THE CULT OF THE SUN GOD

This is what the grown ups in Norneverland do every Summer.The tribes who adhere to the Worshipful Cult of Bonfire Builders begin by stealing wooden pallets and old rubber tyres so that they will be in readiness to build competing towers of tinder ,which they will set alight at a given time to worship Horus the Sun God. The various tribes involved in the cult will compete to glorify the giver of all things ,lest the sun might not rise in the morning and Norneverland might be consigned to a perpetual Winter and crops might not grow and honeybees might never awaken again from their torpor to pollinate those crops.All life might end.
This Summer a branch of a government sponsored gangster consortium known as the UDA , led by a notorious paramilitary godfather called Dee Stitt ,stole 2,300 wooden pallets which were being stored secretly for another branch of the same consortium by Belfast City council.The government already supports Mr Stitt’s gangsters and the public funds them to the tune of £millions through an organisation called Charter NI(Norneverland), so they are well thought of in government circles. These stolen pallets from the Belfast Council’s store were then built into a huge bonfire at Bangor’s Kilcooley estate,near Belfast, making it even bigger than they are usually able to build it. This pleased Mr Stitt greatly ,who measured his ego by such displays.You’ll understand that in the grand scheme of things that there are only enough wooden pallets available to be stolen at any one time ,so the size of bonfires is dependant on the crop to be fetched every Summer, in time for the ceremony.It’s all about supply and demand.It has been scientifically proven that any bonfire might never exceed a given height for this very reason . There would simply never be enough pallets in existence to build them any higher .It is simply impossible to make them any bigger for reasons of physics and gravity and if they could, it might mean that the builders would need breathing apparatus ,much as mountaineers might to ascend to their apex in outer space……
It’s unimaginable that an insect might ever grow bigger than a certain size lest gravity collapse its exo-skeleton, no matter what science -fiction and “b2 movies might say..These are the simple facts of life and logic in Norneverland and on the earth ,generally .These pallets were stolen using a magic flat-bed lorry, especially designed for stealing pallets each Summertime. No one knows where it comes from ,who owns it, what colour or make it is ….. but it comes.The real problems began to arise when it was discovered that the Belfast City council was paying to store some 2000 stolen pallets for a rival south and east Belfast UDA gangster gang who wanted to build their very own sun- tower.They had been mysteriously lifted from a site in Chobham Street in east Belfast and were to be returned, cost -free and without any storage charges ,when they were later required.
Mr Stitt was embarrassed at this bit of foolishness by his men, basically stealing pallets from a rival group who had already stolen them for themselves…. but his new towering pyre looked so beautiful that he was loathe to dismantle it and he didn’t want to lose face by giving the pallets back to the Belfast Council or the Clobham Street or Sandy Row loyalists, either. There was no doubt about it ,pallets had to be burned as part of the ceremony. What to do ,though? Like I remarked earlier, an immutable Law of Norneverland is that there are only ever a finite number of pallets to go around the members of the Sun Cult and his act of felony had upset the entire balance of the natural world and the scheme of things.In fact it made a bit of a fuss in the local media.The Belfast City council had apparently acted in secret and had told no one about their arrangements. For some reason they felt that it should be kept secret even though everyone was paying for it..
The first thing to do for Mr Stitt was to lie through his teeth that he had anything to do with the theft of any pallets .That tactic usually worked for politicians in Norneverland, so why not give it a try?. The normal laws of nature and discourse do not attend in this fairytale kingdom and the politics are akin to those of the Mad Queen’s in “Alice Through The Looking Glass”. Mr Stitt did not want to deplete his power by building a smaller bonfire…or worse still , dismantling the one already built .That would be like saying outright that his penis was too small, which is how these cultists measure themselves.Vanity dictated that he would have to steal pallets elsewhere to make up for the loss and deliver them back to Belfast City Council.His gangsters made a start with 300 pallets ,but then the supply appears to have dwindled to somewhere around zero.At such short notice an order of 2000 stolen pallets was a very tall order, but he had knocked a few noses out of joint among other similarly inclined cultists… and loyalist fueds between UDA members have started over a whole lot less in the past.Indeed, such mishaps have often led to outright murder on the streets of Norneverland. In Bangor, according the local Belfast newspaper “Belfast Telegraph”, it has been quoted :
“The men aren’t happy, and neither is Jimmy Birch (east Belfast UDA leader), who Stitt has made a fool out of again.It’s 10 days until the bonfires are lit, where are we going to find another 2,000 pallets to give to Chobham Street and Sandy Row?The only way we could do it is to rob someone else’s bonfire. We’ve better things to be doing than running around stealing pallets.Stitt should just pull down the Kilcooley bonfire, hand the pallets back and rebuild it, but his ego is so big he won’t do it.”
Something like that dilemma that these grown men faced might bring tears from a stone, wouldn’t you think?They’d lived with this fear of this emasculation and the even greater fear of an irate weather god such as Horus, for so long ,that they’d lost all form and manner of perspective.There is no doubt that the various cult members will somehow resolve this situation in time for the appointed day and sate the Sun God’s appetite before we all wither in an everlasting Winter, but the local council might yet have some questions to answer for all those unbelievers who do not support paying for such arcane notions.