a sixty first story...'as in heaven'

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, Bernard set his eyes on the moon.

‘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.