The
clouds parted, and lo before him were the gates of Heaven.
Brian
gulped.
For the
whole time sashaying around on planet Earth, Brian had been convinced he had
been sent to the wrong universe, and here at last was his escape!
His
chance to start a new life, recreate paradise lost.
His very
own Garden of Eden – albeit it without the serpent(s).
(except
perhaps grass snakes).
If Brian
had a pound coin for every time he had stood in front of the bathroom mirror
and imagined himself in conversation with St Peter, he would have been a very
rich man.
Life on
planet Earth would probably have seemed a whole lot more appealing.
And he
would have had choice.
But no,
fate – for Brian was either naïve enough or dumb enough to believe in
pre-destiny (or both) – had not decreed him capital riches, or very many
options.
What he
earned he had to spend.
Hand to
mouth.
Indeed,
the very act of existence proved difficult for Brian. He was not a good
actor.
If Brian
had known in advance all the world were a stage, and reality a stage set able
to be taken down and put up again, albeit with an unspecified degree of will,
he would quite happily have walked the next block in search of something more
tangible.
Something more
real.
But
perhaps not too real.
The
boundary between what was real on planet Earth and what was a load of old
poppycock had, in some instances, become hard to decipher.
A great
number of earthlings had ceased to believe even the dome of sky above their
heads was the limit.
‘To
infinity and beyond!’, they said.
(Blame
NASA, or Speilberg)
And yet
the truth (if reality is based solely on individual perception) remained that
the limit in most cases was the plaster board ceiling above their heads, or the
white washed surround walls where they dreamed, if not exactly lived out their
fantasies.
Oh
Brian! Oh World!
And
though there was a lot of blame to go around, who could blame any of the
earthlings for wanting a better plot?
Somewhere
to grow vegetables, in peace.
A
Universal Allotment Scheme.
Indeed,
this is the kind of apparently daft idea Brian harboured, and quite frequently
entertained while he was plip-plopping between cradle and grave.
(He was a
socialist)
..So it
came as a bewildering and untoward surprise when he discovered the gates of
Heaven were..
..locked.
And there
was 3 x 4’ Estate Agent’s sign tied to the iron bars.
Brian
took off his glasses and polished the lenses on his sleeve. He squinted
in the celestial light, polished them one more time, then put them back on the
bridge of his nose
The
Estate Agent’s sign read: ‘SOLD’.
Now that
was News!
BIG NEWS,
Ladies and Gents.
‘Wha?’,
said Brian, dumbfounded
And to no
one in particular.
When of
course he should have been asking himself: why?
And then:
why the hell not?!
~
You see what had happened leading up to this point in the
story, was this:
Once upon a time there was a son of car mechanic, who went to
school, and left without a single qualification to his name.
His name was Bernard.
Next, Bernard got a job working as a trainee livestock
auctioneer with a company called Waters & Son.
During an auction he was attending as part of his
apprenticeship he saw 20 freshly laid turkey eggs for sale, which he bought for
a shilling each.
And then, the same day, acquired a
paraffin-oil incubator which he bought for £1 10s.
Someone like Brian with the benefit of hindsight would have
described this as a ‘fateful purchase’.
How dumb!
(or naïve)
(or both)
Anyhow, Bernard began to develop an infatuation with things
with wings.
He spent two years in the Royal Air Force, before deciding he
preferred things with wings that laid eggs as opposed to things with wings that
dropped explosive bombs.
Fair enough!
Ironically then, it was one Nikita Khrushchev – the little,
squat, bald man who nearly led planet Earth to the brink of ultimate destruction
in 1962 – who taught young Bernard how.
How to turkey farm.
(possibly the single greatest achievement of communism should
go down in the annals of history as the modernisation of poultry farming).
So, with the advice of a little, squat, bald man ringing raw
in his ears, Bernard’s turkey farming empire began to grow.
And grow.
The more eggs his turkey’s laid, the more turkey meat there
was, and the more earthlings ate turkey.
As the saying goes, ‘you are what eat’.
And before long earthlings were beginning to behave like
headless versions of the turkeys, chickens, you name it, they were stuffing
down their gullets.
(it is said that when you behead a turkey, or indeed a
chicken, it runs around the farm yard for a few minutes before it falls down
dead. Go, sit and watch earthlings rushing to and fro, hither and thither
at any one of the following locations to experience this for real – Waterloo
Station, Trafalgar Square (Saturday always best), and for the greatest number,
Regent Street (any day of the week!).
Meanwhile, success for Bernard bred success.
In 1985, he became Prime Minister of Great Britain.
In 1991, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
reunion of western and eastern Europe, he was named European Premier (a new
position created entirely for the Great Turkey Farmer).
In 1992 he won a Nobel Prize, and in 1995 was voted World
Leader, winning a landslide against Nelson (Winnie) Mandela*.
(*behind every strong man there is a stronger woman. This,
dear reader, is irrefutable).
At the dawn of the new millennium, Bernard Matthews Farms Ltd
had real estate in every single nation in the world, and owned just over half
the land mass on planet Earth.
Then, after a chance meeting with Steven Speilberg and a
visit to Houston
‘To infinity and beyond!’ became the new company motto,
replacing the now seemingly outdated: ‘it’s bootiful’.
(‘it’s bootiful’, incidentally, referred to a turkey’s plump
and delicious rear end. True fact).
The moon was colonised by Bernard Matthews Farms Ltd in 2003,
and soon every primary school pupil across the globe knew this: that the moon
was not in fact made of cheese, but of reconstituted turkey bottoms!
And by the time our Brian slipped and fell off the roof of
his house trying to readjust his satellite dish, subsequently breaking his neck
and spine, dying in intensive care, having his soul leave his body and make the
journey northwards – to Heaven – BMF Ltd had gotten there first.
Heaven was soon to become, and has become since, a Turkey
Farm.
..on Earth as in Heaven.
