Saint Neil of Great Briton

Museum worker canonized

By our religious affairs correspondent, Mary Maudlin

A humble museum worker (left) has been hailed as the new Messiah after healing the terminally ill, walking on water across the River Thames, feeding tens of thousands of hungry homeless people with just one Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich, and keeping the Elgin Marbles safe and sound in London.

Speaking outside a coffee shop in Bloomsbury yesterday, Saint Neil MacGregor of Great Briton told journalists how he discovered his spiritual mission while strolling through the British Museum one morning.

“I was approaching the Duveen Galleries when suddenly the Stygian gloom was rent asunder and a heavenly light broke through the great vault of the ceiling. A wondrous voice spoke unto me, a voice I recognized immediately as that of Saint James of Chicago.”

Suddenly, Saint Neil fell to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer, spilling his skinny latte all over his freshly ironed denim jeans. “Saint Jimmy was calling to me, commanding me to reach out to all nations and silence their clamorous tongues. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails, leaving me all on fire with a love of God. The pain was so great it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive torment, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”

At this point a team of men in white coats appeared from Holborn underground station and bundled Saint Neil into a waiting ambulance bound for the Cheri Blair Psychiatric Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital. As the vehicle disappeared across Waterloo Bridge, a wondrous celestial light tore the clouds asunder…. (OK, that’s enough biblical twaddle. Ed.)

MM