Wilf Lunn: How I invented patron saints, and the trouble it got me into

Oct 10 2009 by Wilf Lunn

I said: “Its a Hernia Cycle for earthing the hernias of cyclists. It replaces the pedestrian version which involves a jubilee clip discretely attached to a body part from which a length of wire was connected to a spiked boot”.

I said all this, thinking she was going along with the quack medicine joke until she said: “Oh! I must tell my husband about this. He suffers terribly from that complaint.”

I then realised she actually believed what I was telling her. I did not enlighten her because she looked like she could get violent.

No one inquired about the Reliquary cycle and for years it was on the web without drawing any comment, until fairly recently when I had an email from a lady, with one leg, who’d cycled from John O’ Groats to Land’s End.

She was a member of an amputee cycle club and wanted to know if they could use St Salio as their patron saint. I was shocked.

My ambition was simply to take the mickey out of the money making relics market, not amputees. I had to explain that I’d made the Saint up. The word Salio is Latin for hop. Her silence said it all.

The casket of St Therese, I’m told, contains her ankle bone.

My other saints are more obviously spoofs; St Rhinotelexis the patron saint of nose pickers and St Grenouille, patron saint of French Frogs that have given up hopping so that we may dine. Animals go to heaven don’t they?

PS: ‘A good lunch’ is a euphemism. A clue to its meaning is, I haven’t had a drink for 30 years.