SUICIDE BID FOILED BY SAFETY PIN AND GARGOYLE

A young man who attempted to take his own life is today recovering in the emergency gas inhalation ward of Froghill General.

David Williams, 29, who suffers from Tannenberg’s Irritable Thumb Syndrome (TITS), was discovered last Wednesday hanging by one trouser turnup from the eaves of St Mark’s church. Mr Williams was rescued by emergency services after a passer-by spotted him and dialled 999.

Said chief paramedic Michael Totteridge: “We arrived on the scene to find a man dangling from the church guttering about 70 feet about the ground. He was hanging upside down and was very red in the face. There was a powerful smell of gas coming from him and he was farting uncontrollably.

“Careful to avoid naked flame, we cut him down with the aid of an appliance from the local Fire Service and rushed him to Froghill General.”

In a statement given later to Froghill Constabulary, Mr Williams told of being driven to despair by the constant uncontrollable motion of his thumbs. Deciding to take his own life rather than continue to live with his affliction, he wrote a suicide note before turning on the gas at his bedsit home in Blackstock Road.

However, as subsequent tests were to prove, Mr Williams is town gas negative and failed to succumb. Instead, his repeated inhalation of the fumes caused him to inflate to fifteen times his usual size. Rising off the floor and floating around his room, Mr Williams eventually bumped against the sash window which, being infested with dry rot, crumbled upon impact.

Floating out of the building and away into the air, he spiralled on a thermal high above Froghill. And that might well have been the end of the story, had it not been for a passing hot air balloon.

According to Freddie Bellthorpe, chairman and founder of the Froghill Area Big Balloons Organisation (FABBO), Mr Williams was seriously out of control and well on his way into international air space when they met.

“I was on a routine flight and enjoying the breeze at a thousand feet or so,” said Mr Bellthorpe, “when suddenly I saw this hugely bloated human shape emerging from beneath my basket.

“His arms were flailing and his cheeks were blown out, so I gathered that he was in some kind of distress. Now as luck would have it, I’d put on an old pair of underpants that morning and had had to fasten the elastic with a large safety pin. Seeing that it might be called for, I rummaged down the front of my trousers and unfastened it, just in case.

“As he floated past me, I caught his eye. And if one man can read the message in another man’s eyes, then I knew what I had to do. So I quickly leaned out and stabbed him with the pin.

“Well, I must say, I’ve never seen anything go down so fast, not even my old chap after I got caught with the family hamster last Christmas.”

Mr Williams plummeted earthwards and might well have died had it not been for his trouser cuff snagging on the jaws of the Sanctimonious Gargoyle, which sits on the east side of St Mark’s.

Speaking to our reporter from his hospital bed, Mr Williams expressed regret for the trouble he had caused: “I never meant for all this to happen,” he said. “It’s just that I couldn’t stand all that bloody jerking any more.

“However, the counselling I’ve received while I’ve been in here has helped me enormously and I’ve decided to change the course of my life.

“If my TITS can’t be cured then at least I can try to use it constructively. I’ve decided that life can be worth living after all and I’m going to become a Cliff Richard tribute artist.

“I’ve already learned most of the words to Living Doll and I’m working on Congratulations as we speak.”