Rockall this week celebrated the feast day of our venerated patron, St. Rupert the Killjoy, a sixth century Hebridean missionary who brought Christianity to the sacred isle.
Bunting and banners festooned the streets on Tuesday as the Fighting Dog and Pikey's massed pipe band marched the length and breadth of the island,issuing forth a mega-decibel cacophony that terrified roosting gulls as far away as Benbecula and precipitated a landslide at the main guano pit.
Historical records show that St. Rupert sailed from South Uist's Abbey of the Sacred Catamites in July of 589 AD, braving the Northern Seas aboard a currach constructed of willow withies, haddock skins and cormorant feathers, landing on Rockall around mid-August.
Here St. Rupert made contact with the island's indigenous tribe of primitive cave dwellers who practiced pagan religious rites centred around an ancient gull sodomy cult and worshipped a huge phallic megalith known as the Great Auk. ( L. Pinguinus impennis ).
The fearless crusading Rupert directed his acolytes to topple the Great Auk and cast it into the sea, then set about his dauntless task of converting the pagan Rockallites to the one true path of Christ our Saviour with a zealous agenda of scourgings, flayings, and burnings, as prescribed by the sixth century Vatican's missionary manual 'How to Convert Stubborn Pagan Twats'.
So successful was Rupert's mission that in 591 AD his first missive to the Bishop's Synod of St. Kilda reported that Rockall had been elevated from a hive of skullduggery and gull buggery to a haven of decent Christian society, with only five instances of fornication with fish and sea birds being confessed that year.
Marauding Vikings invaded Rockall in 594 as part of their annual Rape and Pillage tour, and exhibited their appreciation of Rupert's attempts to convert them to Christianity by shoving a live gannet up his rectum, beak first, then hurling him off Periwinkle Point with a sack of sodden stoat shit lashed around his neck.
Rupert the Killjoy was canonised by Pope Gregory XV in 1523 for his proctological martyrdom at the hands of the pagan Viking horde, and singular recorded miracle of turning gannet shit into communion wafers.