Sunday 19th September 2010, Cofton Park, Birmingham

Too fecking early in the morning.

Build it and he’ll come, they said. So they did and he did, but he had no baseball bat.   The weather was as kind and gentle as a Catholic Priest, expectations were as high as a school girl’s skirt and excitement was building like a Polish immigrant.

This is history in the making I told myself, but I wasn’t listening so I said it again.

Patiently waiting in the park with thousands of pilgrims, I had a Curly Wurly (not a Catholic euphemism) as I had skipped breakfast.  Helicopters were flying over. Women and children screaming. This was like Iraq all over, but this time it was legal.

Before we could laugh at another disabled person being baptised, Strauss started to play, which was odd as I thought he was dead. Sprach Zarathustra, or if you wear a shell suit, Space Odyssey theme,  was blaring round Cofton Park.  This is the moment when we knew that the helicopter hovering over us was poised to empty its load down on to our happy worshipping faces.  The anticipation was lip nibbling, for the talented ones, the rest of us had to just wait.  Strauss finished to a chorus of cheering, whooping and then silence.

CC Rider by Elvis started playing as what looked like blobs of white squirted from the over head machine to rain down on us. “WE ARE COMING”, we heard from the skies! It was the Pope and Pope impersonators, parachuting into the park.   The original Pope was the first one to land followed by a black one and a Chinese one.   Unofficially, there was also a female Pope impersonator. Sadly her parachute failed to open. Unofficially.  The lady in question regrettably died, unofficially, and she is now unofficially dead.

Music now changed to Steve Winwood – I’m a Man:   the Pope made his way through the crowd of adoring fans on a pimped up Space Hopper.  As he bounced his way to his stage, he handed out packs of ribbed condoms. (not those cheap ones that have little holes in to let those Aids get through)

A small kerfuffle broke out as a man was severely beaten with Chorizo for mistakenly being misheard shouting ‘Nazi’.  The poor fellow innocently remarked that he “Can’t see”  Easy mistake to make with all the singing and clapping that was not going on!   A local police man who witnessed the incident made the following comment “It is no excuse but it’s not always easy to understand these midgets, I am not justifying it oh no, but them squeaky people can be troublesome to understand”

Once the Pope reached the stage, he took his seat and those notoriously cheeky Cardinals put on a show as a special treat.  Music started Electric Six – “Gay Bar”  and those funky Cardinals did their thing.

—

Meanwhile outside the park, there was a small gathering of protesters -you could tell they were protesters as they were smoking and waving paintings they did at play group.  They were clearly proud of their spelling achievements and one was obviously on “top table” as he wrote his sign in Latin.

All was peaceful until one protester, (and it only takes one) threw a squirrel at the Catholics as they left the park.  “Take that you homophobic, paedophile, anti-women, spreader of aids, killer of Africans, racist, Nazi, X Factor fan”  he shouted as he flung the helpless creature at the stream of Catholics.  Why a squirrel I asked, “It’s an insult ain’t it, everybody knows squirrels are gay” the Protester replied.  However, before anything else could be said, this one man’s action triggered a chain reaction that resulted in hundreds of nut nibblers being tossed at the pilgrims.

The pilgrims defended themselves by spitting at the protesters with their holy spit,  and to taunt them they sang bursts of  “We are going to heaven and you’re not”  in a smug manner.  This was a victory to Team Pope in their eyes, where as Team Smoke Dope were getting the munchies so they went home.

In the end, the Catholics had the last laugh as the Pope came round selling Ice Cream.

Protesters, if you are going to protest, stick around to the end you doughnuts!

NB: This blog post is a true account of events, as they happened. Yeah. Really!