The Sermon On The Hill

Now it came to pass that the great Uttabollux Prophet, Nhigel (may his plums dangle mightily), was out having a stroll with his disciples while they were waiting for the pub to open. Nhigel had his fifteenth of his wives, Karen the Easy, with him as well as his disciples. They all sat down on top of a promontory known locally as ‘the hill’.

‘Well anyway,’ Nhigel said. ‘You see, there was this bloke and he went into a pub’. Soon a crowd began to gather around to hear the wise words of Nhigel. First, he told them the Parable of the Talents. ‘Well, you see there are those like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison who have the real talent, but end up pissing it all away, and there are your dull geezers like Cliff Richard and Cilla Black who do the job but lack the flair of the others.’ Then he told them of The Good Scandinavian Plumber who came to the rescue of a poor underdressed housewife who had a problem with a blocked sink.

Then some blokes - from the massive crowd that had, by now, gathered - brought out a friend of theirs on a stretcher for Nhigel to heal.

‘What’s up with him then? He looks like a malingering bastard to me,’ the wise and compassionate Nhigel said to the man’s friends.

The sick man’s friends told Nhigel about the strange illness that the stretcher bound man suffered from. The way he would seem to be fine for most of the evening, but at closing time, on his way out of the pub he would suddenly - and inexplicably - fall to the ground in an insensible heap. The friends explained that they had tried to heal him with the traditional post-pub kebab, and even the holy curry, but to no avail.

‘Right,’ Nhigel said. Carefully placing his healing hands around the sick man’s throat, Nhigel whispered ‘Get up you idle malingering bastard. If I ever see you pretending like this I’ll kick your nuts into the middle of next week, understand?’

‘I’m healed! I’m healed!’ yelled the sick man taking up is stretcher and walking. ‘Come on, lads, I’ll get the first round in!’

‘It’s a bloody miracle,’ the former sick man’s friends cried.

The crowd had now swelled to what one of Nhigel’s disciples later claimed was about 5 thousand… at least, but police sources later estimated at 79, and a dog on a string.

‘Hang on, lads,’ said Barry the Tosser, Nhigel’s most devoted disciple, looking at his watch. ‘It’s dinner time.’

Other members of the gathered crowd began to look at their watches too. ‘I’m hungry,’ said one.

‘Me too!’

‘And me.’

Soon it seemed the whole crowd was – so they claimed - very near the point of starvation.

‘Why don’t you all sod of home and get something to eat, you dozy sods?’ said the wise and all-knowing Nhigel.

‘B… b… but we all live all the way down there,’ one of the crowd said, pointing to the housing estate at the bottom of the hill.

‘And?’

‘Well, it’s bloody miles away and by the time we get home it will be too late for dinner.’

‘Miles away? said Stan the Sceptical, another of Nhigel’s disciples. ‘It isn’t even one mile, a few hundred yards, if that, and all downhill.’

‘But there are no buses… or taxis, or anything,’ said a voice from the crowd. ‘And I need chips; I’ve got a medical condition.’

‘Hang on a bit love,’ said Karen the Easy to Nhigel, as she rooted about in the bottom of her cavernous handbag. Eventually she withdrew a half-empty tube of Pringles from her back and passed it to Nhigel.

Nhigel held the tube of Pringles high in the air. ‘Form a queue in front of Barry here, and we’ll share these out between you.’

‘Er… no… It’s all right, I’m not hungry now.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Nor me!’

‘Bloody hell!’ shouted Barry as the crowd – as one - all claimed to no longer be hungry at turned away to trudge back down the hill. ‘It’s another bloody miracle.’

‘Yeah,’ Nhigel said, taking one of the Pringles from the tube and looking at it for a moment before trying to feed it to a song thrush sitting on a nearby bush. The bird immediately took to the sky, leaving the crisp-like object to fall from its beak to the ground. ‘Come on, let’s go for that drink.’