Special Guest Blogger: St Francis of Assisi

First off my name was the very Italian Giovanni, but my father was a lover of all things French so he nicknamed me Francesco which was shortened to Francis but that wasn't what he called me when i began giving away the profits of his silk store after a vision told me to help out funding the rebuilding of a local Church.
When he found out i run and hid in a cave for about a month but got hungry and stank so i returned home and he locked me in a storeroom but my mother let me out so i ran away again to a local Priest but my dad took legal proceedings to stop any inheritance i was due so broke, destitute and still stinky, i wandered as a beggar in the hills behind Assisi before ending up with a bunch of monks who gave me a job carrying stones for the restoration of their monastery.
Over the course of two years i had restored several ruined chapels in the countryside around Assisi but being surrounded by all that religious paraphernalia had an effect and i decided that i should bring the word further afield and luckily for me the crusades were going on at the time so i set off for Jerusalem to try and convert the Muslims and end the war.
On the first attempt we were shipwrecked off the Italian coast and the second time i fell ill and had to return but third times the charm and i rocked up in Egypt at the Sultan of Egypt's place.
Kindly, he quit bisecting Crusaders long enough to grant me an audience and i told him all about how Jesus knocked Muhammad into a cocked hat and to prove it i had a brainwave to invite a group of his Muslims and me as a Christian to walk into a fire and see who came out unscathed.
I'm gonna say that there is a good chance that i didn't think that through completely, i cannot emphasize enough how little I was thinking to be fair but thankfully they all refused before i turned a crispy shade of burnt to a cinder but the Sultan was so impressed by my maniac plan that he didn't turn me into a Christian kebab and instead gave me permission to preach Christianity unhindered in his lands which is quite decent of him considering he was in the midst of fighting a bunch of Christians who were trying to kill him.
What i am most known for is my relationship with animals, not in a welsh sheep farmer type way, i would communicate with them, telling one wolf to stop eating the local townsfolk and preaching to the woodland animals but when you turn up at your kids Nativity Play and sit through an awful version of Little Donkey while wearing your best tea-towels on their heads, you can thank me because i also came up with that.
I used real animals so the audience could use all their senses, mostly smell, those animals really didn't care where they went.
I probably would have come up with some more cool stuff as well only God had other plans and he gave me a vision of an angel being crucified which started up my stigmata and i died weeks later to start a new career as the patron saint of animals so be nice to them, especially wolfs, my favourite furry thing but i wouldn't give one a cuddle, it will rip your face off. Cute though.

We Do Deserve Better

Not that i have any sympathy with Boris Johnson and the rest of the Conservative Party but it isn't easy once you have been in power for a decade to say what things need improving and how they are going to do it because the obvious answer is you been in power since 2010 so why haven't you done it before?
At the last election their slogan was 'We Deserve Better' which seems quite a comment on their performance but not enough people agreed because they were voted back in again so we ended up with more of the same which to be honest hasn't been great.
So this week the grand poo-bahs of the Conservative Party land in Manchester for their annual jamboree to a backdrop of fuel shortages, supply line disruption, Benefit cuts, containers mounting up at ports, food shortages for months, empty supermarket shelves, a lack of medicines in
pharmacies, tax increases and a host of humiliating U-Turns on bringing back the foreign labour they couldn't kick out fast enough due to Brexit, good luck with that.
Boris and the gang are keen to point out that the shortages are not due to the Foreign exodus while at the same time easing the laws and writing to the foreigners about how they can come back and work here.
On the Sunday media trips this morning Boris Johnson managed to make a point of how hew is saving Christmas while admitting that the supply chain problems with HGV drivers will mean a shortage of things this Christmas and saying that the festive season would be 'considerably better than last year' which as he cancelled, is not the best boast.
What is most shocking is that the Conservatives are 8% ahead of of Labour in YouGov's latest poll which is a damning indictment on Labour Leader Keir Starmer who did such a bang up job of making a pigs ear of the Labour conference this year but if you can't overhaul easily the worst Prime Minister the nation has ever had and his motley crew of money grabbing cheats and liars, then he should be stepping aside for someone like Angela Rayner who isn't afraid to call the PM exactly what he is.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek/Roman God Priapus

Throughout history man has believed in something whether it was the Greeks with Zeus, the Romans with Jupiter or the Norse with Odin while today God and the baby Jesus seem to be the dominant mythology so there have been a lot of Gods and such deities lifted up to the heights and worshiped only to be dumped when a newer one cames along.
Many are sitting impotently in the history books but not all, some are in plain sight even if you don't know it which brings me neatly to me and Garden Gnomes.
The modern era looks pretty cool especially as most gardens have at least one Gnome plonked outside the front garden amongst the Rhododendron's and Hydrangea and catching imaginary sealife with fishing rods or holding a garden implement and are homage to a huge cocked Greek God, me.
I was a son of Aphrodite and a very minor Greek deity responsible for gardens and my thing (all Greek Gods have a thing) was that Zeus's Wife, Hera, in a fit of pique over losing a contest to my mother over an apple, cursed me with a massive penis which i once used to beat a donkey who cock blocked me with the goddess Hestia.
As with all religions, when the Roman's came to conjuring up their own religion they stole the Greek one and adopted me as their own and kept me in charge of gardens and as so, Romans had small statues built of me with my tremendously impressive penis and placed them in their gardens as tribute.
Roll forward a few centuries and while European knowledge of each other grew and expanded, the religions changed and absorbed bits and pieces from other religions to make up new ones, the small statue of me with the whacking great wang remained protecting and looking after even more gardens.
Over time, my penis shrank and withdrew into a pair of trousers as my appearance underwent a change to protect sensitive European eyes from the scary looking Greek/Roman God to cute Gnome although my hat, called the Phrygian cap, remained the same.
What this all means is that out of all the Gods and deities who have been around since man conjured up the idea of a creator, i am the one who has been around the longest and the one who we still pay homage to, even if you didn't know it.  
I can only thank Hera that her curse on me meant that over two millennium later, i am still having statues erected in my honour while the rest of her crowd are long forgotten and inadvertently making me the last deity from the Greek God era still standing.

Special Guest Blogger: Jules Albert de Dion

The Tour de France started shortly after i was arrested for attacking the President of France at a local racetrack but you would be forgiven if you thought that was as ridiculous as it got.
I was an extremely wealthy aristocrat who ran France's biggest car company and when the French President was replaced by another who did not share my views on race inequality, i decided to somehow show my displeasure and by sheer luck he appeared at a Paris Racetrack and i took the opportunity to whack him over the head with my cane, crunching his hat and a melee ensured with the president's bodyguards causing me to break my elegantly jewel-encrusted cane in half over a policeman's head earning me 15 days in prison.
What really hurt was Le Velo, France's biggest sports paper, calling me a dickhead so i withdrew all my advertising and then founded my own competing sports paper and although i was considering setting up a motor car race, to add an even bigger middle finger to the paper, as Le Velo was sponsoring bicycle races, i created an even bigger and better bike race with a huge cash prize for the winner and called it the Tour de France.
The massive prize attracted a huge field of contestants determine to win the cash and in the first race the favorite had to drop out midway through after drinking a poisoned bottle of lemonade and fights regularly broke out with the eventual winner, Maurice Garin, pushing his biggest rival, Hippolyte Aucouturier, to the ground, stomping his bike to pieces and then serenely cycling across the line, insane but the public loved it so we did it again the following year.
The bike stomping winner from the first race took his place at the line alongside the previous years losing stompee but Hippolyte came prepared this time with a pocket full of nails and a lead pipe up his sleeve. The cheating was imaginative, there was itching powder and ground-up stones in jockstraps, slashed tires and riders pushing each other off their bikes and some simply had themselves towed behind a car for large chunks of the route while some even more simply jumped on trains and raced ahead.
At some point the spectators felt that the point of attending a sporting event was to attack as many contestants as possible and ambushed riders on multiple occasions, sometimes ramming them with cars to run the riders off the road.
Maurice Garin was again crowned the winner, only to be disqualified for cheating as was the second, third, fourth, actually the majority of the cyclists but all the drama made the Tour a huge news event, sold loads of papers and made me a tonne of money, so we went ahead and held it for another century anyway so that American with the fridge full of performance-enhancing drugs was just sticking to the original sporting ethos of the Tour de France of it you can't win, cheat and it would be if we found a clean cyclist who had not actually taken any performance enhancing drug of any description that would pose question mark over the continuation of my cycling race.

Special Guest Blogger: Emilie du Chatelet

I was many things in my life, an aristocrat, a scientist, philosopher, musician and the translator of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica but most people know me as Voltaire's girlfriend.
I was born to a wealthy family but much to my mothers horror i possessed intelligence which saw her shuffle me off quickly to a convent but my father was not so easily embarrassed by a brainy daughter and arranged for me to meet many notable scientists of the era and with their guidance i discovered the precursor to infrared radiation, clarified the concept of energy and energy conservation, and published several important papers and in my spare time i translated Isaac Newton's tome into French despite being told due to the haphazard and nerdy way Newton wrote his notes, was impossible, but i took his theories and during the translation made them even easier to understand.
I guess if i had stopped there then i would be known as Emile du Chatelet, one of the foremost scientists of my time but despite already being married with three children, i began dating the distinguished writer and philosopher Voltaire which admittedly did help me get a platform for my scientific ideas but it ended up sabotaging my legacy.
The scientific community already scoffed at my work because i lacked the necessary and vital instruments to be taken seriously as a scientist, such as a pair of testicles and a penis, so they assumed that Voltaire was behind it and credited him with everything despite him denying it and i was relegated to Voltaire's girlfriend for the next 16 years until adding a second lover to the husband and famous lover i already had.
Poet Jean François de Saint-Lambert was his name and it was a bit of a scandal at the time but contraception was a faint glimmer in some future chemist's eye then and i became pregnant but it was a difficult birth and i died days later from a pulmonary embolism aged 42.
One of my greatest works was a book i called 'Discours sur le bonheur' or in English 'Source of human happiness' where i examined it from the perspective of a woman suffering the injustices of 18th century society in France but thinking back on that, the source of happiness could be having two lovers with the second being 10 years younger, yep, that's happiness right there , back of the net!

Special Guest Blogger: Mahavira

You may have heard of the philosophical system that i founded called Jainism, it's almost like Buddhism but nothing like it.
I lived a very simple life, being born on the thirteenth day of the rising moon in the month of Chaitra in the Vira Nirvana Samvat calendar era (aka April) into an overtly wealthy royal family but aged 30 i gave up all my worldly possessions and spent twelve years sitting under an Ashoka tree in pursuit of spiritual awakening and seeking perfection through intense meditation, fasting, severe austerity and being totally stark bollock naked and never once sitting down.
I pondered on such  puzzling questions in life like why are we here, what is reality and how come hair and toe nails are not allowed into heaven and at the age of forty-two, i attained omniscience, the capacity to know everything, which comes in very handy in Heaven's quiz nights.
I preached for 30 years and attained Moksha (liberation) before reaching Nirvana which is when the soul rises to heaven and leaves behind only finger nails and hair.
I taught that every living being has sanctity and dignity which should be respected as one expects one's own sanctity and dignity to be respected, you should be truthful, never steal, should stay faithful to your partner and show an attitude of non-attachment to worldly possessions and i came up with a brilliant symbol for the four arms of existence (Heavenly beings, human beings, Hellish beings and subhuman like flora or fauna) which i called the Swastika.
My Nirvana came and i achieved the release of my soul from karmic bondage during a preaching when the entire crowd fell asleep, awakening to find that i had disappeared and leaving only my nails and hair obviously (see above), which they cremated.
Jainism is still a thing today, i regularly get the whiff of burnt toe nails wafting my way but the use of the Swastika has fallen out of fashion after a certain Austrian decided that my sacred symbol that symbolizes peace was perfect to use and then kill 11 million people with.

Special Guest Blogger: Leo Tolstoy

Saluton! Nobody becomes a success overnight, even World famous authors of those books noone has ever gotten to the end of have to toil in order to get the life experiences needed to write rocking books so i would keep a notepad i called 'Rules for life' and the first entry was dropped out of University and treated in hospital for venereal disease but i used my down time wisely and listed all the weaknesses such as laziness, mendacity, indecision, sensuality, and vanity and would tick off the ones i had displayed that day.
Laziness put in quite a few appearances because after University i spent much of my time going between Moscow, Tula and Saint Petersburg not really doing very much except running up some gambling debts so when my brother suggest i join the Army, i went along with it and served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War but i was shocked by the amount of death involved in warfare so i left the army and decided to concentrate on my writing where nobody is trying to rain shells down on my head.
I had a few stories published and went to Paris to meet Victor Hugo who showed me his yet to be published 'Les Misérables' and his depiction of the battle scenes in the novel inspired my own in 'War and Peace' and after meeting French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and watching a public execution in Paris, my political needs were met and i became a pacifist, i also nicked the name 'War and Peace' from his Anarchist pamphlet.  
News of my new found pacifism found the ears of a young Indian guy who wrote to me to say i had inspired him and asking for advice on his nation gaining independence from colonial rule, i used that in my 'A Letter to a Hindu' book later so thanks Mahatma Gandhi, hope it all worked out well for you.
My wife and i had 13 children so between writing and wiping smelly botties, i joined some causes such as the Esperanto movement which i thought would help bring about a peaceful co-existence if we all spoke the same language but i was continuing to use real life experiences and my political and religious views as an example for my books, the Anna Karenina story of an adulterous woman trapped by society and War and Peace is pretty much 1,400 pages on the futility of war.
My Anarchists views did not go down well and when i said that the Anarchists are right in everything and no ruling authority could not be more violent than that of the existing Authority all hell broke loose and i was excommunicated from the Church (hello, atheist here, what did they think i would care?) but someone must have agreed because i received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909, note i was nominated, never actually won a damn thing.
My wife and i argued frequently about my views as we aged, especially as i had been ill for a long time and she thought i should be resting so i left home one winter night in an attempt to escape from another of my wife's tirades and caught a train to Astapovo, sat at the station and quietly died.
What i did learn is that whatever particular era of human society we are in, it will probably have the shelf life of bagged lettuce. There is no good old days, it is always a bunch of jerks just winging it until something better comes along except absolutely everyone in every era before thought the same thing. It turns out that every attempt to 'improve thing' just makes it worse so Adiau kaj dankon and if you understand that then the Esperanto thing must have really taken off.

Celebrities Save The Day Again!

What a day! It was my day off but typically Sunday's is the day when i can only contact celebrities for advice so typically the day started off with me running out of Blusher and i was stood in Boots faced with far too many shades so i calmly called former Make Up Artist Mariah Carey for help and she advised that as i have fair/light skin, i would be best off going for a shade of soft pink, light coral or peach. Thanks Mariah.
I had a long walk back to my car and my new shoes were rubbing so i rang the only former Shoes salesman i know, George Clooney who told me the best way to break in new shoes quickly is to go the woman's toilet, put my shoes under the hand heater and when they are soft, put them, on and walk around, which i did and it worked so you saved me a few blisters there George and yes, i do understand that the 500m injunction remains in place.
I decided as i missed breakfast i would stop off for a sandwich but when they asked me what bread i wanted, i asked them to wait while i gave Kate Winslett a call, she used to work as a sandwich maker in a Delicatessen and she said i should go for Sourdough bread as it has a low glycemic index and will not cause tiredness due to a sugar crash later in the morning.
After her generous help i didn't want to bother her with my coffee Carb question so called one time waitress Sandra Bullock instead who said that either an Espresso or Americano would not cause me to falter on my keto diet.
It was on my way home that i clipped a cyclist with my wing mirror, he was riding in the middle of the road to try and overtake me at a junction when i hit him and he was saying he was going to sue me so i rang Gerard Butler who was a lawyer but he said that as he overtook my car, he must have been 'cycling furiously' which is a fineable offence under the 1847 Town Police Clauses Act, so i told the cyclist to pick himself up and he is lucky i don't report him to the fashion police for wearing lycra.
When i got home i realised that such was my haste to get the blusher this morning, that i came out without my key so i thought about it for while before phoning ex-fireman Steve Buscemi for advice on breaking down my door and being a real sweety, he suggested i hit the weakest part of the door, the opposite side to the hinges, with a heavy object which meant that the ugly gnome Auntie Karen sent me last Christmas came in handy after all.
With a busted door i had no choice but to telephone one time carpenter Harrison Ford for the best front door to buy, he was filming but stopped to say i should go for a Accoya Wood Door as it is tough and comes in an inherently modern design that still boasts an authentic appearance.
I just had time to make the Choux buns that i had promised the kids but i couldn't find my recipe book so in a panic i checked my celebrity list and thankfully had Harry Styles who was a baker before finding fame in One Direction and he explained that i had to gently heat milk, butter and water until the butter has melted, then bring to the boil before beating in the eggs gradually to a smooth dough.
All i had left to do was wash up but i had used the last of the washing up liquid to blow bubbles at the cat earlier and now all the shops were shut but good old Dwayne Johnson came to the rescue, he said that in his previous employment as a dish washer they would sometimes use very hot water and a little biological washing powder as a substitute.
Thank you Celebrities!!

Let Us Feckin Pray

During a recent four-day, religious live TV event in America, the Pastor Jesse Duplantis made the bizarre claim that Jesus has not yet made a reappearance  because people weren’t donating enough.
Who knew, the son of God was so money motivated but as the news isn't reporting that Jesus put in an appearance i am guessing the Pastor's bank balance didn't swell enough so he stayed in his Heavenly home although i am sure there was some gullible rednecks called Jim Bob or Bobby Jo saying 'Y'all put down 'em gun's youngun's and fetch momma her wallet, we got us some prayin' to do'.
Now i have no problem with people having faith, i don't share it and think they are either brainwashed by parents or just haven't asked enough questions because i'm not sure what they have seen, read, watched or been told different to me for them to say 'Hallelujah, i'll believe that' but that's there look out, as i always say you don't ram your beliefs down my throat and i won't ram my mountains of evidence why religion is a crock down yours.
What bought this up was the report that since lock-down, more young people are praying which is great for them if it helps them in some way with where we are, then fill your boots, no harm to anyone.
The prayer frenzy is being driven by the Internet with many faiths setting up online prayer meetings as the places of worship were locked down, the Church of England alone said that 6,000 people phoned a prayer hotline in its first 48 hours of operation and the majority were young adults aged between 18 and 34.
The most frequent subjects of prayers were for the safety of family (53%), friends (34%), NHS Staff (28%) and themselves (28%) but 24% were also thanking God for something, probably not giving us a killer virus because despite creating everything, he only gets the thanks for all things bright and beautiful apparently.
They also found that the most popular religious figure on TV was The Vicar of Dibley's Rev Geraldine Granger then Sister Evangelina, played by Pam Ferris from Call the Midwife and Father Ted Crilly from Father Ted taking third place although personally if Father Jack was presenting Songs of Praise, i'd watch it.

Cleaning Up Your Mess Costs

The UN Climate Change Conference (Cop26) takes place in Glasgow in November and Governments of the developed World will pledge billions to help poorer countries much in the same way they agreed to provide £100bn a year to poorer countries to fight climate change in 2009 so that's good, or it would be if they do it because they seem to be offering more when they didn't reach the original target.
A report commissioned by the United Nations and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded the £100bn target has not been met since the pledge was made, the 2016 figure was £58bn, 2017 was £71bn, 2108 £78bn and the 2019 figure was £79bn.
So who of the richest nations is skimping on the cash they promised?
Within the G7 the three countries that have paid their share was Germany, Japan and France with the UK and Canada falling a bit short but the two big tightwads are the United States and Italy.  
Joe Biden announced that he will double the current US Contribution which is a nice considering it was his country that caused, and continue to cause, most of the problems in the first place but the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment said that: '£100bn a year isn't going to do it anymore' which stems from the decades of global Governments doing nothing about it.
Time to pay up developed nations, we need ambitious climate targets and you are going to have to dig deep to clean up the horrific mess you made over the past couple of hundred years.