Hi there to all my fans in the crazy fucking world of amateur cricket. How are you all? In case you had forgotten, I am the new Pope, not the old tarmac-kissing git with the white hair. No, I am the new, Nazi one. No-one knows my face, my name or number. Anyway here’s my message.
The Three Kings, along with their entourage of soothsayers, scientists, sex slaves and spin doctors, trundled across the vast deserts of Arabia and Persia - blinded by the nuclear light of a sun in its last agonising death throes, far away in time and space. They were looking for meaning, something, or someone, to explain the world they inhabited, as if their very existence was not enough, as if they did not believe enough in themselves. They carried gifts of gold, francincense, myrrh, the finest belgian liqueur chocolates, toblerones, C.D’s, mobile phone ring tones and W.H. Smiths vouchers. They were electric with excitement - batteries definitely included - travelling blind but travelling heavy, like a band of spaced-out Santas on a mission.
They were looking for a Saviour born in a shed, pissing in the sand as they went and crapping in holes in the ground and unknowingly coining the term sandwich, i.e. ‘everything which we put in our mouths is covered in bloody sandwhichgetsinourmouths’. There used to be a reason for headscarves in such an unforgiving climate - a practical one, to keep the fucking sand out, not a religious/dogmatic one to wrap people up in so they disappear along with their identities. So it goes.
Their search led them to a shed. Men later built more grandiose sheds, later to be called churches, and celebrated the birth (and death) of their saviour by singing and chanting and killing anyone who didn’t agree with them. You see, the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. The real intention of the Gospels, as I see it, was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful and love thy neighbour. Surely only machines/robots without any sense of conscience can drop burning jellied gasoline on other human beings below without imagining what horrors they are unleashing on the human beings on the ground. And yet we are told that bad breath or smoking in public places is socially unacceptable. So it goes.
Churches eventually declined into places where old people play bingo and get buried and where young people nick lead, desecrate graves and get married. But modern men still have their own private sheds in which to remember and attempt to achieve redemption (£99.99 and upwards from B & Q. That’s just for the shed though, redemption comes more expensive). A place in which they can meditate, smoke clandestine cigarettes, and dream, alone, surrounded by ancient tins of paint and broken cordless screwdrivers and the remains of the last state of the art lawnmower - alone, wondering how they had arrived here, what had happened to them, did they possess free will, why they had got married, with a crappy job and a mortgage and a car that doesn’t have sideboard protection or whatever and an armoured car to take the kids to school in and a ‘personal’ loan and a love of D.I.Y. and a blind pekingese dog that shits everywhere and they read a newspaper which informs them the country is populated solely by paedophiles, yobs, illegal immigrants and terrorists (no wonder they feel powerless) and a fucking chipboard ‘designer’ kitchen designed by a nazi with irony and a digital washing machine and cruelty free breakfast cereals and bottles of pills that act as antidotes for all the crap we eat and a holiday abroad in Spain every year and a new white plastic conservatory and a new sort of razor and toothbrush coming out on a weekly basis (too much choice, not in important decisions like how to stop world hunger whilst supermarkets throw away millions of tons of food a week, but in banal ones like which fucking razor to buy now they have ones with eighteen blades that shave so close your skin drops off, or what pastel shade of toilet paper to buy) and shampoo that contains more fruit than sunny delight and aloe vera that appears in everything (the vegetarian alternative to David Jason) and a bank that steals from them and a television that hates and despises them and a ‘private’ dental plan and a pension that, like Heaven, promises much in the afterlife but never delivers, trapped forever with a partner who can have multiple orgasms and yet no interest in the World Cup - looking for meaning, looking for a saviour, someone to make sense of it all for them. So it goes.
What about this? There’s this tree right and its sole crop is money, it grows money. It has £50 notes for leaves and its flowers are government bonds and its fruit is diamonds. It attracts human beings who kill each other for its attractions. Their bodies lie among the roots and make excellent fertiliser.
And this. The Jews claim they have always been persecuted by other beings who inhabit this planet along with them. How wrong can they be. If you nail up the son of the Most Powerful Being In The Universe, then you should be pretty sure who it is that’s persecuting you. And you should learn the lesson that, before you kill somebody, you make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. Unluckily for the Palestinians, they are not well connected.