitch and couldn’t do it so she took us to a remote village and handed us over to some local women where the nine of us grew up together.
As we got older we were expected to join in the Roman festivals and attend the orgies but we refused as we had all been bought up Christians so we were brought before the Governor who just happened to be our father, who recognised us as his daughters.
Our father wanted us to marry Roman officers or other suitors but we refused and were imprisoned in a tower however, we escaped and on our way out liberated all of their other prisoners and we formed a nonuplet warrior gang, dedicated to opposing the worship of Roman gods and we waged a guerrilla war in the mountains against the Roman Empire.
We would travel around the country breaking Christians out of jail, and graffitiing and destroying Roman idols until we were caught and eventually, we were all killed or died, i was beheaded but there are two reasons that the Christians Church can honour you, for either living a life of virtue free from sin or smashing up another religion and as myself and two of my sisters became Saints, the latter certainly worked for us.

Special Guest Blogger: Lillie Langtry

Every woman has a type, some women have more than one but my type was filthy rich so while hard work, practice and patience are all nice things, occasionally being beautiful and having a nice arse and a decent rack will do just as well.
I was born in Jersey and was blessed with a natural beauty, i had men proposing to me from the age of 14 but at 16 i thought it was about time i started seriously planning for the future. Time to grow up, identify prudent investment opportunities and build a portfolio so i set off to the big city to snare a wealthy husband but i actually found one in Jersey, Edward Langtry, and just six weeks after meeting his cheque book, we got wed and moved to Southampton and then London.
Despite all the glamouras and expensive dresses Ed could afford, the High Society eluded me until my brother died and in mourning i took to wearing plain black dresses which stood out more than all the glitzy ball gowns at the toff events and i was asked to model for artists and my fame grew and i came under the wandering eye of Queen Victoria’s own son, the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, AKA the future-King of England who was married, didn't care that i was also married and invited me and my husband to an event, flirted with me and one thing led to another, and before i know it, left my husband at the bar as we found all kinds of uses for the royal furniture.
My husband took to drinking heavily afterwards as i became the not so secret King's mistress but the association with the future ruler got me invites to meet some of the most important people in London but after three years, Albert moved onto introducing his penis to French actress Sarah Bernhardt and our affair fizzled out but i had already moved onto Prince Louis of Battenberg in a short, sharp whirlwind affair which left me pregnant so i moved to Paris and fudged the dates to make it seem like my husband was the father but even he knew how to use a calendar and we separated.
I gave birth to a daughter, left her with my folks back in Jersey and returned to London where i met Oscar Wilde who got me a job as an actress and my old beau, the Prince of Wales, attended my performances and where the prince went, crowds followed, and i got enough fame to try and crack America and ended up cracking the incredibly wealthy Frederick Gebhard and we lived the high life and i owned yachts and racehorses through which i met George Alexander Baird, who obviously, i began an affair with but he died of pneumonia so i settled down with Sir Hugo de Bathe, a man 19 years my junior. He was, as you may have guessed, just my type, flush with cash, which worked well and i lived the high life until i died of bronchitis aged 75 but my legacy will always be that quote to Prince Edward that when he complained 'I've spent enough on you to build a battleship," my clever yet disgusting response was "And you've spent enough in me to float one'. Classy.

Special Guest Blogger: Edward The Black Prince

When you think of the Middle Ages, chances are you picture gallant knights sitting astride brilliant steeds galloping through a sea of plagues, pestilence and filth and that was especially true for me as i spent much of my time in France, a real flithy place.
As the eldest son of King Edward III, i was the next in line to the throne but i had a long wait so at 16, rather than kick my heels and wait for my father to die, i decided to go whack the French around a bit and the hundred years war was in full throttle so i donned my Black armour and hopped across the Channel for a bit of frog bashing.   
As a Knight, i had a code of chivalry to behold and we had to practise the noble art of war and i was always fair and considerate to the people i vanquished, not the plebs who lived in the towns and cities obviously, we just slaughtered them and burnt their homes to the ground, but to the Lords and Kings of the Cities and often we would stop mid-fight for a bit of a yak and sometimes even a meal and at one battle against King John of Politiers, we were heavily outnumbered and outflanked and faced a right rogering but i met with John and offered him a peace deal, he made a counter offer and i said give me a day to think about it and he was fine with that and said he would come back in a few days.
When he came back we had fortified our lines, headed uphill and took strategically important defensive positions and routed the lot of them, taking King John prisoner.   
On the way back to England we stopped off at Limoges who had been previously loyal to England but had surrendered the town to French forces and the townsfolk came out to beg we don't burn down their village and i promised i wouldn't and as a knight i kept my word, as they cast themselves on their knees begging for mercy, i said that i was disappointed in them crossing to the enemy which got the point across but if it didn't, the fact that our followup action was to hack then all to death definitely did, killing all three thousand men, women and children that day.
Spending so long in France it was inevitable i would pick up something nasty and i got a bad bout of dysentery and i was growing weaker by the day so the Bishop of Bangor urged me to ask forgiveness of God and of all those i had killed and that's when i was glad i was a Christian.
As a Christian you see, we can do what you want but as long as we have the split second to repent before we die we're going to end up in the same place as all Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and all the rest of them which doesn't seem fair really when you see what the others have to do but i'm not complaining and i died forgiven of all my many, many sins.

Israel's Right To Defend Itself Against The People It Is Oppressing

Something we hear every single time Israeli attack the Palestinians for firing rockets over the wall is that Israel has the right to defend itself and of course every nation in the World has that right, including the Palestinians who the Israeli's have been militarily occupying for the past 70 years and that trumps the right of the nation who launches a full out attack because the little guy they have been oppressing dares to throw a few punches back at it.
The mantra often repeated is that if Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel then peace would prevail but while no rockets have been fired from the West Bank and Mahmoud Abbas acceding to almost all Israeli demands, Israel continue to make military incursions into it, stealing their land and uprooting Palestinians from their homes in a continuation of settler programs, continually adding to the 240,000 settlers illegally living on Palestine's West Bank.
How would the Government of any other nation, and Hamas is the legally elected Government of Palestine, react to being illegally occupied with the occupier blocking essential supplies of food, medicine and moving its own people to live on your land. I am pretty certain that no country on earth would sit quietly and let the occupier go merrily about its way and nobody would expect it to.  
Israel may wring it's hands and say that it regrets any loss of innocent life but it doesn't seem to be going out of its way to prevent it, the present action has seen 219 people, including almost 100 women and children, killed in Gaza so far forcing Israel into a PR exercise to counteract the images of dead Palestinian children being dragged from the rubble of their former homes.
This has gone on for decades and will continue all the time that the Palestinians are criticised more heavily when they fire rockets into Israel than Israel who are an occupying army illegally seizing and building settlements on Palestinian land, defying UN resolutions, killing Hamas politicians, holding over 9,000 Palestinians in its prisons, destroying farms, bulldozing homes and businesses and maintaining a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the international court of justice amongst numerous other human rights violations.
What Israel really want is for the Palestinians to meekly remain quiet while Israel continues to violently colonize their land so it doesn't matter what weak justifications Israeli spokesmen wheel out to try and calm the tide of angry criticisms aimed at them, there is no justification. Israel and its American backers are complicit in one of the greatest atrocities since the 2nd World War.
Your right to defend yourself is on shaky ground when you are defending yourself against the people you have been murdering and occupying for the best part of seven decades.

Special Guest Blogger: Pope Stephen VI

These days, you might get a handful of different Popes over your lifetime if you're lucky, but in my day it seemed like just about everybody in Rome got to be Pope for a day if they were backed by the right family and i had the Dukes of Spoleto backing me so i got handed the funny hat and was told that i needed to stamp my authority hard and fast lest i be deposed or assassinated like so many before me, so i came up with a beauty of an idea and put a dead former Pope, Formosus, on trial.
The Spoleto's were all for it as Formsus was the other side's guy so i had the festering corpse dug up from the grave where it had been rotting for the previous seven months, dressed it in the full Papal garb and propping it up on the stand, hurled insults at the stinky dead Pope and accused him of perjury and of having acceded to the papacy illegally.
Obviously he was dead and couldn't answer for himself so in the name of fairness and to knacker my original idea that he would be found guilty by virtue of refusing to answer the questions, a terrified teenage deacon was sat behind the former Pope to answer on his behalf.
At the end of the trial Formosus was convicted by me and everyone in the Court and the punishment was to have his three 'blessing fingers' cut off before throwing the corpse in a commoner's grave but then i thought that was probably too good for him so had him dug up again and thrown in a river.
Things went a bit awry when his body washed up on the river banks a few days later and the public failed to accept a trial for a dead guy was fair and they turned on me and rose up and deposed me and Formosus's conviction was overturned and the trial of corpses was also prohibited, hence why you never see dead people people in the dock anymore.
I was imprisoned where i was strangled by a Formosus supporter who was much more popular amongst the common folk than i had anticipated but although my papacy lasted less than a year, just like the putrid smell of rotting Pope in the courtroom, my name lingered for much longer.

Special Guest Blogger: Benjamin Hornigold

Pirates have become cartoon characters in your modern culture so you could be forgiven for forgetting that the real thing were much more badass than the sanitised version in your head, we were unspeakably violent, often mass murderers and thieves and a career choice for people who liked to slash and hack away at people during the day and drink rum and vomit a lot at night.
As far as Pirating goes, i was a success story starting out in the Bahamas with little more than a few canoes but as we captured more and more ships my motley crew of scurvy dogs grew including teaching the pirating game to one of the most reknown and feared pirates of all time and i ended up commanding a huge 30-gun warship called The Ranger, then the most heavily armed in the area which made sailing over to merchant ships and stealing their goods and jewels extremely easy.
My protege was a young disenchanted goods importer called Edward Teach who quickly discovered that there was quicker and easier ways to make a living than humping around folders and files and it was so simple that sometimes we would do it just for kicks, one night we overtook a merchant ship and the only thing we demanded was everyone's hat, explaining to the puzzled crew that we got drunk and tossed ours overboard the night before, then we thanked them and  took off without stealing anything else.
Despite having the weapons to take over any ship we fancied, we avoided attacking British-flagged ships as we then had the fig leaf of cover that we were attacking England's enemies but my crew wanted to expand our operation and when i refused, they cut me loose in a sloop and they took off to raid anyone they fancied with Teach, or Blackbeard as he was now calling himself, as their leader.
Now unemployed i did consider my next move and did a bit of pirating on the side while waiting for opportunities to present themselves but word arrived of a general pardon for pirates offered by the King of England who not only offered a clean slate but also large sums of money for the capturing of other pirates so i became a pirate hunter chasing some of the same guys i used to run with.
I did round up a few of the old gang before sailing my ship into some reefs and perishing but i may not have been the most famous pirate but i taught the man who was everything he knew so i get a mention in every book and movie with the word 'Blackbeard' on the front and i raise my bottle of rum with a yo ho ho to that.

Special Guest Blogger: John Pemberton

Most important discoveries were made by dedicated people tirelessly exhausting themselves and their resources to achieve a clearly defined goal. Then there are others made by people with vague agendas who, by luck or circumstance, trip over major finds like a fat man at a free buffet and my discovery came about due to some huge slices of fortuitous timing, luck and a total disregard of safety standards.
America in the 1860's was an era of Cowboys, Indians, pioneers, outlaws and guns but most importantly the Civil war and i was a Chemist from Atlanta who ended up fighting on the Confederates side and as luck would have it i was slashed with a sword during a cavalry battle with the Union Calvary.  
Being slashed with a sword may not sound all that lucky but as a Chemist i had access to the pain killer morphine and quickly became addicted so i went looking for a cure for this addiction and began to experiment with safer painkillers that would serve as a morphine alternative and came up with mixing booze and coca leaves and kola nuts, aka cocaine, and came up with Pemberton's French Wine Coca.
I marketed it as 'medicine' and advertised it as particularly beneficial for sufferers of extreme mental exertion although 'Booze now with added Cocaine' would have got the message across just as well.
If you're thinking to yourself that combining a stimulant and a depressant into one concoction isn't the greatest of ideas, you obviously didn't grow up in the 19th century because in those golden days, you could have a shot of whiskey at lunch, come home and have a couple of belts then go out and down a couple of highballs with a bourbon chaser before stumbling home to your negligee-clad wife and the country actively encouraged your alcoholism at every turn and my wine was a hit, and then a local prohibition law was enacted and alcohol was banned.
For most people whose living was alcohol related, this would have spelt disaster and if one door opens for them when another closes, their house is probably haunted but for me it was a second massive stroke of luck because i replaced the alcohol with carbonated water, kept the cocaine ingredients and sweetened it with obscene amounts of sugar and advertised it as a drink which could cure headaches, relieve exhaustion, impotence and calm nerves, calling it Coca-Kola as reference to the two main ingredients.
Due to the prohibition, and with alcohol quality and quantity dwindling, my new drink filled the gap and people drank it to replace the missing alcohol with the cocaine and tooth rotting amount of sugar and it should have made me rich, and it would have done if i didn't retain my expensive morphine addiction which forced me to sell off almost all rights to the company a few years later.
I did keep some back for my son, hoping that after my death he would benefit from it which he did, it allowed him to sell the shares for $2,300 just after i died from stomach cancer and buy the large amounts of opium that he died overdosing on.
I heard that the cocaine component has now been removed from the drink and they have made lots of new flavours but why mess with my winning formula, they should either put the cocaine and booze back in it or leave it the hell alone.

Eurovision 2021 This Weekend

This Saturday is one of the best Saturday's on the calendar because love it or hate it, the evening's television will be dominated by the Eurovision Song Contest and by midnight we will know which country are the top songsters and can expect hordes of brightly coloured Eurovision fans piling into their nation next year, virus permitting, as they earn the honour of hosting it.
As the contest now includes Australia along with Israel, it is becoming more of an international affair and after hearing all the songs i am putting my little ticks beside Italy's guitar bash, Malta's quirky effort, Iceland's 80's synth attempt, the Greek's annoyingly catchy song, Lithuania's tune which again harks back to 80s synthesizers and dark horse Germany with a mad song which will either do well and fly or sink without a trace, something i feel about the Italian song also, i like it but it may be too aggressive for your normal Eurovision audience.
The bookies have the winner as Italy (5/2) with France (11/4) second and then Malta (5/1), Iceland 8/1), Cyprus (10/1) and Switzerland (11/1) making up the top six.
The UK is currently ranked 17th at 125/1 and likely to finish on the right hand side of the results board so we shouldn't worry about clearing the diary of the O2 complex next May because we won't be walking away with the prize.
So if you want to stick your money on someone the bookies are saying Italy and to be fair it is a very good guitar led song but luckily we have a fool-safe system that has an impressive record of picking the winners of elections so let's ask Google who will be holding aloft the Eurovision crystal microphone and asked to sing their song again on Saturday night.
Using online searches, and with a record of 9 correct predictions over the last 16 years where the top-searched candidate also received the most points from televoting, it has a prediction rate based on search activity of just over half right.
The powers that be at Google HQ have crunched the search data and come up with a list of winners based on the countries and acts that have been searched for the most by people in participating Eurovision countries online and they have Iceland winning the whole thing with Malta the runner up and then Lithuania, Germany, Austria and then the Netherlands but how the Netherlands got any searches is beyond me, to be polite, it's not a classic.
The Eurovision website has a poll and that has Eurovision fans voting France top and then Malta, Switzerland, Italy, Lithuania and Greece taking the top six spots and they are the people who are likely to be voting.
So taking all four sources into account, and bearing in mind that some may fall by the wayside at the semi Final stage, the smart money is going on Malta then Italy, Iceland and Lithuania and then a dust up between France, Switzerland, Germany and Greece for the fifth place but we may have to come back and revise it on Thursday after we the second Semi-Final.

Falling On A Bruise Soon Also Available On Substack

Saint Dymphna isn't happy because Blogger decided that her guest blogger post violated their Community Guidelines, bizarrely their 'Malware and Viruses policy' which means it violated the: 'do not transmit malware or any other content that harms or interferes with the operation of the networks, servers, end user devices or other infrastructure'.

So they yanked it down and sent me a 'don't do that again or you and your blog are outta here' type email although they have since emailed me again to say that: 'upon review we have re-evaluated the post and it has been reinstated' and it has now been put back and Saint Dymphna's story is there in all it's glory for all to read.

A while ago i did consider breaking the blog up into sections, a few comments where along the line of pick a subject and stay with it for gawd's sake woman but i liked just writing whatever bothered my brain that particular day so what ended up on the Blogger page could be about space, politics, bunny's, religion, Christmas or pretty much anything under the Sun but moving the posts seemed like too much hard work so i never but my fellow collaborator on the Special Guest Blogger posts suggested we at least move the Guest Blogger posts elsewhere so they are not lost and he suggested Substack.

When i saw it was a site that you had to charge a subscription for, i immediately refused to entertain it but after some persuasion and looking into it a bit more, you can either charge or set it up as free content and subscribers would sign up to receive an email whenever we posted and it wouldn't cost a thing.

Again i resisted but following Blogger's email and the threat to end Falling On A Bruise, which i assume came after someone complained about the St Dymphna post, i have decided that i need a back-up and as long as he does all the work, we will begin to transfer the posts across to Substack and split them up into sections so people can subscribe for whichever flavour of posts they want.

On this blog there are 5,121 posts and i will continue to post here for as long as Blogger allows me because i like the way this works but not all of them will make it across to the new platform but we have made a start and it will probably take a few weeks (months?) to pick out, create the relevant section and move them but so far we have began putting the political posts at https://foab.substack.com/ and the ones i see as more fluffy and less shouty at https://lucyp.substack.com/ and https://famousdeadpeople.substack.com/ for the Famous Dead Bloggers but remember you will need to subscribe but the ones i write alone I PROMISE WILL ALWAYS BE FREE, you are just signing up to receive the emails although i can't promise that for the Guest Blogger ones, we have to have a bit of a discussion on those ones.
 
I will post the links to the Substack sections here as we set them up but if you come here one day and find an empty space then you know Blogger has pulled the plug especially as i intend to continue to post about Saints on their relevant Feast Days and if the Saint Dymphna's story was controversial, i do have some concern for some of the upcoming ones which feature some of the big names in the list of deities. 

As always, thank you to everyone who reads this blog and may it long continue.

Lucy
 
https://foab.substack.com/     for the political shouty posts
https://lucyp.substack.com/   for the less shouty type
https://famousdeadpeople.substack.com/ for the Famous Dead Bloggers

Special Guest Blogger: St. Dymphna

There are some things in life that obviously should be avoided. The seat beside Pee Wee Herman in a cinema for example or Russians carrying Polonium but one of the no-brainers should be a father attempting to put the 'non-consensual' bit into 'non-consensual sex' with his own teenage daughter.
We were a normal Irish family, my father was a Pagan but my mother was a very devout Christian woman and we would spend many days reading the Bible and having religious discussions and when i turned 14 i consecrated myself to Our Lord and took a vow of chastity, vowing never to let a man touch me which made my mother very happy but shortly afterwards she died due to gremlins or evi spirits (we weren't too savvy about what caused death back then) and things took a very dramatic and awkward turn.
My father, somewhat of a leader in the local community, was pressed to remarry but he vowed to only marry someone as beautiful as his deceased wife and he looked and looked and looked but after searching fruitlessly, he came home one day and said that i was the spitting image of his dead wife, my mum, but the warning bells didn't go of until he began flirting with me and pinching my backside and announced that he would like to marry me.
I resisted, for the obvious reason that this was my freaking dad so i decided to deal with it by asking myself what would Jesus do in this situation and decided that he would have obviously got the hell out of there as if his arse was on fire which is what i did, fleeing to Belgium with a priest to put as much distance between my backside and his wandering hands.
In Belgium we began helping the poor and built a hospital for the sick but news of our good endeavours spread to my father who came to find me and turned up with a sword and an ultimatum that i return to Ireland to be his bride or he will chop off my head.
I tried once more with the 'No because i'm already married to God' line and i shook my head, he shook his sword and my head shook the basket it landed in and i don't know if he ever got remarried but i went on to become the Patron Saint of runaways and incest victims and my shrine is  situated in Ohio where you can only hope they have a lot of runaways and not because it is the capital of some very awkward family breakfast tables.

We Know How This Will End

Trying to explain the latest conflict between Israel and Palestine is not easy as it goes all the way back to the foundation of Israel in 1948 and the captured of the then Arab-controlled parts of Jerusalem.
The tension this time has been the Jewish settlement in the east of Jerusalem, an area that Palestinians claim Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state and Jewish groups have been using the Israeli courts to evict Palestinian residents from their homes in East Jerusalem, claiming that the houses were owned by Jews prior to 1948 and the ruling was due to be handed down on May 10 but was postponed amidst protests which Israeli police responded to with teargas, stun grenades and storming and occupying the al-Aqsa mosque.
The Palestinians rulers, Hamas, told Israel to remove security forces from in and around the mosque and when they never, fired missiles into Israel and Israel answered with military attacks in Gaza and have prepared a land invasion.
What normally happens is that the Palestinians death toll raises to such shocking levels that the international pressure forces Israel to back down but not before the US, Israels main ally, back the Israel in a military campaign using the usual 'right to defend itself' misnomer until the civilian human cost becomes unbearable, and only then will there be pressure for an end to the genocide and sadly for the Palestinians,
a return to the grim status quo and Israel running roughshod over Palestinain human rights.

Just Say Sorry Harry

You would assume if a Brit was going to have a pop at any of America's amendments it would be the absolute mad second one but Prince Harry has decided to have a go at the one before that and has criticized the United States constitutional right to free speech, the First Amendment.
During an appearance on the 'Armchair Expert' podcast, the prince who left the UK to go live in California used his first amendment right to call it 'bonkers' which is a nice change to him and his wife taken shots at the royal family in television interviews.
The comment angered many Americans who quite rightly questioned why Prince Harry was living in the United States and most have said that he should 'go back to England'.
Now hold on a second, we took Piers Morgan back when he said the second amendment was crackers, which it is, and he ended up polluting our TV Screens again so we don't want Harry and his family back again so just apologize Harry, wave a little American flag and stuff a cheeseburger in your face and shut up.

Special Guest Blogger: Bill Haley

When the youth of 1950's America was looking for a soundtrack to lead their revolution, a one eyed, hillbilly country and western singer and champion yodeler would not have been top of their agenda but our song, Rock Around the Clock, ushered in the the era known as Rock n Roll but it almost never happened at all and the history of music would have taken a very different direction.
During the 1940s i was known as Silver Yodeling Bill Haley and considered one of the top cowboy yodelers in America and was in a band called Bill Hayley's Saddlemen and we had a few country and western songs knock about the low ends of the charts but everything changed when we recorded a swing number called Thirteen Women about the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb that leaves just one man and 13 women alive but we took so long over the song that we only had 40 minutes left of studio time so we dashed off a song for the B Side.
Thirteen Women. Know it? Of course not, nobody does because the B-side song we dashed off was a speeded up rhythms and blue version of a Sonny Dae and His Knights song called 'Rock Around the Clock' and on its release it barely touched the lower reaches of the charts before quickly disappearing and that's where the story would have ended if one of the few people who bought Thirteen Women hadn't been a boy named Peter Ford whose father was Glenn Ford who was about to star in a film called Blackboard Jungle and the producers deciding that they needed some music in the film that represented what the kids were listening to and Rock Around The Clock fitted the bill perfectly, and they set the opening and closing credits to the song.
Now going under the name Bill Hayley and his Comets, the film and our song was a smash with the kids and the radio DJ's flipped the record and our song re-entered the charts at number one and Rock 'n' Roll was born and became associated with youth and rebellion and we became the first rock 'n' roll superstars as a result.
We rattled off a few more up-tempo songs, one of them 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' which was a filthy, innuendo filled song about sex which we changed into a song about sending our woman to the kitchen to rattle some pots and pans but while our version was concerned with making dinner, the original was more concerned with using the table and worktops surfaces for doing something far less edible.
The line 'I'm like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a seafood store' was kept intact as a nod to the original and certainly was nothing to do with a half-blind cat wandering into a fishmongers.
Younger and more relatable singers pushed us to the margins but we kept plugging away through my alcoholism, three marriages and years of cranking out the same old songs until i was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died aged 55 but i may not have had the coolness of Elvis, the guitar skills of Chuck Berry or the voice of Tony Williams and been as edgy as a pool ball, but i was the musical father of them all.

Special Guest Blogger: Dr James Barry

Like the stories of a tee-total Australian and generous Scotsman, some tales are just so unbelievable that they are dismissed immediately and my story certainly falls into the unbelievable category.
History has some amazing female medics but i'm not quite clear when all that changed but we have to assume that at some point men realised they had allowed women to become too powerful by letting them be in charge of both stethoscopes and vaginas so women were banned from attending medical school but when i was told to stay home and bake cookies, i said screw that sweetheart.
Born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Ireland, my Uncle James Barry was a member of the Royal Academy and when he died i took his name to enroll in medical college and arrived at Edinburgh Medical School in a long overcoat and 3-inch shoe inserts and a female voice which led to people querying my age not that i was female, at one point they tried to bar me from sitting for my exams on suspicion that i was too young.
I passed the exams and after graduation got a job in the British army, after all, the Napoleonic wars were raging, and the army needed good medical personnel and i healed famous people such as Napoleon's son and his special advisor and i was one of the first to successfully perform a Caesarean section and my fame and skill made me one of the top-ranked doctors and surgeons of the 19th Century.
I was never caught out in my lifetime but i left strict instructions for nobody to inspect my body after i died but after i succumbed to dysentery, one of the nurses thought 'stuff it' and looked anyway and not seeing what she was expected to be seeing between my legs, got the undertaker to confirm that i had been a woman all along and instantly earning me the title of first female doctor in Britain.
Questions have been asked if i was a trendsetting transvestite but the obvious question that nobody asked was how a 5ft tall woman who never took off her overcoat and spoke with such a high pitched voice managed to pull off being the opposite gender in a world full of medical experts.

Special Guest Blogger: Wladyslaw III Of Poland

I was only 10 years old when my father died and the Cardinals came to me and said right, put down the childish things because your now the King of Poland and i thought that shouldn't be too bad but when i was 16 they came back again and said the Hungarian King had died of something or other nasty so you are now the King of Hungary as well and i thought brill but what they never told me was that Hungary was at war with the rising Ottoman Empire, the same dudes that i had just signed a peace treaty with. Bit awkward then.
My Cardinals explained that we were Christians and the Ottomans were Muslims and therefore big girls blouses who fought like pussies and anyway they were infidels and we were Christian's so any agreement i had with them was not binding and we should go crush them in the name of all things Godly.
As i was 16 and computer games were still 600 years in the future, i got together an army, appointed the famous warrior John Hyundai as commander and went on an anti-Ottoman crusade in Bulgaria.
Me and 500 of my closest heavily armed buddies turned up at the Black Sea to meet the Venetian Fleet as previously arranged to smack around the Muslims a bit but the Venetian's didn't arrive on time but the Ottomans with a few thousand of their own closest heavilly armed buddies did.
Now it might have been prudent to think we are outnumbered three to one here so let's get the hell out of here but my Cardinals have told me we had God on our side, they only had some bloke who lived in a cave so i thought, okay, the big guy has my back in this and led a charge into the massed Ottoman troops.
I don't know where the big man was that day, whether he was far too busy at that particular moment answering prayers, saving British royalty, orchestrating all the Holy Wars in his name or making sure the right athlete won the 100 metres hurdles in future Olympic Games but he certainly wasn't there because the charge started off bad then it got worse in the middle and the less said about the end the better but as it ended with my head on a pike it couldn't be called successful so thank's for nothing God.

Special Guest Blogger: Mae West

Long before the likes of Marilyn Monroe, i was the iconic female sex symbol and film star in Old Hollywood but i was far more than just a pretty face with an alluring sex appeal even if i didn't break into films until i 39 years old.  
I began out in the world of theater in several persona's, one was as a male impersonator but even before Hollywood came knocking, i was in some very highly controversial plays, controversial because i had many African-Americans in my plays when many Americans thought they should still be picking cotton rather than on a stage and one play i was in was called SEX but it was ended when the Holy Gang objected and New York City police officers launched a raid and i was charged with obscenity and corrupting the morals of youth. I got ten days in prison for that but i only served eight, getting two days off for good behavior but the publicity was fantastic for my career.
People were always taking issue with my movies back in the day despite my never having any nudity, sexuality, or swearing but still my movies had more boots stuck into them than Imedla Marcos's shoe cupboard but the negative publicity made me a star.
My film Belle of the Nineties was originally titled It Ain’t No Sin but the Church again objected because whatever it was, the Church considered it a sin in 1920's America but for my follow-up to Sex, i starred in a play about cross dressing called The Drag and another ban and prison sentence for moral corrupting.
My move into films didn't really pull up any trees, my first was Night After Night in 1932 and my last film was Sextette in 1977 and both these films also featured film star George Raft but when my film career ended, i wrote books and plays and continued to perform in Las Vegas and the United Kingdom, on Television and radio although i was banned from radio after one particularly double entendre rich sketch with a puppet, have you got wood and you gave me splinters, that sort of thing.  
I married a man 30 years my junior who happened to be a body builder and a former Mr California but i died after i tripped while getting out of bed, turns out i had a stroke which is ironic because that is what i was trying to do when i tripped but my legacy and everlasting fame would be Coca-Cola bottles, the shape is based on my figure.

Special Guest Blogger: Francois l'Olonnais

The French and Spanish pirates have always had a bit of a rivalry but after they almost killed me, i took it to a whole new level of hatred.
While going about our pirating business, me and my hearties were shipwrecked in Mexico and a party of Spanish soldiers attacked us and set about killing almost the entire party, i was the only survivor as i had covered myself in the blood and hid amongst the dead hoping the Spaniards were too lazy to check, which it turns out they were.
After the Spanish departed, with the assistance of some escaped slaves, we made our way to the Spanish island of Tortuga and held the whole town hostage, demanding a ransom from it's Spanish rulers. The governor of Havana preferred to send a ship to kill us rather than pay but we captured and beheaded the entire raiding crew save one, whom i spared so that a message could be delivered to Havana that i shall never henceforward give quarter to any Spaniard whatsoever, just in case that wasn't completely clear from all the headless Spaniards littering the ground.
Next i raised a pirate fleet of eight ships and hundreds of men and proceeded to terrorise the coast of South America, targeting Spanish-ruled cities, capturing Spanish treasure ships and i developed a nice line in torturing the soldiers including slicing portions of flesh off the scurvy dogs with a sword, burning them alive, or tying a rope around the victim's head and pulling on it until their eyes popped out their skulls, that sort of thing and generally being a huge pain in the arse to anything Spain-related.
The Spanish obviously didn't enjoy that very much and they set an ambush and as my pirate buddies were being blown to pieces by grapeshot all around me, i managed to escape and captured a couple of Spanish hostages along the way thinking they would know an escape route free of Spanish ships but they refused to help so i drew my sword, sliced into one Spanish prisoner's chest, pulled out the warm, still beating heart with my hands and began to eat it saying to the other one that i will eat his heart next unless he helped me escape which not surprisingly worked like a charm and i escaped safely.
My luck later ran out in Colombia when a tribe of indigenous Indians tore off my limbs and set my body on fire which meant Colombians were also added to the shit-list of people i really didn't like.

Trusting The Science

Not long before the Coronavirus pandemic hit, there was a BBC programme by the brilliant scientist Hannah Fry which set how how, if a pandemic hit, how and why it would spread.
With unfortuitous timing, we were soon able to compare the programme with the real thing as we watched the news with growing horror as Covid-19 spread across Asia then ran through Europe and turned up on our shores early 2020 with devastating and deadly consequences.
Thirteen months later it appears to be the beginning of the end of the virus in the 'rich' nations armed with vaccines although it is stil ripping through the rest of the World with catastrophic results.
You can see from the figures how some Governments played it well, New Zealand, Australia and most of the Far East nations have relatively low numbers where some Governments had a disastrous time such as the UK, US, Brazil and India where death tolls make up a high percentage of the global death tolls.
It is no surprise that the nations with the highest numbers are run by leaders who either dismissed or downplayed the virus despite the scientists were screaming what was coming and what had to be done but despite the assurance that they were following the science, science was definitely shoved to one side.
The mask debate was never really a thing in the UK, people took to wearing them pretty quickly but in the US it became more of an issue and seemed to split down between political lines led by the awful Donald Trump who was keen to dismiss the advice of the leading Scientist, Dr Anthony Fauci, and instead handed out his own sage advice such as suggesting drinking bleach would work.
If we learn anything from our recent experiences for the next time, and there will be a next time, it is that Scientists should be not only listened to but acted upon because the places which adhered to scientific advice and locked down quickly avoided the fate of the other nations which sidelined the scientists and made Covid-19 a virus proven to be serious but manageable, made much worse due to the likes of the science dodging Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro and Modi.

Afghan War Really Wasn't Worth It

Although America and it's gullible allies should not have been in Afghanistan in the first place, i was always of the opinion that as they were the ones who blew down the walls to leave the Afghani's exposed in the first place, they then had a moral duty to stick around and keep them safe so after two decades they are finally packing up there bags and heading home so just how safe are they leaving the country they invaded for Democracy?
True, they did oust the Taliban leadership who nobody could argue was a force for good but now they are outside the tent pissing in with their guerilla tactics and the UN said that last year 3,000 civilian deaths and 6,000 injured which is down from a high of 4,000 deaths and 7,000 injured in 2016 but that's the seventh year in a row the death number has topped and that's the numbers when the America forces were 'protecting' them, without that deterrant the numbers are going to soar so we can't look there for successes.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, but after the US invasion there was a flurry of International Aid and after the initial boost, things have gone backwards with more than 54% of the population living below the national poverty line, up from 38%.
When the war was being justified, Tony Blair stated that it was partly about women rights and under the Taliban women were not allowed to work and were discouraged from going to school and the number of women working and girls in school has grown in the past two decades so a back-slap for that welcome statistic.
With the Americas out the way, it is expected the Taliban will take back control and so will the return of the harsh Government and the anti-woman laws which did so much damage so Afghanistan will be back in the same place it was in 2001, only with more poverty and more deaths from a Government keen to punish large numbers of it's population.
At a cost of almost 3 trillion dollars, 4,000 coalition deaths and 241,000 civilians deaths, Afghanistan did not become a beacon of democracy and the Afghan will soon be back under a tyrannical Governments rule and are worse off in every other respect.
Nor is the World a safer place so it does make you ask, after 20 years of conflict, if the Afghans are just going to be worse off then when it started, was it all worth it? Hard to say anything but a resounding no.

Get Your Act Together Keir

It doesn't reflect well on the Labour Party that despite knowing what Boris Johnson's Government have been up to over the past couple of years, enough people still chose them over the Labour Party, handing them 11 Councils and Hartlepool.
Considering that the good people of Hartlepool once mistook a monkey for a Frenchman and hung it, it is no real surprise whatever they get up to up there but the fact that the Labour Party ended up worse off in terms of seats then they started amidst a flurry of inquiries into Tory sleaze is mind boggling.
The fall guy, or girl in this case, seems to be Deputy Leader Angela Rayner who has been sacked as national campaign co-ordinator, which is a bit of an own goal as she is probably the most fearsome character in the Labour ranks, and one you would least want to upset especially as many consider she should have been the one with Party Leader after her name although that could go some way to explain why Starmer has decided its all her fault.
So how to explain how after a disastrous Coronavirus response which had left 127,000 dead, an array of inquiries into shady backhand Tory donations, blatantly lying about everything and refusing to answer any questions asked of him, him and his Party wasn't booted up the arse by the electorate and the answer seems to be a bounce from the vaccine roll-out.
Credit must go to Boris for that i agree, the Government got 90% of what it did wrong but getting in early with the vaccines and getting them out quick to the population was absolutely the right thing to do and the election came around just as the feel good factor was springing in the hearts and minds of a people pummeled for the last 13 months, if the election had been a few months ago it would have been very different outcome.
Labour needs to get its act together quickly, 11 years of Conservative rule has not been kind, but if Keir and Labour can't make the argument now that they are a better bet to Govern then the current lot, they may as well pack up and go home because they never will.

Special Guest Blogger: Douglas Bader

Pacifists, hippies and spotty faced, 16 year old boys have long made the call of more lovemaking and less war but the only thing i wanted to get inside several times a day and take to heaven and back was my plane and the fighter planes of the Second World War were capable of all kinds of airborne acrobatics that found pilots bodies moving in the opposite direction to their blood.
The immense G-Forces could drain all the blood from the top half your body into your legs so the dogfights were a constant battle between out-maneuvering the guy trying to turn you into a flaming pile of metal and trying not to drain all the blood down into your legs, or at least, that was a problem for people who had legs for their blood to drain into because i lost mine a few years before when i pranged my kite right in the how's-your-father.
Even with no legs i could still kick arse and i did, it was up diddly up, down diddly down, whoops, poop, twiddly dee a bit of a scrap with the fiendish Boche followed by a bit of a jolly old crash landing behind enemy lines then capture, torture, attempted escape, and then back home in time for tea and medals but my story begins 10 years earlier when i was in the RAF and i showing off in front of some fillies and doing some low-flying aerobatics.
The tip of my left wing touched the runway, the hairy blighter dicky-birded into the ground and i woke up days later in a hospital bed with no use for my new slippers anymore as both my legs had been amputated and i was retired out of the RAF on medical grounds.
I kept trying to get back into the RAF but they were not going to allow a guy with no legs inside one of their machines until they were rapidly running out of pilots to take on Jerry in WW2 and then What-ho, funnily enough they welcomed me back.
22 shot down Germans planes later i was bally shot down myself and had to bale out sausage side but i lost one prosthetic leg when escaping the aircraft and landed in a field and even the Krauts couldn't miss a one legged man dressed in a British Uniform frantically hopping across a field and i was captured.
Fair play to them, they did arrange for another false leg to be flown to me from Britain, which was duly parachuted down and i was placed in a hospital but after several escape attempts, they got all squiffy and threatened to take away my bally legs and moved me to the prisoner of war camp at Colditz Castle where i stayed until the camp was liberated.
I became a bit of a celebrity after the war and appeared on radio and TV shows but finally flipped over on my Betty Harpers and caught the can in the Bertie aged 72 which is bally good because i could have so easily snitched a parcel sausage-end and gone goose-over-stump frogside all those years before.

Special Guest Blogger: St. Dominic Savio

Sainthood, so it would seem, is not a career path for those who wish to live to see middle age and i was barely into my Teens when i handed in my chips but i always had a feeling that my stay on Earth was only temporary which is why i did as much as i could to make sure that when my time was up, i was heading upstairs.
Both of my parents were very religious and that rubbed off on me at a very early age, i would scold the other children who were doing things morally dubious with a firm 'STOP THAT OR WILL GO TO HELL' which meant very little to 4 year olds but it must have worked because they never did those things in front of me anymore, come to think of it they never did anything infront of me because they stopped asking me out to go out and play with them.  
I even refused to go swimming because all that naked flesh is an affront to God who was pretty strict on his no showing your juicy bits policy.
One time at school two boys had a disagreement and decided to fight each other by throwing stones and i tried to reason with them but with no positive result i stood between them, held up my crucifix and said they should throw their stones at me instead.
Rather than take me up on my offer and brain me with rocks, they gave up and went home instead.
It was hearing a talk on Sainthood at the Church that made me decide that it was my chosen path so i decided to give up things like a comfy bed, comfortable clothes and eating healty food by placing small pebbles in my bed and sleeping with a thin covering in winter, wearing a hair shirt, and fasting on only bread and water.
With hindsight when i first began coughing i should have maybe grabbed a few extra blankets and eaten something a bit more healthy and the doctor cutting my arm multiple times to let some of the bad blood out didn't help and my cough got worse and i died aged 14.
I had a choice between living a righteous life and becoming a Saint or living the life of a teenage boy and if i had my time again and someone said you can achieve Sainthood or live a teenage boys life of  debauchery, girls, alcohol, sex, cake, music, adventure and drugs i would say erm, let's have another look at that teenage boy option again. Only kidding, it would be hair shirts, stones in the bed and Sainthood every time. Well almost every time. Okay some of the time.

Special Guest Blogger: El Cid

When you think of medieval knight's you probably imagine the shining armour, paying courtly love to fair maidens, fighting on behalf of the little folk, piously defending Christianity and adhering to strict codes of chivalry and some of that is true, we were trained in swordsmanship and horsemanship for years, striking terror into infantrymen arrayed against us and whilst some genuinely believed in chivalry, some of us had no scruples about slaying anyone in our way if we were paid enough.
I lived in Spain at a time when the country was deeply fragmented between Christians and Muslims and within those groups as well as in the rivalry between the Christian kingdoms of Aragon ruled by King Alfonso and Castile ruled over by King Sancho so it was a time of great confusion but a great financial opportunity for a skilled practitioner of war like me.
From the age of six i was taken under the wing and trained to a high standard by King Sancho II of Castile and was made the commander of the royal troops and played a major role in the military struggles between Sancho and Alfonso, earning the title 'El Campeador' but Sancho was assassinated and faced with the death of my collaborator and friend of decades, i was left with no choice but to tell Sancho's lot that off was the general direction in which they should bugger and went to work for Alfonso, but was exiled after conducting a raid against a Muslim city under Alfonso's protection.
With that in mind, it would take some pretty massive balls of steel to then switch sides again but i had such steely balls and offered my services to al-Muqtadir, the Muslim ruler and together we won many battles and i gained the reputation of being a fearless fighter, a strong leader and tactical expert and a man who was not too particular about which side he fought on, as long as he was showered in cash which is how i ended back in the pay of Alfonso again but i had my own plans to grab myself a title and with my own independent army, invaded and conquered the city of Valencia, naming myself al-sid (The Master) from which my name, El Cid, derives.
The wars continued and i died from famine after a siege of Valencia but such was my reputation that my army fitted my corpse with my armour and sat me on my horse and sent out to scare the bejesus out of the invaders and amongst the many dead lay many infantrymen who not only died horribly but died crapping every set of trousers they owned when, despite being dead, i honed into view.

Special Guest Blogger: Srinivasa Ramanujan

When people say you should follow your dreams, they usually mean stuff like find your passion and achieve your life's goals and not turn up at a job interview naked and i was one of those people who did exactly that. Not the naked interview thing but building a career on the thing i saw while fast asleep.
I had a knack for Maths, and was entirely self taught from a maths textbook on advanced trigonometry my parents gave me as a kid but i had some special help with the tough stuff.
Being a young man, i had dreamt of the Indian goddess Namagiri many times, she was a beauty with multiple hands but in this particular dream she  used all those extra pair of hands to show me all sorts of maths including the fully formed properties of the partition function where a number is any combination of integers that adds up to that number so all i he had to do upon waking up was jot them down and check them because Namagiri was kind of lazy and didn't provide me with mathematical proofs, only the finished formulas so as a result, the finest mathematical minds in the world spent years verifying them as i started sending my theorems off to various important math people.
One was a professor at Cambridge University who saw the theorems and invited me to England where i spent five years but the English weather and food didn't agree with me and i fell ill with tuberculosis and a severe vitamin deficiency so returned to India but India's health care system was second only to Japan, Canada, Sweden, Great Britain… well, everywhere actually and i died a year later at the age of 32.
It turns out that when fortune smiles upon you, there's no designated time in which she does and sadly, some of the most famous people on the planet only became so after they kicked the bucket and my formula was ideal for computer algorithms which didn't even exist when i was alive but today, my formula's have found uses in everything from string theory to the arrangement and bonding of atoms in crystalline solids and Black Holes.
The big one was Pi which is the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference and calculating pi to the most places is the nerd equivalent of peeing the highest up a wall so pay attention kids and listen to the Maths teacher because as my catchphrase states, maths is important as sure as 1p=i5?k=08s10C(k)10k+3(-52) k+1/2, j10C (1+i2) = -52 but to be honest, unless you are a maths teacher, the chances of ever hearing anyone mention the word Pi again once you have left school is 3.141592653589793238462643383279 or something.

UK Getting On Top Of Covid But It Surges Elsewhere

The UK Government appear to be winding down the Coronavirus restrictions as the vaccine's begin to have an effect and the daily death toll is now in single digits although with the opening of the country, a rise is expected to follow but it appears, finally Britain is in the end game but that can't be said for many other countries, with India reporting record breaking figures every day.
The death toll worldwide stands at 3,220,589 with over 750,000 new cases and 15,000 deaths a day with India the latest hotspot amidst shortages of testing kits, medical oxygen and hospital beds.       
The USA still leads the grim death league table with 591,91 deaths followed by Brazil (407,775), then India (220,571), Mexico (217,233) and the UK (127,539), only 15 nations Worldwide have not registered a single death out of the 222 countries on the WorldoMeter website.
SAGE, the group of scientists informing the Government say that booster jabs could very well be needed in the UK in Autumn as they expect a surge of cases to hit again once summer has ended and people retire back inside again so it is too soon to say that Coronavirus has been defeated in the UK, and as long as cases soar elsewhere, we are vulnerable so vaccines should be shipped around the World, starting with the 5 million being made in India which are being readied to be obscenely shipped over to the UK.    

Special Guest Blogger: Sean Connery

I was best known for being Bond, James Bond, but my friends called me Tommy but i went by my middle name, Sean but before being the first James Bond, i was just another ex-coffin polisher, footballer, lifeguard and babysitter before my acting career took off.
I took elocution lessons to shake off the Scottish working-class brogue and began in stage plays, bit parts in movies and small roles on TV including my big break in the film 'Another Time, Another Place' and was spotted by the team looking to bring the character of James Bond to the screen for the very first time.
Bond creator Ian Fleming wanted Cary Grant but he would only commit to one film so it came down to me and Roger Moore but after a crash course on not speaking Scottish, i was cast for the first-ever Bond film, Dr. No, and the role would go on to change the entire course of my life.
When Dr. No became a huge hit, i was flying high in more ways than one and the money meant i could hide my baldness under fantastically realistic wigs but i was worried about being typecast so i quit after the fifth Bond movie, then after the sixth, and then after the seventh because i kept coming back because finding work was not as easy as i expected and replacing me as Bond was not as easy as they thought, they signed George Lazenby for a seven-film contract as the suave spy but Lazenby immediately crashed and burned, and left the role after just one film.
I did go on to make The Untouchables and play Indy’s father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade but it was The League of Extraordinary Gentleman which was so disastrous that i left Hollywood completely afterward and confirmed my official retirement from acting.
I was back on TV soon after when my first wife published her autobiography, and in the book, made accusations that i had physically abused her during our marriage, which i of course denied saying that abusing women was never justified under any circumstances.
That went down well until an interview was unearthed where i said i didn’t think there is anything particularly wrong in hitting a woman, not that i could remember much about it as i was suffered from dementia but i was a big advocate of all things Scottish and Scottish independence so told the Scots to leave the country that i so blatantly abandoned from the other side of the World in America where i worked and the Bahamas where i lived and died and am now buried.