Special Guest Blogger: Saint Andrew

When some long haired, bearded hippy called Jesus came along to mine and my bothers Peter house to rent a room we were not sure and when he heard we were fishermen and he made a joke about how he will make us fishers of men we both looked at each other and thought oh great, a comedian.
What isn't included in the Bible is just how awful his puns were and i was present on all of the important occasions but thankfully the people who put together the Bible left out the awful puns.
After a week of jokes about our net income, if we need a bigger boat his dad Noah's a man who has an ark and how he never really liked the Ocean because he always thought it was a little fishy, we told him nobody would take him seriously if he kept cracking such awful puns and he did tone it down a bit when he started out properly but he couldn't help himself sometimes.
When he offered the well water to the woman he really did say 'whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst' but he also said 'I would give Moses's coffee a miss though, Hebrews it' and 'Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but the bit omitted was 'the ones who gather in Churches though are birds of pray'.   
The Last Supper was a laugh riot, that's me in the painting third from the end on the left with my hands up in surprise, he had just picked up the bread, blessed it, broke it into pieces and handed it around saying 'Take and eat as this is my body', we all refused at first and then he said 'take this bread of life or you are all toast'. You can see Matthew saying to the person writing it down off on the next table to leave that bit out.
As we all know he was crucified the next day (it being called the last supper is a clue) and we had to rewrite his last words as 'Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do' because his actual last words were, 'Say what you want about these Romans but they sure have nailed this crucifixion lark, Nailed it! See what i did there?' 
I was crucified myself not long afterwards but i was put on a X shaped cross rather than the T shaped one Jesus died on but no coming back alive for me, my dad wasn't important enough obviously, but i did get to become part of the flag of somewhere called Scotland.
The story goes that Óengus II led an army of Scots into battle against the Angles, led by Æthelstan, and he prayed for victory and two white clouds formed an X shape in the sky and they took it that i was blessing them and they won the battle and was so grateful they made me their patron saint, set a white X against a blue background on their flag and named a golf course after me so i'm glad they paid such attention to wispy clouds and take them cirrus-ly. Bloody hell, he's got me doing it now!!

Omicron On It's Way To UK

I have always given the Government the benefit of the doubt with the Coronavirus when they said that their main target was to stop the NHS being overwhelmed, to me the main target should be to stop people dying but if we stretch their comment then if the NHS is overwhelmed then people will die as they cannot be treated so i cut them some slack on that one.
Now with the new Omicron Variant worrying enough scientists that it will be able to evade the vaccines we were banking on to return to some sort of normality, it feels like we have taken an almighty step backwards and there was one scientist on TV this morning saying  that the mutations are so numerous that it could be considered a new virus altogether, COVID-21.
It's still early days and the scientists are still gathering the data so it would be irresponsible to jump to any conclusions until we have all the details but many nations have already decided that it is worrying enough to bring down some of the shutters they had tentatively been lifting recently.
Here in the UK the Government, hopefully learning a lesson from their previous awful decisions and horrific death-toll, have rolled back on some of the restrictions they recklessly threw out completely in July with face masks being mandated again in certain situations and booster jabs considered being offered earlier than the six months gap although the advice from their own science advisors is that they need to go much further.
We have a new Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, after the last one was photographed breaking his own Covid rules with a female 'friend' who wasn't his wife, and Sajid was on TV over the weekend saying that: 'The reason we've set out these measures is to protect the progress we've made so we can all continue to enjoy Christmas with our families'.
Hmmm...with around 150 people a day still dying from Coronavirus in the UK, and with 26 days until Christmas that’s approximately 4,000 people whose families will be sadly having an extra seat at the Christmas Dinner this year, the Government obviously are happy enough to accept that devastating figure and maintain the status quo to avoid bringing in tougher restrictions which would affect the progress we have made.
We know by that they mean the economy, it was the reason they threw the restrictions out in July, they even made the case a few weeks ago that we won't be affected so badly by another wave which was building in mainland Europe because our figures are already so high and when your argument against stopping something awful happening is because things here are already so awful, you will always find it hard to argue with the absurd mentality behind it.
Hopefully the Omicron variant will not be as game changing as feared but if it isn't it will be despite Boris and his gang rather than because of them and we can look forward to Christmas and staying with the appalling 55,000 Covid deaths a year the Government are willing to tolerate.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Dionysus

I was the God of Sex, Wine and getting off your face drunk and not necessarily in that order but i blame my parents because things were compicated even before i was born.
My mum Semele had a one night thing with Zeus (who didn't) but he was married to Hera who made him appear before my mum in all his robes of radiant glory and as mortals cannot look upon the gods without incinerating, she was consumed in a lightning-ignited flame which frazzled her to a cinder, leaving an unborn baby, me, which Zeus, full of remorse and guilt, popped it into his thigh for safe keeping.
When i was finally born from the top of his leg i was called Dionysus, Hera called me something else altogether and sent some babysitting Titans to tear me apart and eat me.
Rhea, bless her, managed to save me by disguising me as a girl and whisked me away to be brought up in secrecy but Hera discovered the plot, turned me into a ram and gave me as a plaything to a band of nymphs.
So yeah, being born twice, the second time from my fathers thigh and then finding you have four legs, horns and a woolly coat can mess a kid up a bit but i did later get given a more befitting body and while being raised by a bunch of ever-attendant nymphomaniac Nymphs, i discovered i could do two very important things, make wine and make orgasms which could drive you to the brink of madness.
My lover Ariadne was especially thrilled but we drifted apart when she turned into a constellation and the next few years were spent hard drinking, and driving excited females into a frenzy. The orgy-making was as popular as ever but it did get me into a lot of trouble with the authorities and jealous husbands and i headed for Rome and laid low until i emerged as Bacchus.
As Bacchus we held the Bacchanalia festivals which were basically just massive drunken orgies but some of my other responsibilities was for orchards and fruit and vegetation and i was the man who could grow anything big and strong so i am firmly the number one God for vegetables

Special Guest Blogger: Arthur John Priest

I was a common, down to earth salt of the earth worker and my language could get a bit fruity so Lucy has turned on the swearing filter which is bullshirt but what the fork, it's her blog.
I always said that death comes for us all but that doesn't mean you have to go out like a chump, just do what i did and look death in the face, give it the two finger salute and say 'Not today you son of a bench, try again later'.
I was a stoker and a forking good one, i would tend the furnace, the backbone of steam-powered ocean travel and i was in high demand and got assigned to the new fangled Titanic and let me tell you something about the Titanic, people forget that on the maiden voyage there were over 1000 miles of uneventful, very pleasurable cruising before it hit that forking great iceberg.
By the time i made it out of the boiler room, they were fresh out of rafts and life vests and i was hauled out the Atlantic by a life boat before i was turned into a human ice cube like most of the other poor barstools. My cigarettes were wet which really forked me off but i survived with only a bout of hypothermia and i completely lost my sense of taste and began listening to a lot of Jazz.
I went back to work on the merchant vessel Alcantara and, what do you know, it happened again after it had been commandeered into military service during WWI until it was sunk by the ash-hole Germans.
My next assignment was on the HMHS Asturias which sunk after being hit by another forking German torpedo, and then i was next on the HMHS Britannic which was kitted out to be a Hospital Ship and down that went after the shirt for brains captain steered us into a German mine.
The next ship i was moved onto was the SS Donegal which someone upstairs must have been watching over and then decided to fork with me by sinking it with another German torpedo.
After wringing out yet another pair of trousers i did begin to ponder if i had chosen the right career path so after some other further close calls and collisions, i decided almost five times was enough and finally quit while i was still alive which came as a great relief to every other sailor wishing to avoid sharing a boat with me.
I lived out the rest of my life on land and died of pneumonia but as my story got told i was often asked when i do finally die did i want my body to be donated for research but i'd say fork that, i want it to go to a scientist who is working on bringing dead bodies back to life.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Catherine of Alexandria

I was born into nobility in Alexandria, Egypt which at the time was one of the finest cities in the world, and a center of learning and culture as well as faith, mostly faith to be fair, but because of my privileged birth, i naturally received the best and most exclusive education available at the time and the newest religion, Christianity, which was the new thing around town and one day i was instructed by my teacher to pray to Christ, fast and keep vigil for the entire night and to tell the class about it the next day.
Being a good girl, i did and during the night experienced a vision of Mary, the Mother of the Lord and the Christ-child who gave me a golden ring and told me to spread the word of God.
Not too long after this, i came across a public event held at a pagan temple and the Emperor Maxentius was directing the killing of animals as sacrifices so i went up to him and gave him an awful earful about killing God's creatures.  
Now Maxentius was not known for his ability to take an earful without removing something from the earful giver but rather than send my head skittering across the temple floor, he ordered fifty of his foremost philosophers to debate their truth against mine.
Back and forth we went, my Bible teachings against whatever toilet roll book they had until the Emperor grew bored and ordered all fifty of his philosophers be beheaded.
As they knelt awaiting the executioner, i made the sign of the cross on their heads with oil and they looked up at me and asked if they converted to my faith, would my God protect them from their fate, i said 'nah' and to prove my point 50 heads with oily marks on them went rolling away.
The Emperor had another fate for me and devised a wheel of spikes which he planned to torture me on until i changed my mind on the whole God thing by spinning me around on it but the moment i touched the device, it fell apart.
My lack of slow and painful death only further maddened the emperor who rather confusingly tried to win me over by proposing marriage but i refused so he reverted to a good old fashioned head chopping but the spiked wheel is a popular symbol often associated with me.
The pyrotechnic Catherine wheel, which rotates with sparks flying off in all directions, took its name from the wheel they tried to kill me on which on reflection seems a tad inappropriate.

Special Guest Blogger: Egyptian God Ra

When i heard Lucy was going around all the other ancient Gods i knew that there would be lots of explanations put forward to how the Earth and everything got here and i am fine with that, would be boring if there was only one god and there have been thousands of religions and each has a way of explaining things but we all know the truth and i am here to explain it and you can thank me later by burning a few virgins or whatever, that's up to you, i won't turn them down.    
In the beginning there was nothing except a great, chaotic ocean and a huge pyramidal mound with a Lotus flower which blossomed and out i dropped bringing light with me.
Now being the first being is all very nice but pretty lonely so i created Shu, the god of the air and Tefnut the goddess of rain and sent them off to have a bit of a nosey around but they were gone for ages and i was getting a bit concerned so when they came back i was so happy i cried and human beings were born from my tears.
Now with lots of humans milling around i had to find somewhere to stash them all so we created Geb, the god of the Earth, and Nut, the goddess of the sky and thus the sky and the earth were created but the Earth needed a source of heat to grow their crops so as the top God i decided it was up to me to create the Sun which i did by throwing my eye up into the sky to create it but schooloboy error, i had to keep it moving across the sky so i made myself two barges to drag the Sun across the sky and also to drag it through the Duat or underworld back to the East so it could rise again in the morning.
Now the Duat was full of nasties such as the massive snake Apophis who would try and eat the Sun because he was an idiot like that and one time he did, causing an eclipse but he literally couldn't stomach it and spat it back up again, doesn't stop him trying though.
By now the kids were having kids and i was feeling my age so left them to it while i semi-retired and just concentrated on sailing across the sky in my boats and winding through the Underworld's twelve gates without getting zapped by malevolent hideous monsters and generally lazing around sunbathing and recounting my night time adventures with whichever of the Grandkids joined me that day.
As the new religions came along many Gods tried to get in on the act by adding my name to theirs for the glory but we know the truth and you only have to look up at the Sun, that’s my eye there, it's called the Eye of Ra so that's a clue and the damn things moves across the sky and i am sure human scientists have tried to explain it with science which always gives me a chuckle.
Now, about those deep fried virgins you promised...

Special Guest Blogger: Anna Maria Helena

The best medical facilities in my day meant getting a splinter was enough of a reason to go scurrying around booking your own plot at the cemetery, ordering some tasteful wreaths from the florist and chiselling your own epitaph on a headstone before climbing into your own coffin, getting comfortable and sliding the lid shut which is why i came up with my own medical techniques.
My family were headed by Henry Baring of the bank fame and i married into the French aristocracy so we were astoundingly wealthy, owning houses in several countries including the South of France where we would spend our Winters because the English weather was awful and all those leaves just laying about were not healthy and i knew all about health matters.
Around that time vaccines were becoming popular and held up as the saviour against all manner of diseases but i told my doctor that was stuff and nonsense and i had heard some rubbish in my time, every time you open your mouth as a matter of fact, but sticking tiny needle in one's arm will stop them catching polio? Madness! I will stick to my tried and tested method of breathing in cows farts thank you very much.
Although you would never find it written in any medical journals, inhaling large doses of methane fresh from a cow's bum was the route to a long and healthy life so to that end, i kept a herd of cows outside of our bedroom so i could be sure to get the full benefits of their gas.
As well as bovine flatulence, dead squirrels tied around the head of a night prevented me getting wrinkles and used onions on doorknobs guarded against infection and nothing greets you in the morning like the smell of cow trumps, rotting squirrels and onions, thats the aroma of healthy living my friend.
Our only child died young, not enough cow pumps was not the diagnosis, but i knew different but one Autumn i saw a painting of a beautiful young peasant girl in a Paris salon and did the rational thing of purchasing the seven-year-old child for two bags of gold and the promise that she would receive an education and a standard of living that were superior to what her parents could have provided.
The child grew up into a beautiful and successful woman, thanks to only being allowed to drink milk from cows personally selected by me and her faintly smelling of cow butt never hurt.
I died in my 82nd year which is about 150 in today's years but on my death i left a large portion of my money to an orphanage for the daughters of clergymen because no matter how rich you are it sucks to fork over a large percentage of your estates finances to politicians who might use it to build roads, but also probably use it to buy whipped cream to cover prostitutes in it but it did come with some conditions obviously.
The girl's must drinking plenty of milk, study phrenology to ensure a firm spirit and conscientiousness and no girl under 10 should be taught Maths because unless they planned on sewing leather patches onto their cardigans and becoming Maths teachers, they will never actually use Pi, Calculus or Pythagoras and could be learning something more useful instead, such as how to turn a squirrel into a headband.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Columbanus

I was never much of a people person, i was much more at home communicating with animals and the more dangerous the better but in Ireland the most dangerous thing we had was a badger after Saint Patrick had driven all the snakes out so i bopped around Ireland for a few decades and decided to try my hand in Europe so got permission to travel to the continent.
I made a home in the forests of Gaul and my Irish version of Catholicism was pretty well received and the community expanded and drew more pilgrims, so i would often disappear for weeks on to avoid the crowds to a cave miles away with a messenger who would run between me and the commnunity.
Just me, an out of puff messenger and the lovely cute animals but over time my influence grew and the Frankish bishops didn't like that my version of Catholicism was ever-so slightly different to theirs, mostly the dates of Easter as they used a different calendar to us Irish folk and they also objected to my haircut. Seriously, they complained about my hair style which was shaved at the top and a thin ring of hair going around the head.
The King sent soldiers to drive me back to Ireland but i managed to escape and went on a Europe wide tour across France, Austria and into Lombard, Italy where i was given a secluded tract of land in the Mountain forests and set about converting the people of Northern Italy and spending time with the animals.
I would roam the forests with birds flying around my head and landing on my shoulders while squirrels would run up and down my robes and nest in my cowl but i wasn't some sort of hippie because my control over animals didn't stop with the adorable ones.
While walking through the forest one day, i was confronted by a dozen hungry wolves, probably attracted by all the tasty birds and squirrels that followed me around everywhere to be fair, but they laid down and allowed me and my menagerie to pass unharmed.
Another time i went to a cave for a bit of a lay down but it already had a resident, a whacking great hibernating bear but it was a very nice cave so i woke it up and ordered it to leave the cave which it did. After seeing what it had left in the corner i wish i had also told it from now, do your business in the woods buster.
I later came across another bear, might have been the same one, they all look the same to me, which was feasting on the carcass of a deer so deciding that i had got enough picking pine needles out of my feet, nicely asked the bear not to harm the skin of the deer so that i could use it to make a new pair of shoes.
My final bear interaction was to tie a plow to one and get it to plow the monasteries fields so you would assume that when i died later i would be the Saint of bears or animals or even embarrassing haircuts (the mullet, come on, your telling me that's not worth asking for help to sort out) but they put me in charge of hearing the prayers made by motorcyclists due to my traveling although i am depicted in most stained glass windows as palling around with a bear and not some leather clad greaser on a Harley Davidson.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Marina the Monk

As the child of wealthy parents, i didn't want for anything but after my mother died my very devout Christian father raised me and as i approached marriageable age, my father intended to find me a husband and then retire to the Monastery of Qannoubine in the Kadisha Valley of Lebanon.
When i learned of his plan i asked why can't i live as a monk with him and he explained as monks are men it literally took balls to become a monk and i didn't own a pair of them so i hatched a plan and shaved my head, changed into men's clothes and called myself Marinos and he was like all whatever, Monks wear baggy robes and aren't in the habit of poking about at each other's genitals so took me with him to the monastery.
The other monks never suspected i wasn't male and attributed my soft voice to long periods of prayer so i got away with it pretty easily for a while and all was sweet up until my father died and i was given more responsibility by the Abbot such as attending business with other monasteries in the area.
One day, the Abbot sent me to attend to some business in another region but as the journey was long, i was to spend the night at an inn.
That night, the only other lodger was a soldier of the eastern Roman front who disappeared into the room of the inn keeper's daughter, seduced her several times from what i could hear through the thin walls, and as neither of them used protection because it hadn't been invented yet, instructing her to say that if she got pregnant, then to blame the cute young smooth-faced monk monk down the hall.
As it turns out she was and she did blame me and the Abbot banished me from the Monastery and i could have explained that anatomically it couldn't have been me but my mouth, unlike the innkeepers daughters legs, stayed firmly shut and i decided to take responsibility for the baby and the monastery expelled me for getting a woman pregnant and i lived outside the gates as a beggar taking care of the kid.
The other monks convinced the Abbot to allow me to return as long as i did all the cooking, cleaning and carrying water in addition to regular monastic duties and caring for the child which i did until i became ill and died.  
The Abbot ordered that my body be cleaned, my clothes changed and that i be transferred to the church for prayers and it was while they were undressing me for burial they made a discovery which made them feel like dicks, or rather not feeling one, which alerted them that i was a woman, so no penis and therefore no pregnancy
I have not yet been assigned anything to be patron saint of but there is talk of me becoming the saint of something called the LBGT community which as far as i am aware is women who like a Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich only they have a little extra gherkin.

Quantum Computing Next Big Thing Apparently

Boris Johnson has announced that the UK is going to 'go big' on quantum computing which apparently is the next big leap forward in computing so as with anything with computers, i contacted a Tech expert and asked him 'So Quantum Computing...WTF'?
As usual there was a lot of sighing from him and lots of me saying things like 'What???' but i think i got the jist of it, or more than likely i never, but here's how i took it.
So normal computing uses a string of binary, represented as a 0 or a 1, that are transmitted to the processor which encodes them in sequential order but a quantum computer encodes the combinations of 1s and 0s at the same time therefore performing the tasks much quicker.
The previous most powerful quantum computer achieved 66 simultaneous combinations but IBM have recently achieved a new record with 127 combinations encoded simultaneously with the goal of reaching 1,000 by 2023.
German carmaker Daimler have used a quantum computer to model new lithium batteries and my guy agrees that as computers pretty much do everything now, being able to do it 1,000 times faster will have massive implications for us which is nice but i will just be happy if i can get one that doesn't hang
if you try to run Microsoft Word and an Excel Spreadsheet at the same time.

What Am I Missing In The Rittenhouse Case?

I can only assume that i am missing something important about the Kyle Rittenhouse not-guilty verdict in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
His defence was that he was acting in self defence when he shot 3 people, killing two of them, at a Black Lives Matter protest in in August 2020.
Rittenhouse travelled 20 miles to Kenosha to the protests and took his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle with him and walked the streets amidst the protests carrying his weapon.
Video shown in the court shows Rittenhouse pointed his weapon at the first victim, Joseph Rosenbaum, who threw a plastic bag at him and then ran at him before Rittenhouse shot him four times.
The second victim was Anthony Huber who hit Rittenhouse with his skateboard and tried to grab the gun off him after he pointed it at him and his girlfriend, Rittenhouse emptied a round of his weapon into Huber.
Now i know America has some bat-shit crazy gun laws but if you take a semi-automatic weapon to a protest, then point that weapon at people, how are you acting in self-defence if you are responsible for creating and putting yourself in that position in the first place?
If he felt his life was in danger because two unarmed men confronted him, one with a skateboard and one with a plastic bag after he pointed his weapon at them, where is their right of self defence? Surely they felt their lives where in even more danger when someone aimed a semi-automatic weapon at them?
As i said maybe i am missing something here but it seems to be a common theme now in America that as it was black men that were killed by a white man, it's not a crime.
Obviously the ridiculous gun lobby backed Rittenhouse, Guns of America have offered to give Rittenhouse a free AR-15 rifle, similar to the one used to murder the two people that night but more frighteningly for black Americans, it sets a precedent for white guys who have watched too many Rambo films to not only provoke a dangerous situation but they then have the justification to murder the person they provoked.  
I don't get it but then i have never understood American gun logic, the deplorable pure racism over there sure, but the mad and screwy gun-nut logic, i never got my head around that.

Guest Bloggers Christmas Collection Free Ebook

There has been almost 600 Guest Blogger posts written by Famous Dead People on this blog and they have been a lot of fun to write, especially the Saint ones and massive thanks must go to The Rev for not only pointing me towards the best Saints to use and their backstory but also for not disowning me for not being as reverent to them as i probably should be.
It was pointed out to me by a Techy type that there is a decent sized collection of specifically Christmas ones and have i considered putting them all together into an ebook for this Christmas so i did the usual and shrugged, mumbled something and said you do it if you want which is exactly what they did.
Over on the right in the FOAB Information section is a link to a page with the free pdf and mobi version ebook of the collection of the Famous Dead Bloggers posts who have a link to Christmas including King Herod, some of Santa's Elves, Saints, Authors, Mr and Mrs Christmas and all the main players in the Nativity all giving their view on their achievements and how history remembers them.   
The technical bit is that the link is a direct link and will download whatever version you prefer to your device and i have agreed that if there is the demand, the guy's can make some more collections bundling together some other Celebrity Bloggers for free download so take a look and leave a comment and if there is demand i will nod my head towards them and let them go to town.

Special Guest Blogger: Drukpa Kunley

We like to think that we know everything about the world, that we're so close to unlocking all the secrets of the Universe but the truth is we can't even agree on what happens to us after we die. Do we spend eternity rotting in the ground, or do we ascend/descend (cross out as appropriate) to the spiritual plane that we deserve? Luckily for us, there is no shortage of religions who have taken it upon themselves to tell us and as a Tibetan Monk, that was my job.
After my training i crossed into Bhutan to help spread Buddhism further but i struggled to get people to listen as the Buddhist teachings were very restrictive and even after simplifying the religious texts for the laypeople to understand, they didn't much care as Buddhism encouraged others not to pursue extremes but i believed these constraints were too restrictive for the average common person to understand.
I sat down and gave it some thought about how i could get down to their level and get my Buddhist message across and then i thought, hmm, they drink and have sex all the time so i thought i will use that, yep, can't see how that will hurt so let's doooooo it, as i later said to the Buthan netball team and declared that i could help to enlighten them while maintaining healthy relationships with many, many, many, many women and the Bhutan people were very much into my message of the virtues of sex and booze.
Some of my most famous performances include urinating on sacred religious banners and stripping down naked and i once offered my testicles to a famous Lama but as impressed as he was with them, he said had his own thanks so turned mine down. 
Women would seek my blessing by bringing me exotic fruits and requesting sexual intercourse, an exchange of show me your melons and i'll show you my plums kind of deal and i became known as the Saint of 5,000 women but it worked because i showed that it is possible to be enlightened and still do things that require a damp rag and a mop and bucket afterwards.
It was just the beginning of my sexy conspiracy but my greatest feat which today sees images of my impressive penis hung on roof corners of new houses for protection was after i used it to defeat the three demons named Loro Duem who were terrorising people.
I showed up to confront them but they combined into one and took the shape of a giant, ferocious dog but i didn’t have the usual weaponry, no sword or knife, no bow and arrow, so i used the only weapon i had to hand, my penis, which i battered the demon to death with, earning my penis the nickname 'The Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom'. 
So as well as subduing demons i used it to bless women by hitting them on the head with it but that becomes quite painful after a few blessings so i always carried a wood and ivory version and they are still in possession of my temple, the Chimi Lhakhang, where fertility blessings are still offered in the same way i used to give them, by hitting women on the head with the ten inch tool.
While out walking one day i watched a rainbow build and then dip towards me so fast that i was unable to move out of the way and it pierced my foot and carried me off to the Jokhang Temple where my consciousness entered into the Jowo Sakyamuni statue where i reside to this day, awaiting the appropriate time to return to benefit mankind.
While everyone waits, the Bhutan people make do with scrawling the symbol of my giant penis all over their homes so my legend continues to live on in the form of cock and balls painting everywhere, so your child isn't being crude when they draw it all over their school books, they are just following my Buddhist teachings to drive away evil spirits.

Special Guest Blogger: Egyptian Godess Bast

You may see my name written as Bast, Bastt or Bastet but that's because of hieroglyphic confusion and as the Egyptian language changed some letter-sounds lost their pronunciation so people started to pronounce my name with silent T like the fish so scribes began nailing extra letters to the ends of words so Bast became Bastt and luckily people took the hint otherwise i could have ended up as Bastttttttttt.
As Ra's daughter, i started out as a fierce lioness as befits a warrior goddess with the all seeing eye of Horus for sacrifice, healing, regeneration and protection although it didn't protect Horus much, his eye got torn out and cut up into pieces while trying to avenge his father who was cut up in 14 pieces and scattered around the globe which began the fashion for mummification as the body had to be whole to pass into the underworld or my brother Anubis's place as we also call it.
His job was to act as the Guardian of the Scales, basically weighing the hearts of the dead as good deeds made the heart heavier while evil made it lighter, so weighing it would determine the person's worthiness for either entering the underworld or getting eaten by Ammit, the devourer of souls.
I was depicted in the form of a cat which is a good animal to be, cool and sophisticated and you would never get a cat to be a servant. You ever see a cat return a stick? We just say you threw the stick so you go get it yourself! If you wanted the stick so bad, why'd you throw it away in the first place? Now go clean up my litter tray.
Cat's were revered in Egypt, one of their powers was believed to be able to run into a fire to draw out the power so they were the original fire extinguishers although admittedly water was even better but with nine lives, they were very likely to come back, albeit slightly singed and those that didn't escape alive from their fire-fighting services were mummified and sent to join me in the spirit world.
The Greeks absorbed me into their Goddess Artemis but i left my mark through smoke alarms and cat-flaps, i was the original Cat-Woman although i coughed up a furball when i heard i was now regarded as the Goddess of Sex and Lesbians, i was a mighty warrior, not a damned sex-kitten.

Special Guest Blogger: Dr. David Livingstone

Growing up in Scotland, i was an avid reader especially of religious and explorer texts and i became a missionary and was persuaded that the heathen African's needed saving so i sailed off to South Africa and set up a missionary and got attacked by a lion but the African's didn't seem that bothered about learning about God so i decided as i was there i may as map the African rivers instead.
With the help of some African guides, i set off down the Zambezi and discovered a waterfall which the locals called the Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders") but i kindly renamed it Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria for them. Despite almost dying from a fever and suffering almost daily attacks from spear chucking African tribes, i eventually reached the Indian Ocean, having mapped most of the course of the Zambezi and returned to Britain a hero, i wrote up my story with an artistic flourish and the Royal Geographical Society presented me with their gold medal and if i had just stopped there i would be rich and famous but i had the explorers itch and not just from the lice.
Another expedition set off using my book as a guide and due to my artistic flourishes, they set off thinking they were going for a fairly pleasant cruise through the jungle with wholly inadequate supplies and most died but i was already planning my next exploration to Zanzibar to find the source of the River Nile.
Upon arrival i was extremely ill and was saved by Arab traders who gave me medicines and carried me to an Arab outpost where i caught pneumonia and Cholera and the guides i hired decided one by one that they weren't as curious as me where the Nile started and nicked off with my supplies.
The number one fear for most explorers is getting captured and eaten by cannibals but a very close second is getting captured and made a human exhibit in a zoo which is exactly what happened while stumbling through the jungle on my own, mapping out rivers and marshes and fending off every disease the jungle could throw at me when i found a tribe who weren't used to seeing too many white people and offered to feed me if i sat in a roped-off enclosure for the entertainment of the locals.
I was gone for years, the thieving native guides said that i had probably died in the jungle after they abandoned me but when rumours reached back home that a white man was seen in the African jungle, another explorer, Henry Stanley, went looking for me. When he finally found me, i was crippled with dysentery and he greeted me with "Dr Livingstone, I presume?
As that phrase became famous i wish i had come up with a better answer than 'I don't suppose you bought any toilet roll did you?
Most accounts end this story here as i refused the rescue and wandered back into the jungle where i promptly died of malaria which is why they usually leave that part out.

Santa Not Coming To Town For Anti-Vaxxers

The mad Anti-Vax brigade are threatening to boycott Tesco over their Chrismas advert which shows a double-jabbed Father Christmas showing off his Covid vaccine pass but that suits me fine if they stay out of the store, means the rest of us can shop safely in the knowledge that we won't catch their germs or their stupid.
The ad shows a potential hiccup on Christmas Eve and people panicking as a TV news headline reveals that Santa may have to quarantine to travel internationally but Father Christmas whips out his mobile phone to reveal his NHS vaccination app showing that he has been double-jabbed and is allowed to get into the country to deliver his presents.
Gammon faced anti-vaxxers have taken to their parents spare room to vent on social media and contact the Advertising Standards Authority to say that the advert is coercive and encouraging medical discrimination, over 3,000 of the morons have stopped watching their cartoons long enough to submit a complaint for which the ASA have said they will see if an investigation is warranted into a potential breach of the rules.
Tesco have said that they: 'Set out to create a campaign which took a light-hearted view on how the nation is feeling and the advert reflects the current rules and regulations regarding international travel'.
Seems fair but we know who Kriss Kringle will not be visiting this year don't we, no presents for you this year Cov-idiots.

Special Guest Blogger: Gordon Gould

History has seen many great minds who have improved the world with their contributions to mankind but history has also seen many more scumbag charlatans who let others do all the hard work and then swooped in at the last moment to steal their the glory.
Scientists may be boffins and clever-clogs but we are still people and as such we are more than capable of making some pretty boneheaded moves just like the rest of you less cerebral folk and there is no greater example of this than my story, making me one of the most gullible genius to have ever lived.
I started my scientific career contributing to the Manhattan Project which should have earned me enough scientific chops to send me to the top of the profession and it would have if not for my decision to fall in love with and marry a Communist and in 1940's America, Communism was a bit of a no-no.
I was working on a design which would produce a narrow, coherent, intense beam of light which i called Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or LASER for short, and recorded my findings in a laboratory notebook complete with diagrams of exactly how the laser would work.
I was keen to get a patent on my invention to stop other scientists from stealing my design but i was told by a lawyer friend that i needed a working prototype to do it so in order to gain access to the funds and materials to build said prototype, i joined a private research company, TRG (Technical Research Group) and the company said they would support my research and set about finding the funds to build the LASER.
They immediately filed for a government grant to develop the laser, and the government then classified my notes and booted me off the project because the whole marrying a Communist thing popped up again and i was fired and blackballed.
With me no longer able to contribute to my own invention, a colleague 'Charles H. Townes' not only took over the project and claimed it's patent, but also published the work without crediting me at all.
I tried to stop Townes from taking credit for my work by filing patents of my own, but again, the communist thing so i had to watch Townes receive the Nobel Prize for Science in 1964 for my Laser invention.
After 30 years of court battles and appeals, my original notebook was unearthed and i did manage to at least gain the royalties and earned $30m but you won't see my name in any science books but it's thanks to me that you are able to read this through the fiber networks that connect us to the internet and the ability to drive your cat crazy with a pointer.

All Over By 2026-ish

I found Boris Johnson's warning that the storm cloud were gathering over Europe and a new wave of Coronavirus could reach our shores if we are not careful a bit strange as we currently have a higher daily Covid-19 infection rate than any EU country thanks to his less than sensible Covid strategy of what the hell, let's just open up anyway.
Not sure what happened to his Plan B, over 200,000 new infections and 1,000 deaths a week obviously isn't enough to impose it, but he today announced that they are working on introducing a vaccine passport to prove who has been jabbed and who can therefore enter venues such as theaters, cinema's and concerts, a measure that has began to be rolled out in other countries.  
The UK Government released a report last week that shows they are working on an assumption that Coronavirus will be with us for a while yet and have three scenarios – optimistic, central case and worst case which suggest the pandemic will end between 2022 and 2026.
The optimistic scenario sees the virus peaking in 2022/23 and the worst case scenario will see if lingering until at least 2026 but the one they have most confidence in is the middle case where we will have some restrictions in place until 2023/24.  
How it will end is more clear cut with Government scientists predicting it will be manageable with vaccines and the virus will naturally mutate to become less deadly and cause milder illnesses although it will continue to kill but more in the vain of Flu and other respiratory diseases.
It will be the Woirld Health Organisation that declares the pandemic ended and they have said that they will not declare it until everyone has been vaccinated and as some poorer nations are still scrambling for the first vaccine while the West are talking up the third, it may be a while yet so plan for the worst but hope for the best as the old saying goes, or in the case of the current UK Government, plan for the worst and fully expect it.

Special Guest Blogger: Pope Eugenius IV

It took me a little while to take the Pope hat, my uncle, Pope Gregory XII put me on the road to the Vatican when i was only 24 but the political leaders objected saying that i was far too young so he made me the papal treasurer instead and Cardinal Priest of the Basilica of San Clemente.
When my Uncle died i was elected the top Catholic and immediately upon assuming the papal chair, i got involved in an argument regarding slavery which i was very much against, well, against making slaves of the black Christians anyway and i passed a ruling that said anyone found to be enslaving Christians of any colour would be excommunicated, do what you want with the other black's but don't take the God bothering ones.
With that sorted i was getting ready to kick back and enjoy the trappings of being Pope when the inconvenient question arose of what happens to people who haven't been wicked enough to deserve Hell but also not quite holy enough to ascend to Heaven so we scanned the Bible for a guide to what happens to those people and found zip.
Because saying just shut up and don't ask tricky questions wasn't cutting it anymore, we got together a council in Florence and put our holy heads together and came up with the resolution that if a person does not fulfill the entry requirements of either heaven or hell, they go to a place called Purgatory which is like a holy waiting room.
The plebs seemed happy enough with that at first and went back to the usual questions about how hard specifically are they allowed to beat the non-Christian slaves (hard but not enough to kill them), can we really kill homosexuals, anyone who works on Sunday, women who are not virgins when they get engaged, women who are raped and adulterers (yes, its all in there in the Bible so knock yourselves out) but theologians soon discovered another problem with our new purgatory as in those who didn't realise they had been born into sin such as babies who died before they have a chance to be baptized and those who lived and died before Jesus was born.
Our original take was they go to Hell but that didn't fit so well with the all loving God so we said they go to Purgatory as well and although we never checked, im sure God was cool with us editing his word as we went along, if not then it's his fault because he should have made it clearer.

COP 27 Not Game Changing

Greta Thunberg called it blah, blah, blah but Boris Johnson is excitedly saying it is a 'game-changing agreement that the world needed to see' and that the 1.5C increase remains within reach which isn't what the climate scientists are saying, they are telling us that the idea of keeping the warming to 1.5C is 'dead' and is more likely to be between a best possible result of 1.8C if everyone who does what they promised actually does it and a worst of 2.4C.
Pre COP 26, the Climate Action Tracker Group said we were heading towards a global rise of 2.7C, after the game changing agreement it's an average of 2.1C which i wouldn't call  game changing at all, not even in the same county let alone ball park although it may have been naive of those of us who hoped for better from our leaders doing this for the 26th time when the previous 25 had had so little effect.
The finger is being pointed at India and China who refused to sign off on the agreement until the wording stated that they would "phase down" rather than "phase out" coal which the Prime Minister, desperate to not have anyone pee on his 'success', tried to spin as 'You phase down on the path to phasing out', and then explained that it would be discussed further at COP 27, in Egypt.
The UN Secretary-General António Guterres was sadly, completely correct when he said that 'Climate change is moving faster than we are'. 

Not Remembering

It's the same every 11th November, our leaders stand around looking solemn and laying wreaths at the Cenotaph to remember those military personnel who have died in Wars Britain has got themselves into.
I avoid it but not because i don't feel huge sympathy for those who have died and their families, but because if you speak to any of the older generation who fought in WW2, many returned converted pacifists and my own Grandfather refused to attend the Remembrance Days himself, saying why would he want to remember such horror.
Maybe it is time to stop the remembering because it no longer seems to be about the muck and bullets, the families torn apart and the broken young minds and bodies forever haunted by what they saw it has also become a remembrance of the awful recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wars which were started for reasons other than those stated.
The warnings have not been heeded, wars continue apace and the awful death tolls go on increasing and if the people involved refused to remember it, what exactly is the point?
Over time, as we have become embroiled in conflicts that our leaders have found hard to justify, the sacrifices of the past have been used not to deter us from war, but to lend legitimacy to new wars, using the image of the fallen to encourage new recruits to their armies and to try and silence dissenters by lionising the young men and women who will be sent to fight and possibly die on foreign battlefields.
This serves the interests of those who, for political reasons, want to encourage our involvement in foreign wars by tossing out the usual cliches such as 'defending our freedom' and 'keeping us safe' but although that was the case in 1939, our freedom or safety was not at stake in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Kosovo and nobody can argue otherwise, although the politicians and useful idiots did at the time.
Far be it the Western soldiers being in danger, it is the unarmed civilians who are most at risk, the military are trained for war and are heavily protected while civilians have to do whatever they can to survive while the military with advanced weaponry and in recent cases of drone attacks are thousands of miles away, destroy all around them.
So excuse me while i do my shopping instead of looking sad and laying wreaths at monuments to the sadly fallen as i do not want to be supportive of any Government that holds the power to decide whether to send other people's sons, husbands, wives and daughters to war and kill and die for it for deceitful reasons.

Lucy's Museum Of Musician's: Christmas Songs

My Christmas countdown is telling me there are 40 days to go to Christmas and the music channels are already switching from whatever that it is that the young-un's listen to today to Christmas songs which is about the only time you will see Cliff Richard's on TV thankfully but they always wheel out the same old songs, i'm already sick of Noddy Bloody Holder and it's only mid November.
I am currently writing up my 20 favourite Christmas songs for Lucy's Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucys Museum for December, most of which you won't hear on the Radio but it is difficult finding just 20 and some, such as 'Snowman' by Anti-Nowhere League i am mulling over wether to include as it certainly isn't a child friendly song and i am almost certain that what he tells us the Snowman want's to do is anatomically impossible unless the carrot is positioned very much in the wrong place.
I have gone for the 20 which i would have on my home-made mix tape and there a couple of classics, a few more punky or rock improved versions of classics and some which are not classics but i like them anyway and one which even surprised me but it is a great tune and is sung so well it does the hair standing-up on the back of the neck thing so i ignore the religious message (bloody religio's trying to claim Christmas, the nerve) and just consider it an amazing Christmas song.
Anyway, i will start posting them in December and Noddy Holder, Cliff Richard's and Bing Crosby will not be anywhere in sight except on TV and in shops on repeat until December 26th.

Special Guest Blogger: St. Homobonus

Jesus was no fan of Capitalism, saying to his disciples: 'Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven' and then went off on a tangent about humped desert animals and needles and the Bible contains many mentions poo-pooing money and material gain so the underlying theme is that if you are a Capitalist, God and Jesus hates you so with this in mind, one of the leading capitalists to emerge in Europe was me and i'm a Saint.
I was born Omobono Tucenghi in Italy but i was proud to gain the Latin name Homobonus due to being a Homo (good) Bonus (man) and i was very much a homo man, actually such a massive homo man that people still speak about me today especially in the business world because i was not only a successful homo man but also an awesome businessman and am now the patron saint of business people, tailors, shoemakers and cloth-workers.
My family were very wealthy and i took over from my father in the world of tailoring but i had the idea of instead of spending hours hunched over a smock sewing it myself, just sell the cloth and let the people do it themselves and they did, i didn't even have to stitch the cloth together.
Soon i had more money than i knew what to spend it on, there are only so many top of the range horse and carts you can own so i retired and began on my life of being even more homo by giving it away to the Church and the poor, share the wealth i always say.
Apart from spending the day doing many homo things, i would frequently partake in the Eucharist every day and was famous for really getting into it but one day while attending the mass i felt a pain in my chest and i collapsed back onto the floor arms outstretched and the attendees present thought nothing of it, just assumed i was prostrating myself in the form of a cross looking up at the statue of Jesus on the wall but i was actually dying but they weren't to know until i was still there in the same position the next morning.
I am often depicted clutching a money bag, showing my huge homo side but if you want to meet me personally then my head is preserved in the church of Saint Giles in Cremona because you know...Catholics.

Special Guest Blogger: Allah

I have never been one of those Gods who thinks they should appear on bits of toast or in the grain of doors to prove my existence, there are far better ways then putting my face on a cubicle door in the toilet of the Brighton branch of Ikea which just goes to show that i am the only true God, all others being false and fake. And definitely no pictures, please.
I have my own Holy Book of rules and regulations known as the Koran, or Qur’an, which i dictated to my prophet Muhammad via an angel and the boy did good, there are over 1.6 billion of my followers now but i always had a soft spot for academics, the first thing i created was the intellect and said that a scholar is worth a thousand ignorant worshipers and the ink of scholars is holier than the blood of martyrs.
The name ‘Allah’ is simply the Arabic word for God which might get a bit confusing but i do have lots of other titles, over three thousand of them but a thousand are only known to angels but Muslims believe that i am the deity known as Yahweh and/or Jehovah who is also worshiped by Jews and Christians so you can see where the confusion comes into it.
Islam is one of the youngest of the religions, we never got our act together until the 7th Century so there is a bit of crossover between mine and the Christian beliefs such as the first human Adam made from clay and a woman made from his side, the six days earth building exercise and me resting on the seventh, it is similar but if you have any queries with that, speak to the God of your choice, not me.
The big difference is Christians have ten commandments of which the people of Christendom must follow to be allowed into the kingdom of Heaven, we have 70 major sins to avoid and a whole plethora of minor ones that can be totted up to a major one although i didn't actually explain what the minor ones were.
The main bone of Christian contention appears to be that Muslims deny the divinity of Jesus but in fact Jesus does get a very good press in the Muslim world, being regarded as a top prophet along with Moses, and of course Muhammad himself, couldn't leave that little dude out.
My list of big no-nos for Muslims includes at number 50 'Treating others unjustly' will get you kicked out of paradise as well as 'offending people and having an arrogant attitude toward them' and 'arguing and disputing violently'.
Another major sin is 'not protecting oneself from urine' so don't get caught short but above all don't forget to keep mentioning that Islam is a religion of peace and if those Western infidels don't agree, well, maybe a week of rioting, killing and arson will make them change their minds.
Peace be with you.

Special Guest Blogger: Rene Descartes

I might be known as the Father of Modern Philosophy and one of history's greatest thinkers but my early life was actually far from your average philosopher's as i earned a Baccalauréat and Licence in canon and civil law in accordance with my father's wishes that i should become a lawyer and then quickly gave up on that idea and joined the Army for a career in military engineering in Germany.
While fighting in the Battle of the White Mountain near Prague, i had an experience which would not only change my life but the course of philosophy when, to warm myself one cold winter evening, i climbed inside a large wall stove because back in the 17th Century men were men, and if you wanted to stay warm you damn well sat in a big stove.
While huddling there all toasty, i nodded off and had a strange dream and not the usual kind about being naked in a field while your teeth fall out or doing exciting things with the Countess of Gramont and a tub of goats milk, these were sent by God and had me caught inside a vicious whirlwind being chased by ghosts who trapped me in a room full of thunder and fire and a door to a peaceful room with only a book called 'What path shall I take in life?' for company.
I immediately knew what it meant, either i was in the early stages of carbon monoxide poisoning or God wanted me to reinvent the way humans think about the universe so i set about formulating a whole new philosophy, Cartesianism, based on the understanding that all truths were linked with one another and finding a fundamental truth and proceeding with logic would open the way to all science.
I wrote it all down in my essay 'Rules for the Direction of the Mind' concluding that we should never accept anything for true which we do not know to be true such as our own existence, we may just be a brain in a vat that thinks it's living in the real world or part of a game where we must score as many points as possible by the end so if we doubt others then the very fact that we doubt proves our existence, or to put it in a more memorable way, 'i think therefore i am', therefore you can be certain that you exist because you are thinking about possibly not existing.
Queen Christina of Sweden invited me to her court to tutor her in my new philosophy and i said give me a bit of time to think about it (that went straight over her head) so i arranged to give lessons to her in her cold and draughty castle. After only a few weeks i caught pneumonia and died, or someone moved the VAT or the game ended, i never did work it out exactly.
The problem with the idea of living in a game is that we don't know what we do to score or lose points so we don't know how well or bad we are doing as the game goes along, we may get points for something as seemingly trivial as opening a door or lose them for clapping our hands so after you finish reading this, spend the next 30 minutes opening and closing doors because you just never know.

Special Guest Blogger: Alexander of Abonoteichus

As those of you know who have looked these things up, religions are forever nicking bits from other religions to sex their own up and as i was peddling fake medicines around Greece at the time many new religions were popping up and oracles were a denarius a dozen and people were swallowing that crap, i packed up my false medical bag and set about a new career as the prophet of the god of medicine and healing, Aesculapius.
I set up a sign saying 'Get healed here and have your future revealed. 2 Drachma' and fortunately for me, the ignorance of the time was stronger than the idea that someone just making shit up and the crowds came but i needed a back story and as with all religious folk, the more preposterous the more the gullible religious types believe it so i went with that i was directed to an egg by the Gods in which a small live snake had been placed called Glycon who knew all and who i had made my pet but only i could speak directly to it.
To make it more authentic and to distinguish my godly reptile buddy from all the other non-divine serpents out there, i got a snake, tied a false human head onto it and set about answering the faithfuls many questions asked of Glycon and saying things to the crowds that the great Glycon wishes to bring blessings on your house, and on yours, and on yours.
I deliberately kept the answers vague and things were going well with word of Glycon spreading throughout the ancient world. During a bout of plague i informed the town that to keep them safe Glycon gave me a verse to read out and after hearing it they should place an amulet, purchased from me, and placed above the door which would keep them safe, obviously the amount who still died of the plague was horrendous but dead people don't tend to come and ask for their money back and those who survived came to thank Glycon.
It began to unravel a bit when news of my success reached the ears of the Roman Leader Marcus Aurelius who was set to go to war with the Marcomanni and wanted to ensure victory so i told him that Glycon said if they sacrificed two lions by throwing them into the river then success would be guaranteed.
As it happened taking battle advice from a snake with a fake head is not a great tactical move and the Romans were routed and 20,000 legionnaires died which the uppity Christians used as proof that Glycon was a fraud and their guy, him who made man from scraping together some bits of dirt remember, was the real thing so I said that Glycon is retiring but although he may not be here in person anymore, his radiance will still light up your darkness so up yours, and up yours.

I packed up my snakes false head, my immense wealth and swiftly retired from the prophesy game before an angry Roman Leader with a severely depleted legion came looking for me.
I lived out my life in luxury but just because i was a fraud taking peoples money to hear the words of a God it doesn't mean that all preachers are on the make, it could be the there is a cost to your chosen God relieving you of your sin, judgement, dignity and large wads of cash.

Biden Let's Rip

Cop26 was about stopping harmful gases but nobody seems to have told Joe Biden because he apparently did his own Air Force One while talking to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall with an episode that was she said was 'long and loud and impossible to ignore'.
At least he never asked her to pull his finger first but he has history of letting rip in public, once breaking wind during a live discussion on CNN although he said that it was the sound of the chair creaking but that could just be a lot of hot air.
Possibly meeting the Royals literally scared him so much that it knocked the wind out of him but luckily that was the only American Trump at the meeting, that guy was far to fond of tooting his own horn and with his diet and obesity that would have been a lot of tooting.  
 There is an urban myth that once, the Queen, when riding in a carriage with an overseas dignitary the horse blew a mighty one and made a terrible smell and the Queen said 'I do apologise' to which the dignitary replied 'if you had not said anything Mam I would have thought it was the horse' but i don't know if it's true but it is very funny.

Special Guest Blogger: Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I really should start this with my famous first line 'It Was A Dark And Stormy Night' but at the moment it's a bright and sunny but this is England so give it an hour or so and it could change but i am sure in the meantime that i will be able to squeeze in some of the other famous phrases i gave to the English lexicon before the end.
That famous opening is from my 'Paul Clifford' book which had my name on the front cover which is easily the most British name imaginable but when i wasn't writing amazing first lines i was a Whig Party politician but i wasn't chasing the almighty dollar (one of mine) and found that 'the pen is mightier than the sword' (another one of mine) but my love life was a little more complicated.
I was due to be married but before we got down the aisle the father of my betrothed decided she would be better off marrying someone else and forced her to marry another man so instead i married Rosina Doyle Wheeler although this time the disapproval came from my mother who said she was a bad'un and would disappoint me. Turns out she was right.
We separated a few years later due to the time i committed to my literary and political work, that and the many affairs i had which may also have played a part but the divorce was not amicable and she a firm believer in the well worn route that revenge is best served repeatedly over several decades and she firstly wrote her own book 'The Man of Honour' which was a not very thinly veiled parody of me as a pompous twit.
When i later ran for re-election to Parliament, she denounced me publicly and told 'the great unwashed' (yep, mine again) that i was so awful and corrupt that i should be shipped off to Australia with the rest of the common criminals.
I did what any Politician in my situation would do with an inconvenient family member and used my political connections to have her declared insane and committed to an insane asylum thinking that'll teach her to love me, stand up for herself and then blame me for our marriage failing apart just because i happened to have sex with women who weren't her, the nerve.
Bizarrely having her committed on false pretenses was deemed 'unfair' and the newspapers led a campaign to get have released which was successful and she was freed and immediately accused me of sleeping with Benjamin Disraeli and wrote another book, this time a 'tell all' type but being a wealthy member of the aristocracy in the 19th Century meant it never really affected my career and i was even offered the Greek throne when Greece gained independence but i declined and instead wrote 'The Coming Race', one of the first in the new science fiction genre, about a man's journey to the centre of the Earth where he encounters a civilization called the Vril-ya's who emit a healing fluid named Vril which was pretty standard sci-fi fare until a bunch of nutters took it as a true story.
My novels have fallen out of favour since but i did leave some legacy's even if you don't know it as 'The Coming Race' led to the Hollow Earth Theory also the house i resided in, Craven Cottage, is still in the corner of Fulham Football Club's stadium, the term 'vril' lent it's name to Bovril and the ending of Charles Dickens 'Great Expectations' was my suggestion after he got stuck for an ending so all together not a bad legacy if you ignore the theory's that the Earth is flat or hollow inside, my wife was but the Earth certainly isn't.

Special Guest Blogger: Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin

I don't know if you have ever tried to kill someone but if you have you will know that they don't just wait patiently for it to happen, they kick and fight and struggle and that can generally get quite messy if you are trying to behead them which can take a few whacks to get the job done so as a relatively well known Parisian physician and opponent of capital punishment, i suggested that criminals be used as subjects in medical experiments rather than be put to death.
That received a big fat 'Non' so i began giving some thought to a process where if i could not convince my countrymen that chopping off heads wasn't a nice thing to do, we could at least make it more humane and reduce the cleaning bill of the crowd in the first three rows of executions and considered an updated version of the Halifax Gibbet, a device the English had used where the victim was placed in the stocks and an axe on a pivot fell, lopping off the head.
My version had a simple mechanism with a heavy blade that would fall and dispatch the head cleanly first time every time and a prototype was built and when it's test sent the head of a convicted highwayman tumbling into the waiting basket, my 'machine that cuts people's heads off' as i called it was given the name the Guillotine after me (they added an e to the end of the name to make it feminine and called it Madame La Guillotine) and it was officially adopted by the French government and became a fixture in the streets of Paris during the Reign of Terror as did the tricoteuses, the women who knitted busily while the heads rolled.
Towards the end of the Reign of Terror, a letter from the Count Comte de Méré to me fell into the hands of the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville in which the Count, who was to be executed, commended his wife and children to my families care. The authorities demanded i inform them of the whereabouts of the Count's wife and children. As i refused to give the information, i was arrested and imprisoned and this is where things got a bit confusing because while i was in prison, a doctor named Guillotin was indeed executed by the guillotine but he was Dr J.M.V. Guillotin, a doctor from Lyon whereas i was released without charge in the general amnesty after Robespierre fell from power and i went on to support the discovery of vaccinations and was the chairman of the Central Vaccination Committee in Paris.
I actually died at home from a septic boil but the association with the 40,000 deaths attributed to Madame La Guillotine so embarrassed my family that they petitioned the French government to rename it but when the government refused they decided to change theirs instead.

It Really Shouldn't Be This Hard

I once pitched an idea of running solar panels down the middle of every one of the 262,300 miles of road here in the UK, they are just laying there outside in daylight from dusk to dawn and 262,300 miles of solar panels contributing into the electric grid would make a massive dent in the amount of electricity the nation would need to generate but the idea was dismissed as too expensive and this is the UK so the sun putting in an appearance is unreliable.
It is amazing that we have three powerful natural sources but yet we seem to be looking at nuclear as the way forward to reduce filling our atmosphere with dangerous gases which it will although someone seems to have overlooked the waste material which has a half life of hundred of thousands of years which will have to be buried somewhere leaving that ground uninhabitable.
When it comes to Solar power, we are bathed in a constant and permanent source of solar energy, it has been calculated that a total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously which is more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use. And that energy is completely renewable until at least the Sun gives up and blinks out anyway.
Every continent has access to a vast desert and deserts make up a quarter of the planet, bathed in more sunshine than you could shake a solar panel at but just sit there empty so why isn't that space being used for building large scale solar panel farms there?
The Earth is covered 71% by oceans, and due to the Coriolis Effect, that's tens of thousands of miles of water with tides and waves which could be used for generating tidal power, The U.S. Department of Energy's Marine and Hydrokinetic Technology estimated that the annual energy potential of waves off the coasts of the United States is estimated to be as much as 2.64 trillion kilowatthours, or the equivalent of 66% of U.S. electricity generation so that is a lot of potential going to waste.
Vast tracts of Ocean are there with nothing but fish in it and the odd ship sailing through it so why not build some tidal power stations in it, and as for the danger to shipping even the captain of the Titanic couldn't miss a whacking great power station.
As for wind power, in 2020, the UK generated 75,610 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity from wind which the Office of National Statistics advises is enough to power 8.4 trillion LED light bulbs or 7.25 million homes a year and as anyone who has ever been the UK will tell you, we do have a lot of wind here as well as brightly lit LED light bulbs and 7,723 miles of coast.
I get the argument that wind turbines are ugly and i would be the first to complain to the council if i woke up tomorrow and found one had landed outside my kitchen window but plenty of that is empty and could be utilised with wind farms.
With the promises made at the COP 26 meeting, we are heading towards a rise of 1.8C which is still not enough so we have to keep thinking of new ways to generate the electricity we need but we have the free sources and we have the technology to more than meet our needs, we just need to have the will to do it.

Peak Boris

With this Government i do sometimes think we are living in some sort of warped version of the Emperors new clothes but that would mean i would have to think of Boris Johnson naked and more than enough females have had that glorious sight and i would be googling ways to blind myself if that ever happened but over the last few days we have had the full Johnson experience.
It all began when Conservative MP Owen Patterson was not so much caught red handed taking £100,000 to lobby on behalf of his employers, his hands were rainbow coloured when the Standards Commissioner, Kathryn Stone, said he was all kinds of guilty and should be suspended for the 30 days which would trigger a by-election.
Boris then swung into action to get his close friend off the hook, three line whipping his fellow Tories to vote against the punishment on fear of losing their jobs or facing cuts for their constituency and declaring the Standards Committee unfit for purpose and planning to replace it therefore rendering the adjudication null and void.
As the uproar rose, Johnson picked the Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng to pop out and do the media rounds to defend the PM’s attempt to get Owen Paterson off the hook and explain why the commissioner for standards would have to resign then after a couple of interviews where he ummed and erred his way through them like an idiot, Boris changed his mind and announced that they would abide by the original ruling and it had all been a misunderstanding forcing Owen to do the most gracious and sensible a Tory MP can do and resigned.
Boris has been on TV this afternoon saying that he is very sad that parliament will lose the services of Owen Paterson who has been a friend and colleague of his for decades but obviously not enough of a friend that he bothered to tell him that he was abandoning him as Patterson found out from a BBC reporter.
Now that Kathryn Stone and her committee have cleared the in-tray of the Owen affair, they are free to take up th next MP on the take on the agenda who just happens to be a Mr B. Johnson which explains why the scrapping of the Standards Committee seems so appealing to him.
Already the proud owner of several investigations against him, pending is an investigation into the extravagant refurbishment of Johnson’s Downing Street flat, how it was paid for and a couple of undeclared all expenses holidays along with a whole lot of other difficult questions that will have the prime minister sweating like glassblowers arse.
We can only how big the dead cat he will inevitably lob on the table will need to be to shift this one, i'm thinking sabre toothed tiger at least.

Special Guest Blogger: Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

As a wannabe author, you would think that marrying an established author, even a Z-List one, would be a good move, a way to ingratiate myself into the world of literacy and it did get my novels into publication, although it wasn't my name on the dust cover, it was my husbands.
Willy read my work and admitted that my writing was much better than his so he took the decision that he didn't need to write anything himself anymore so as the saying goes, when God closes a door he opens a window but in my case the window was then firmly nailed shut so that i couldn't escape our home.
He did have a reputation of stealing other peoples work, he would often collaborate on books and then forget about those who helped him and claim the credit for the work and he conveniently forgot to mention that i had actually written the first Claudine book, Claudine At School, based on my own formative years,
It became a hit and spawned a whole series, and even a range of merchandising tie-ins such as Claudine perfume and Claudine was hailed as the voice of a new generation of women, which made it even more stranger when people thought that it had been written by a 40-year-old man.
He demanded i write more books and when i confronted Willy and asked for due credit, he did what any supportive partner would do and locked me in a room, refusing to let me out until i had finished writing another book.
After the fourth Claudine book, i left my husband but found that as he held the copyright, i wasn't able to claim a centime so i wrote more books, the most famous being La Vagabonde and Gigi and in 1948 was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was hailed as France's greatest woman writer.
I married a second time, this time a man without a hammer, nails or a foreskin which the Gestapo were very interested in when they invaded France during WW2 and arrested all the Jews but he was released after a few months when i approached the German ambassador.
Meanwhile, Willy squandered all of my Claudine money on gambling and booze, and is now only remembered as my douchebag of an ex-husband.

Special Guest Blogger: Hindu God Brahma

I'm not here to knock other religions, some are okayish while others are just crazy (looking at you scientology) but what all seem to have is a far fetched start of everything story, seriously, some of the things i hear which are believed make me shake my head in despair and that isn't so easy to do when you have four of them.
Sit down and grab yourself a drink (nothing alcoholic) and i will explain to you how you all got here and it doesn't involve breathing into the nostrils of lumps of clay or fleas dropping off a coat.
In the very beginning i pondered, and my first thought was that i really should exist so i thought myself a nice golden egg to be born out of and there i was, inside an egg sitting on a Lotus flower.
Next i took a look around and it all seemed very empty so i decided to create the Universe but i didn’t just knock it out on a wild whim like other creator gods i could mention. Oh no, i planned it all properly after much meditation and even created a team of assistants called the Prajâpatis to manage operations.
I took my lotus flower and separated it into three parts of the heavens, the Earth and the sky and it all looked okay but there was something missing so i split myself into two to create a male and a female. From this first male and female all beings were created.
The woman was called Shatarupa and she was a cracker, a real beauty but she was shy and when i looked at her she would turn away but in every direction she moved, i sprouted a head until i had developed four of them.
With the World created and my job done and with three more heads then i had anticipated, i left the maintenance and upkeep to Vishnu and Shiva and i said that i was taking a well earned break and took my four heads to stay aloof and just gaze upon my creation, looking to the four corners of the Earth.
So you see the entire universe you perceive is just an infinitely tiny blip in the infinite infinity of infinity and true reality is impossible to know except by looking inwards to your own soul. When you understand yourself, you understand the universe so go meditate on that and not on how if the world is round, how can i be looking into it's four corners, forget that bit, your mortal mind wouldn't understand it.

Special Guest Blogger: Peter O’Toole

It may seem like every movie star is just a drunken sex scandal waiting to happen, you could almost think that it's not possible to be a prominent actor without also having an utterly depraved sex life behind the scenes and looking back at my life, that's right on the money.
It was often said that i had a drink problem but i didn't think so, i'd drink, get drunk and do stupid things like spout lines from King Lear when i was in Macbeth so no problem but people expected that from me and it was in my genes.
When i was still a baby, my father packed up the family and took us on a five year tour of racecourses until the German fokkers headed our way and i was sent to to the country to a Catholic school with lots of praying and scary nuns so i decided to embrace sin for all its worth with a stripper called Bubble LaRue and what a talented and flexible woman she was!
I worked for Yorkshire Evening Post newspaper for a while until i was fired and then wandered into theatre work and found i had a talent for Shakespearean acting.
I met my future wife, Sian Phillips, who was as mad as me, on one occasion i threw all her clothes out the window so she started wearing my clothes.
Problem was i was developing a stonking drink habit, she was teetotal so she didn't even have that excuse although she did enjoy the ride because i was the next big thing, as my role as T.E. Lawrence in the Lawrence of Arabia film.
Two years filming that was and i had to learn how to ride a camel, taught myself basic Arabic, lived in a Bedouin tent and i was told to keep myself in good shape but i said 'The only exercise i take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise' and my co-star was Omar Sharif, or Cairo Fred as i called him although i didn't get on so well with Alec Guiness, after i came back drunk from a local tavern he said 'You could have been killed and i’m beginning to think it’s a pity you wasn’t'.
Most people will be overly forgiving of people we admire, particularly us celebrities because a high-profile movie star will be forgiven any indiscretion the instant he makes a movie we like and that film made me famous and ooddles of money and women, i made a bet that i could bed Anita Ekberg, Jayne Mansfield, and Diana Dors and i walked away with the winnings but the most impressive notch on my bedpost was a real life Princess, the Queens sister Margaret.
I was big drinking buddies with Richard Burton but even closer to his wife Elizabeth Taylor until she forbade Burton from drinking with me, it was around that time my wife left me but i began dating Trudie Styler who went on to lower her standards by marrying Sting.
I mostly had no idea what i was doing but i know did it really, really well but the drinking took its toll and i had to have my pancreas and some of my stomach removed because of cancer and diabetes and soon afterwards it was my coffin the friends were getting their exercise by walking behind.

Special Guest Blogger: Erwin Schrödinger

I was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in quantum theory like the Schrödinger equation to calculate the wave function of a system and wrote many works on statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, physics of dielectrics, colour theory, electrodynamics, general relativity, and cosmology but mention my name and nobody remembers all that, all everyone say's is 'Oh, the cat guy'.
I left Germany because i couldn't stand the intolerance that was permeating throughout the nation coming from the growing supporters of the Nazi's and moved to England and took a job at the University of Oxford but British intolerance reared its head as they disapproved that i lived with both my wife and my mistress so i moved back to Austria and the University of Vienna.
Being an award winning scientist was sexy back then and i had my fair share of teenage students including two twins but one got pregnant, they were identical so im unsure which one it was, so when she told me she thought she might be with child, i explained that technically she was both pregnant and not pregnant until she took the test which said she was indeed pregnant so i paid for an abortion which went wrong and left her sterile.
By 1936 the Nazi's were really getting their act together so i got sacked from the University for opposing their anti-semitism so moved to Italy which was a bit of a non-starter as fascism was a thing there also so i moved to Ireland with my wife and mistress.
As for the cat thing, i came up with the idea of the pet being both alive and dead along with Einstein to try and show how ridiculous the notion was, he said in the concept of quantum superposition, an unstable keg of gunpowder will contain a superposition of both exploded and unexploded states until it has been observed and i went yeah, like a cat in a box with a radioactive substance can be both alive and dead until you bother to check which one it is and that became my legacy but nobody calls him the Gunpowder keg guy.