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.