So jolly Jonty the happy Christian is retiring from athletics after twisting his ankle and blaming – sorry, saying it was a sign from – God.
Jonathan Edwards, the Olympic gold-medallist soon to become a TV censor – having been appointed to the board of Ofcom, the new UK TV watchdog – got on GALHA’s tits when the appointment was made. You see (and don’t say this too loudly), the poor boy’s a bit touched.
Early in his career, he infamously refused to run on a Sunday. Now, the 37-year-old has told a press conference that, since “that fateful day” of the divine ankle-twisting (for surely it can be none other than the Almighty who wrenched the devout ankle in the first place) at Crystal Palace, “God has directed my path. As I lay in the pit at Crystal Palace I was sure it was the end of my career.
“ ‘A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps’,” he uttered (with utmost unctuousness, no doubt), quoting Proverbs 16: 9.
This is the man, folks, who is going to help to decide what we all watch on British television. Good job Queer as Folk got in before he did!
If he needs a twisted ankle to help him to make career decisions, one wonders what drove him to dare to stand up in front of a press conference full of grown-up people and spout twaddle about having a hotline to God. A twisted cerebral cortex, perhaps.
Ho, there, Frodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippin, you will not believe this! Did you know the Son of the Creator has been fiddling with a Man child? I swear on the Ring it’s true.
As sure as the Plateau of Gorgoroth is in Mordor, I tell you, Father John Tolkien was touching ‘em up quicker than you can say, “Look what it’s got in its pocketses!” It’s forty Man years ago now, mind.
He’s from Middle England (geographically speaking, that is) rather than Middle Earth (which we all know is in New Zealand), but he was curate at the Church of English Martyrs in Sparkhill when he sexually abused a Man, who has now been given £15,000 by the archdiocese of Birmingham. Mind you, fellow Hobbits, they do not own that anything actually happened. Oh, no. They probably blame it on Sauron or a passing Nazgûl.
The Son has passed on himself, now, and has gone into the clouds beyond the Lost Realm of Arnor, beyond Forodwaith and beyond the Northern Wastes. Good thing, I say. You can bet he was in league with the Sackville-Bagginses. Nasty lot, they are.
Good job he didn’t come to Bag End. He might have got into some rather bad Hobbits.
The Catholics are carrying bones around again – and this time, guys and gals, it’s with the help of no less a figure than Sir Jimmy Savile.
Who would have thought, in his earlier, more rebellious days, that the cigar-chomping TV personality was as nutty as a fruitcake when it comes to religion? He’s now behind moves to make a saint out of a former Scottish factory girl by supporting a move to canonise her because he “miraculously” got better after an illness when he was a nipper. “When I was two years old, I had a problem with a condition called dying – that’s what it was known as then,” Sir Jimmy has told journalists.
“The Duchess, my mother, went to the cathedral in Leeds and found a leaflet about Margaret Sinclair and thought she would try that, so she prayed to her. At that moment I apparently took a one hundred per cent turn for the better and when she came back to the house my grandparents said I was all right.
“The priest from the cathedral and the doctor wrote this up and sent it to Rome and it’s now in some room in the Vatican forming part of her CV to become a saint.”
True to Catholic tradition in these cases, Ms Sinclair’s mortal remains will be exhumed and, in her case, reburied in a church in Edinburgh’s historic old town.
So let’s get this right. You die, somebody prays to you, somebody else gets better, you’re dug up and, uhm ... Yes, it’s all so clear now.
Danuta Nieznalska, a Polish artist, has upset Catholics by creating a work of art comprising a penis and a cross. But poor Mr Nieznalska has badly misjudged a local judge, who fined him 2,000 zloty (about £300) for “blasphemy”.
The judge, Thomas Zielinski, told the artist, who was also given a six-month foreign-travel ban, “The cross is a symbol of suffering, because Christ died on it.”
Right, so all those crosses used before Christ were not symbols of suffering, then. They were just for people to hang around on while they sang “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”.
Infidel could not help but notice a hint of irony when the NSS’s – and GALHA’s – Terry Sanderson found his way onto BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House news/magazine programme at the beginning of August. Contributors were asked to find something nice to say about people they would usually lay into.
The ever-resourceful Mr Sanderson plunged straight in with a tribute to the Arched Eyebrows of Cantberry, Dr Rowan Williams: “We would like to say how much we admire the Archbishop of Canterbury’s intermittent liberality, especially on the topic of gay priests. We think he has been very semicourageous on the issue. We also admire his speeches and sermons – whenever he climbs into the pulpit our membership goes up, and so does that of the Stanley Unwin fan club.”
All joyfold! Goodlee byelode!