JESUS OF NAZARETH

 

JESUS OF NAZARETH

Simona Frillsom couldn’t be more excited. After graduating with a degree in cardigans from Central Saint Martins she had been hired by the top design team at Fitly, a rising star in the exalted world of fashion design houses, and tonight was her first show in Paris. Simona was taking charge in the dressing room, ensuring that all the models were comfy in their outfits, making last-minute adjustments and tucking in some stray body parts.

As the first model took to the catwalk there were audible gasps from the audience and photographers alike. One elderly lady in the front row fainted. “Wow” thought Simona “I’m really making an impact here - I’d better make sure my CV is up to date as I’m sure to be on the poaching list for all the other designers”.

But as model after model took to the stage, the impact of her designs began to dawn on Simona as she watched the assembled rich and famous get up and leave one by one, until by the final piece there were only a handful of buyers from Primark left in their chairs.

Devastated at her failure Simona turned to her mentor Jorge to try and determine what had just happened.

“What have I done wrong Jorge? Why did my designs go down so badly?”

“Well” said Jorge “what was your thinking process behind the outfits?”

Simona explained: “I enjoyed my time immensely as a child and was a frequent winner of beauty pageants. Obvs - I mean, look at me? Anyway, so I wanted to emulate that idea of a big shiny winner’s ribbon worn diagonally across the body. Of course, I needed to make it a lot wider to spare the models’ blushes. Unfortunately my choice of material was a coarse-knitted rope twine which would have made the models unbearably hot under the lights, ruining the look with their sweaty brows. So before they dressed, I put their outfits into a fridge for an hour at -10 degrees in order to chill them right down.”

“So” replied Jorge “you have dressed each model in …” 

_  /  _  _  _  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  _   (1, 6, 4, 4)

“Yes that’s right” said Simona. “Was that wrong?”

“Oh my dear girl” replied Jorge “your ideas were magnificent, contrasting the beauty pageant stage ‘look’ with Paris’ much hautier visions. Don’t interrupt me, of course hautier is a word. Ahem. The idea of refrigerating the outfits first was also first-class and showed your ability to handle unforeseen situations very well, and you clearly deserve credit for that. But where you did go wrong was your choice of material for the outfits. Maybe you were too busy studying to know that it was all anyone was talking about at the shows last year - unfortunately clothes made from this material ended up causing a gigantic scandal with hugely influential customers being forced to endure excessive chafing as the coarseness of the material abraded their flesh."

"It is a shame, but nobody likes or uses that material any more” he continued “nobody at all. Not one person admires it as clothing and none will buy it or wear it either. I’m sorry Simona, but….”

_  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  _  (4, 3, 4, 4)

Answer1: > a frozen jute sash <

Answer2: > jute has zero fans <

HIERONYMUS BOSCH

Life in the early 18th century was a necessarily slow-paced affair for the average citizen.  They would walk to school, to work, to market, to church and to the pub, in all weathers.  Life was uncomplicated, monotonous and time-consuming.  Steam-powered trains had only just begun to be used and even they were confined to industrial settings, unavailable to anyone other than rich industrialists and hobbyist lords. Rather like first-class travel today. Whilst there were other inventions waiting to be discovered such as aeroplanes and computers, Samuel Johnson didn’t invent the dictionary until 1755 so they wouldn’t have known what to call these new-fangled devices anyway.

One chap, however, was brimming with ideas.  Cuthbert Smugbeard was a skilled blacksmith, always working away at his forge to come up with new ideas for improving his life.  He’d recently been looking into the problem of donkeys moving at, well, a donkey’s pace.  Whilst this was all well and good if you were transporting goods to market or ferrying kids along Blackpool Beach, Cuthbert wanted a faster way to get to the pub after a hard day at the forge.  And a faster way to get home after a hard evening at the pub.  Drunk in charge of a Donkey was not yet on the statutes.

Being a farrier as well as a smith, he was well used to shoeing hooves of various beasts, and hit upon the idea of inserting a thin slice of wavy steel between the iron shoe and the hoof.  This, he determined, would impart extra spring in the step of the beast which would enable a longer stride, a higher step, and an ability to leap a five bar gate at even the easiest of canters.

Upon seeing Cuthbert riding his newly invigorated donkey with the special shoes, a nearby landowner, Lord Slooty, invited Cuthbert to fit two pairs of his marvellous new device to all four hooves of his prize stallion, thereby enabling the lord to win that year’s 50 guineas race by several lengths (and due to a minor metallurgical miscalculation by Cuthbert, several heights too).

Slooty invited Cuthbert to go into business together to manufacture the device, but they needed a snappy name for it.  Cuthbert wasn’t too good with words (nobody was until 1755 when Johnson invented them), and wanted to call it the Springing Stallion Slither O’Metal but Lord Snooty eventually came up with a much snappier name for it, the…

_  _  _  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  _   (6, 5, 4 )

Answer: > bouncy horse shim <

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

The John Lewis Christmas advertisement production team were having a brainstorming session, trying to decide on a new bold direction for their annual campaign. After several years of adverts featuring families, stuffed animals, real animals, and plenty of heartstring-tugging emotional denouements, the newly-appointed creative director Crispin Brand wanted to up the stakes a little and produce something “with extra raunch” as he put it. Ungrammatically.

“I want something more sexy, with more funky music, maybe a famous musician from the 80s who will appeal to our demographic in new and exciting ways” said Crispin. The creative team bandied around a few names but he rejected each one:

Kylie Minogue? Too 90s

Madonna? Too expensive

Michael Jackson? Too dead

Elton John? Too 2018

Ozzy Osborne? Too much… in too many ways

Then Chloe, a junior member of the team and resident millennial, suggested Nile Rodgers - the famous guitarist currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity amongst the fifty-something festival glamping set. Crispin was astonished that Chloe even knew who Nile was, until she pointed out that her mum watched Glastonbury on BBC2 every year while wearing glitter make-up and a Jo Whiley wig.  

“Brilliant!” said Crispin. “We can combine the sounds of ‘Le Freak’ with a little vignette about Nile discovering his fancy footwork capability and then seamlessly segue into ‘He’s the Greatest Dancer’ for the final few seconds of the advert, while Nile gyrates his hips provocatively. The glampers will love it!”

The team swung into action. They worked up storyboards, hired Mr Rodgers and a film crew, and chose a location in a cobbled street in West Barmsby, Yorkshire, which Strategy & Planning had assured them would appeal to the Werther-bothering triple-locked pension demographic.

Nile was insistent that he wanted to use the latest dance moves which he’d “got off YouTube” and involved twerking his bum around all over the place. No matter, thought Crispin. If people ridiculed the moves but it increased sales for the lead-up to Christmas then he'd live with it. After all, the audience's biggest creative criticism a few years ago had been that John Lewis didn't sell pianos. What do they know.

The ad made its debut on ITV at 9:15pm on 30th November. The reaction was incredible. People loved the advert, the response to the gyrating Nile Rodgers was adulatory, and the team and their clients were looking forward to the second showing the next day.

And at that point they received a call from the Advertising Standards Authority telling them that they were not allowed to air the ad in the remaining 24 days leading up to Christmas.

“But why?” asked Crispin. 

“Well you see,” began the ASA “as well as having a watershed for children’s snacks and not allowing nudity, we can't permit adverts in the last month of the year that prominently feature specific 1980s funk band members' bums, I’m afraid.”

While it was not invoked often, this very specific rule was called the...

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   /  _ _ _ _  /  _ _ _ _  /  _ _ _   ( 8, 4, 4, 3 )

Answer: > december chic butt ban <

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

The monks were revolting. That is to say, they were in revolt (although Brother Rancid was, to be fair, a little on the pungent side).  

The local head of Callygrafy Servyces, Bishop Retamanger, had recently been tasked with implementing cost saving measures among the scribes under his command. Since that pesky fellow Caxton had appeared on the scene, the demand for hand-illuminated bibles and other notable works – okay, just bibles – had gone through the floor, and the monastery was losing money hand over sandle.

The savings made so far included a reduction in the storage capacity of the wine cellar, principally undertaken with extraordinary enthusiasm by the abbot himself over the course of several months, as well as the rationing of food for the monks by diluting their daily gruel to the official ecclesiastical consistency of “thin”.

But the measure that really irked the scribes was the replacement of the usual stiff goose-feather quills with much more floppy feathers from the underbelly of the Little Bittern. These were lacking almost entirely in rigidity, drooping and flapping around while the monks tried to write, causing numerous mistakes and ruined manuscripts.

The monks had heard of a new-fangled device popular on the continent, a wooden stick with a metal nib attached. These were purported to last for many decades and would thus reduce costs year-on-year while simultaneously avoiding the annual Bittern slaughter.

After a clandestine 2am meeting of the revolting monks – which due to the vow of silence was conducted entirely via hand-drawn caricatures rather like a medieval Zoom session – the head scribe was sent to confront the abbot with a demand that they be provided with these stiffer writing devices. Whilst he was unable to speak to the abbot of course, he presented a note to him with the following text:

Abbot – we can no longer cope with these droopy old-fashioned writing methods, we need the stiffer new devices from the continent.  Take away our floppy quills, and…

_ _ _ _ _  /  _ _  /  _ _ _ _ _  /  _ _ _ _ (5, 2, 5, 4)

CHRISTINA AGUILERA

 

Hans Werner died recently, aged 89.  Born in Salzburg, he was raised by his grandparents in the mountains west of Innsbruck following the unfortunate death of both of his parents in one of the earliest ski-lift incidents in the region, when the chair they were riding couldn’t support their combined weight after an apres-ski feast of 30 Wiener Schnitzels each the night before.  Ironically, they were only able to afford the last day of their skiing break after demolishing the food in under thirty minutes to win the coveted crown of Schnitzel-Eaters of the year, along with 500 Schillings in prize money.

Hans grew up in the mountains, herding goats.  He developed a very keen eye for how his creatures moved, leaping from rock to rock as they did whilst balancing on almost vertical slopes.  Hans began to mimic the creatures, first with small jumps and easy ascents, but with increasing confidence it wasn’t long until he was able to scramble up and down mountains in no time at all, unaided.

It was this skill with traversing mountainous terrain that first brought him to the attention of the national Olympic committee of his country when they were putting together their team for entry into the then-niche Olympic event of Rock Hopping.  Hans could leap around like nobody’s business, with a seemingly boundless ability to spring, jump, and hop over any obstacle at incredible pace, eventually leading his team-mates to a well-deserved Rock Hopping gold medal in the 1952 Winter Olympics.

Following the death of Hans’ favourite farm animal, Wilhelm Goat Gruff, and a suitable month of mourning (he really loved that animal) Hans retired from Rock Hopping altogether and used his leaping knowledge to develop his own brand of sports clothing and equipment called “Unforgoatable”.  As well as being a tribute to Wilhelm, the brand name seemed to stick in people’s minds for some reason, and within a few short years he was propelled to immense levels of wealth.

Hans retired at 35, having amassed billions.  He went to live out the rest of his days, returning to Innsbruck to start a goat sanctuary, where he could be seen regularly bouncing and leapfrogging around the hills like a true mountain goat.  He never married, though he did leave several hundred kids. 

Hans Werner. 1931 – 2020. 

He truly was an  _  _  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  _  /  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  (5, 4, 8)

Answer > Agile rich Austrian  <

JASON STATHAM

JASON STATHAM 

“Devilled Strawberries? What on earth are you talking about!” said Pierre D’eath, the owner of the most famous patisserie in France. His young protégé Philippe LePlum had been experimenting with new recipes to add to the dizzying array of conserves available from Pierre’s flagship Paris outlet, La Mort par le Chocolat, and had hit upon the idea of adding an array of very strong spices to his latest attempts at creating a new product to impress his rather traditional boss. 

“You see” said Philippe, “our normal products are almost all terribly sweet and I think there is a market for something a little spicier that certain people can spread on their toast in the morning. I recently visited my British friend Charlie Potato, and he said that over there the restaurants are starting to add spices to everything – well mostly sriracha sauce to be fair – but the brits have definitely developed a taste for all things spicy. So I had the idea of taking one of our normal fruit conserve recipes and as well as sugar and fruit, I would add a number of traditional British condiments like Worcestershire Sauce, mustard powder, horseradish and of course a good dollop of sriracha. 

And I thought we could market it as Devilled Strawberries, monsieur.” 

Pierre thought about the name for a moment. “Philippe, I think your idea may just work, but we need a better name for it. I was in England shortly after the war, and the word ‘devilled’ tended to be applied to recipes containing kidneys, not fruit conserves; this is almost certainly not the connotation you are looking for. But I like the idea that the devil himself has had a hand in this, so why don’t we call our spicy fruit conserve…

_ _ _ _ _ ' _ / _ _ _ / _ _ _ (6,3,3)

Answer > satan's hot jam <

FRANCES DE LA TOUR (2)

Brad loved to go and ride the waves on his board down in SoCal. 

After a day’s fun of shooting tubes and the occasional wipeout he’d often take a stroll along the boardwalk behind Malibu Beach, frequently stopping to chat to any old dudes he could find about what the scene was like in the 60’s and 70’s when people used to flock there to enjoy the new craze. 

One old fella called Salty Steve had many tales to tell, like the time he rode a 100ft high breaker right up the beach, over the sand and directly into Jerry’s Beachside Bar without even getting off his board. Or when he got chased by a great white shark while paddling out and only escaped after bopping it on the nose with a snorkel. Or the time when he joined the zero-feet high club in a particularly dangerous liaison at the base of a big wave, twos-up on his board with Barbara (commonly known as Santa Barbara as she was particularly giving, especially at Christmas after a few bourbons). 

Brad would normally buy Salty a drink after hearing about another one of his exploits, as they were so amusing and detailed. Until one day when he was pulled aside by another old-timer called Wavy Davy, who told Brad that Salty Steve was an utter fraud, scamming drinks off strangers and that not only did he not own a board, he had never actually set foot in the sea due to a severe case of hygrophobia following a traumatic wellington boot / puddle incident as a child. 

“But… but.. the stories – they seem so real!” said Brad. “Yeah" said Davy, "he might claim to be just like the rest of us, but he’s all about long rambling stories rather than actual action out on the breakers. He’s what we call round here, an …"

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ (9, 6)

Answer > anecdotal surfer <