If there's one thing that God really fucking hates, it's old people. In fact he can't stand the wrinkly, saggy-arsed little bastards. Just when they think they're on the road to retirement, they've paid off the mortgage on the tent, and managed to accumulate all the goats they can slaughter, God jumps in and says, "Oy! You! I've got a fucking job for ya!"

So when a manky old coffin dodger called Abram thought he could look forward to a life of creaky joints, bad teeth and pissing the bed twice a night, God decided to send him on a bit of an expedition.

"Look Abram, me old mate, you've got no kids, no prospects, and let's face it your wife's downbelow bits are about as appealing as a squashed meat pie. If you do a job for me, I'll see to it that she has more children than you can shake a shitty stick at. And I'll give her bigger tits as a bonus."

Abram was 75 years old and he'd thought his days of spearing the bearded clam were over, so he jumped at the chance. Well, he did his best - his arthritis was giving him some trouble, so he just farted and passed out. When he woke up again he asked, "What do I have to do, O God?"

"Simple. Just get off your fat, lazy backside and bugger off to Canaan. And I'll tell you all about it when you get there."

"O God, I must go now," said Abram.

"Well there's no hurry, I'll give you time to pack your tent and rent some long distance camels."

"O God, I need to go now," said Abram, more urgently this time.

God frowned. "It's good that you're keen but..."

"O God..."

"What the fuck's up with you, man?"

Abram looked away. "I told you I needed to go. It's too late now, I've shit myself. I've been doing a lot of that lately. It's my age. You couldn't sort something out for me before I set off could you? Just a tiny miracle, nothing major."

God held his nose and nodded. And lo, Abram's incontinence was no longer a problem. For God did conjure up a year's supply of rubber underwear and a rough sponge on a pointy stick.

A few days later they were all ready to go. As well as Abram and his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot was tagging along because he wanted to sell some of his old music at the market. It was a compilation album called "Now That's What I Call Psalms 26", so they had to find room for fourteen temple singers and a band of chanting hermits.

When they got to Canaan God was waiting for them, and Abram was keen to get started. "What's the job, God? Dost thou command me to found a city in thy name and fill the land with my progeny, that they might praise thy Holy word, O Lord?"

But it was nothing like that. God pointed to several boxes on the ground nearby. "That is your great task, Abram. Built me an altar."

For yea and verily and lo, and lots of other Old English words of exclamation... within the sacred boxes God had delivered unto Abram was some flat-pack, self-assembly furniture.

God shrugged. "I've had a look at the instructions and it might as well be written in fucking Swedish for all I know. I may be Supreme Lord of the Universe, but I'm fucked if I know how to build an altar from 27 pieces of laminated chipboard and a bag of assorted screws and metal fittings. Build that and I'll make your wife look like Britney Spears before she went mental. No hold on, I'm getting my dates mixed up. She'll look like Eve without the fig leaves, and her fruit will be ripe and juicy, not saggy like a couple of wet paper bags.

Abram got down to work.

157 days later the flat-pack altar was finished, and Abram had enough spare parts to make a couple of book-ends and a novelty toilet roll holder. It was all looking good, so he did a test run, but when he tried to sacrifice a goat on the altar, the back fell off, one of the hinges came loose, and Abram realised he'd put the drainage channel for the blood on backwards, so it went all over his nice new sandals.

When God saw the mess he was furious, and ordered Abram and his family to roam around the countryside for years, putting up more flat-pack altars all over the place until he got it right. And of course he never did.

Abram's wife was being a total bitch because she still had no ovaries and was stuck with a vagina as loose an empty leather bucket. And Lot didn't help because he'd traded his Psalms album in for some Arabian Emo music, which meant that they were now sharing the tent with 5 men in black robes, singing about the end of the world and cutting themselves to get more attention.

"We need a holiday," said Abram. "Sarai, pack your sun cream, we're going to Egypt."

And so they travelled to the land of the Pharaohs, who were already onto their TWELFTH Dynasty, having somehow managed to build the pyramids AND, totally amazingly, survive God's Great Flood, which had covered the whole world but for some reason missed them altogether. Their excuse was: nobody had seen the memo so it didn't affect them. And do you really think that people who could build pyramids from millions of tons of stone couldn't build boats or umbrellas?

Sarai thought the beauty of her wizened old body might push the Pharaoh's lust buttons, but Abram thought she didn't need to worry, mainly because she had a face like a box of smashed crabs, her skin looked as if it had been used as an exercise mat for a team of Middle Eastern wrestlers, and nobody would be interested in the contents of her knickers unless they wanted something to scare off a family of marauding crocodiles.

However, worried about the future safety of his shrivelled old testicles if he mentioned all of this to her, Abram just told Sarai to pretend to be his sister. "That way if they molest you, at least they won't kill me first," he said, while secretly thinking, "and at least I won't have to tongue kiss your gummy old mouth in public."

Unfortunately the Egyptians also lived for hundreds of years and the Pharoah was a grey old bag of bones himself, so anything with a pulse was likely to give him a stiffy. Sarai fell for his shiny bald head and the promise of all the milk she could syphon from his royal ass, and pretty soon all you could hear from the palace was the sound of Pharoah and Sarai banging away at each other like a couple of leathery old saddle bags. But when God realised what was happening he was livid, mainly because he'd missed all the hot geriatric sex action and had forgotten to record it on his VCR.

Quicker than you can say "incontinence gets me all wet", God inflicted a terrible plague on Egypt, giving everyone boils and blisters so big that the only cure was to jump into the river to cool down. Many years later nobody could believe that the plague was actually as bad as they said it was, but maybe that was because they were all in denial.