It's enough to get Dan Brown pulling at his pencil again. One minute the gentle folk of the Thames and Medway Canal Association are doing their thing cleaning up and restoring the disused canal, the next they're soaping themselves in garlic and bulk ordering their crucifixes. OK, we made that last bit up.
Instead of the usual car tyres, bottles and body parts we take for granted washed up off our waterways, they recently found a small black bag containing 12 coconuts, 12 nails and a bag of lentils. Of course there's no way these were the ingredients for coconut and lentils soup. No, something far more sinister going on here: some voodoo guru black magic badness.
Association chairman and thinking environmentalist's Tom Hanks, Brian Macknish, said:
It's bizarre. There has to be a good reason for it. I asked someone who said it could be something to do with gurus. They tell people to do things to bring them good luck. Somebody said to me they scoop out the coconuts, put ashes of the dead in and throw them in the river. We have never found anything like this before. There is something in it.
There may well be. Especially since the attributed articles were found at the Gravesend end of the canal, well known as a hotbed of pagan sacrifice and dirty heathen activities on a Sabbath day. And if it means the dead are going to start rising from the marshes then we're definitely in.
Offers of explanations have poured in from as afar afield as Miami, pointing variously to evidence of voodoo, Nigerian witchcraft, Hindu fertility rituals or simply the makings of a coconut shy.
The report lists a number of other findings as evidence of ritual, not as it might read, discarded shopping:
A coconut with a bottle of ghee, clarified butter used in Indian cooking, wrapped in a supermarket bag.
A coconut with curry flavoured crisps again wrapped in a supermarket bag.
A coconut with laurel leaves and fruit wrapped in a supermarket bag.
Coconuts wrapped in the type of material used for making a sari with coins, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, a ball of black hair, screws, and mung and kidney beans.
Coconuts wrapped in red wool.
We're not sure about you lot, but we're a little suspicious of those supermarket bags so we did some investigation of our own, ran a Google search (for the soup recipe), came up with some ideas and... Hold on! Weren't there 12 disciples? And didn't they eat lentils? Jesus and two robbers, that's 12 nails. And didn't Monty Python use coconuts to simulate the sound of horse hooves in Monty Python And The Holy Grail before going on to make Monty Python's Life Of Brian, which was of course about Jesus? Sort of. Make peace with your Gods because it won't be long before we see the four oarsmen of the Apocalypse winding their way through the weeds and reeds of this Wiccan waterway. The end is, as it always has been, nigh.
Alternatively if you have any sensible suggestions then please let us know. Especially if we may inadvertantly have upset any localised deity.
