Gilliver's Travels
Peripatetic
Stop Press - New case confirmed (see para 5)
Spin doctors advising Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott today admitted he’s been suffering for eighteen months from an extremely rare brain disorder. This compounds the dyslexia which for years has been at the root of his legendary difficulties with expressing himself.
Termed Falmaphobia, the newly diagnosed condition makes him clinically incapable of ever concluding the planning application for Brighton and Hove Albion’s new stadium. His wife Pauline explained. “It’s awful. John has been wanting to pronounce on this application for many months now, but whenever the papers arrive on his desk, his jaw locks up and he’s unable even to open his mouth. Even writing the word “yes” is completely beyond him. Whenever it happens, we just have to lay him down in a special, smoke-filled room and wait for the affliction to go away. It usually takes around ten weeks before he can bear to think about it again - and then, well, the cycle just repeats itself.
“John often wakes up in the middle of the night, crying, ‘Pauline, it’s terrible! If I say yes, well okay, that may well please around half a million Sussex folk. But where’s the sense in that, eh? Saying the Y-word will seriously hack off - at a guess - as many as seventeen extremely posh people! Most of them are friends of Tony. And these toffs all know each other, y’know. So yours truly’s chances of joining the Humberside Shootin’ and Fishin’ fraternity would be absolutely bloody ruined. And you, pet, I know you’ve set your heart on being Lady Goole… I just can’t let you down now!’”
Falmaphobia is a condition that affects many men in late middle age. Another sufferer is Charles Hoile, a hardly-known, provincial solicitor. Already beyond treatment, his Falmaphobia has for months forced him to refute any and all known facts about Falmer. Some time ago he exhibited classic symptoms of the sadly terminal stage three. This means that he now claims, to anyone that will listen, that he is ‘seeing sites’ – unfortunately ones completely invisible to everyone else.
And the first case of a woman with Falmaphobia has been disclosed. Times reporter Laura Peek was found recently 'to have been 'seeing trees' all around the proposed stadium site - despite its being just a bare, muddy field. And classic stage two Falmaphobia was diagnosed after she produced an imaginary 'map' where the Solent now miraculously stretched between Chichester and Eastbourne. Times proprietor Rupert Murdoch commented: "Ripper! Any more of this kind of investigative stuff, you little beauty, and I'll soon have you editing The Sun!"
The Falmaphobia Appeal Rural Trust (FART) is holding a continuous incandescent vigil at the Labour Party conference in September. Don’t miss it.
Spin doctors advising Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott today admitted he’s been suffering for eighteen months from an extremely rare brain disorder. This compounds the dyslexia which for years has been at the root of his legendary difficulties with expressing himself.
Termed Falmaphobia, the newly diagnosed condition makes him clinically incapable of ever concluding the planning application for Brighton and Hove Albion’s new stadium. His wife Pauline explained. “It’s awful. John has been wanting to pronounce on this application for many months now, but whenever the papers arrive on his desk, his jaw locks up and he’s unable even to open his mouth. Even writing the word “yes” is completely beyond him. Whenever it happens, we just have to lay him down in a special, smoke-filled room and wait for the affliction to go away. It usually takes around ten weeks before he can bear to think about it again - and then, well, the cycle just repeats itself.
“John often wakes up in the middle of the night, crying, ‘Pauline, it’s terrible! If I say yes, well okay, that may well please around half a million Sussex folk. But where’s the sense in that, eh? Saying the Y-word will seriously hack off - at a guess - as many as seventeen extremely posh people! Most of them are friends of Tony. And these toffs all know each other, y’know. So yours truly’s chances of joining the Humberside Shootin’ and Fishin’ fraternity would be absolutely bloody ruined. And you, pet, I know you’ve set your heart on being Lady Goole… I just can’t let you down now!’”
Falmaphobia is a condition that affects many men in late middle age. Another sufferer is Charles Hoile, a hardly-known, provincial solicitor. Already beyond treatment, his Falmaphobia has for months forced him to refute any and all known facts about Falmer. Some time ago he exhibited classic symptoms of the sadly terminal stage three. This means that he now claims, to anyone that will listen, that he is ‘seeing sites’ – unfortunately ones completely invisible to everyone else.
And the first case of a woman with Falmaphobia has been disclosed. Times reporter Laura Peek was found recently 'to have been 'seeing trees' all around the proposed stadium site - despite its being just a bare, muddy field. And classic stage two Falmaphobia was diagnosed after she produced an imaginary 'map' where the Solent now miraculously stretched between Chichester and Eastbourne. Times proprietor Rupert Murdoch commented: "Ripper! Any more of this kind of investigative stuff, you little beauty, and I'll soon have you editing The Sun!"
The Falmaphobia Appeal Rural Trust (FART) is holding a continuous incandescent vigil at the Labour Party conference in September. Don’t miss it.
