41-year-old middle manager Paul Henderson, trapped in a loveless marriage for the last eleven years, had been planning his ‘Great Escape’ for the last 18 months, and decided to use the traditional mid-January spike in suicides as camouflage for his ‘drowned-at-sea’ act, but was left gob-smacked when he found himself sitting down next to his own wife on a flight to Mexico where he was to become a goatherd.

‘It turns out she had just come from pushing the Volvo off Beachy Head to fake her own death, and well, long story short, blazing row, got chucked off the plane,’ explained an embarrassed Henderson. ‘I don’t think it would’ve worked anyway, with all the thousands of cars pushed off the South coast in the last 24 hours, and the coast guards being too busy clearing the Channel of empty canoes so that shipping could get through.’

Executives from Barclays Investment Bank were left similarly red-faced when they all turned up in the same Thai fishing village having separately filled their private jets with corpses and crashed them into the jungle.

‘I’d been covering up tens of millions of pounds worth of losses on my books for the last three years, and I knew it was going to come out,’ said would-be snorkel rental hut owner Philip Walker, a senior investor at the banking group, ‘but it turns out that was at the low end of the scale when I bumped into the guys. [Head of the FSA] Adair Turner had also faked his own death and rocked up to the same place. We were all booked at the same plastic surgeon too. It was very awkward.’

‘It’s really not fair that a few thoughtless ‘jumpers’ cause such disruption for so many,’ said a TfL spokesman. ‘From now on we’ll be asking the suicidal to travel to Amersham and wait in line for their turn. They’ll know it’s their moment in the headlights when they hear our special announcement – ‘Don’t mind the gap’.’

Details of the scheme were unveiled a day after ex-psychiatric patient John Morton, who had suffered depression since losing his wife and daughter in a road accident, was forced to apologise for causing almost 25 minutes of rush-hour travel chaos after his botched attempt to throw himself under a train. ‘Thankfully I glanced off the train and was thrown clear,’ he said. ‘If I’d ended up on the tracks the hold-ups could’ve been well over an hour.’

Despite the scheme intending to make it easier for people to kill themselves considerately, one early user was critical of TfL’s service. ‘They could have picked somewhere a bit more accessible,’ complained recent divorcee Norman Price. ‘There’s only one train to Amersham every three hours. After wasting the best part of two hours hanging around I thought ‘ah, what’s the use’ and I decided to end it all and go home.’

TfL is now rolling out a poster campaign at suicide hotspots, ‘Don’t be selfish, top yourself at Amersham’. They have also taken the opportunity to remind potential jumpers to put enough credit on their Oystercard to cover a single to Zone Six, or their next of kin will be invoiced before the body can be returned.

By Corrigan, steve_l and Des and Stan, with a hat-tip to Oxbridge

‘I’d lost my job, my wife and my house and I just wanted to end it all,’ said John Carter of Halifax. ‘But when the checkout girl told me I could only buy two packs of painkillers, it felt too much like hard work to go round the store again so I decided to put my life back together instead.’

Tesco staff preventing the sale of multiple packs of paracetamol are being presented with a sash saying ‘I saved a life today’.

‘One of our checkout staff picked up their third sash today after stopping a customer with 3 packs of paracetamol, two litres bottles of bleach, a bottle of vodka, a length of rope and some razor blades. It’s good to know we’re making a difference.’

Vertically Challenged Giant and Oxbridge (hat-tip to JonnyJP)

‘The programme featured disturbing scenes of family unity and gratuitous and offensive contentment,’ said one critic. ‘Where were the show’s usual staples of incest, murder, rape, AIDS and cot death? Some of the characters even smiled – it was horrible.’

Eastenders has long been considered one of the finest studies into human suffering, but the show’s writers were urged to abandon their normal ‘grey-sky thinking’.

But Ian Hart, now a widower, spoke out against the programme which led to his wife killing herself. ‘Eastenders had always been a huge comfort to Eileen. No matter how low she felt she’d always perk up after watching the untold misery that affected everyone in Walford.’

Director-General Mark Thompson has apologised to viewers and promised an immediate return to life-affirming plotlines of paedophilia and miscarriage.

‘All the villages around us are twinned,” said Graham Huntsdon of Stuffing Grotwick Parish Council. ‘After a while it starts to get to you when they talk about their trip to France to meet the mayor of the village they’re twinned with.’

‘We’ve got a lot to offer,’ claims Ben Stokesby, a Stuffing Grotwick caravan park owner. ‘Sure, the other villages can be a bit cruel sometimes. They act like there’s something about Stuffing Grotwick which stops us getting twinned, but we’ve just had a run of bad luck, that’s all.’

Vicar of Stuffing Grotwick the Rev Jim Peters said that the villagers were growing desperate: ‘If we don’t find a village soon, we’re going have to accept the offer to twin with Sleepy Hollow.’

Colleagues have described how they watched in horror as Derek Short, from Uttoxeter, Staffs, tried to access Suicidr, a controversial website that allows users to delete themselves from social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.

‘He’d been acting strange for a while,’ claimed line manager Harvey Powell, ‘not updating his status as frequently as he used to and such. Then he started talking about women and football, and how he was too busy playing five-a-side with his new girlfriend’s colleagues to go on his PC at home nowadays – in retrospect the signs have been there for a while now. I feel guilty that I didn’t pick up on it and post something on his wall.’

Another workmate, data-entry technician Sue Dormer, became concerned after Short started to become more extrovert at work. ‘He began to lose weight and act with confidence. Alarm bells started to ring after he told me he’d been playing some form of three-dimensional Scrabble with a real board outside of Facebook. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. I tweeted my concerns, but nobody took any notice.’ A distressed Dormer described Short’s belief that farms were real places where food is ‘grown’, instead of cute little sources of entertainment with virtual cows and stuff.

A specially trained negotiator was called in to defuse the situation by continually ‘poking’ Short, while a team of electronic counsellors repeatedly accessed his seldom-visited blog in an attempt to improve its hit rate. After a tense stand off, Short eventually relented and agreed to stop looking out of the window at what he termed ‘the real world’, and return to Mafia Wars, to cheers from colleagues.
Suicidr hit the headlines in 2008 after a spate of teenage ‘copycat’ deletions, which left MySpace with virtually no users in certain broadband hotspots, while the Scottish government has responded by posting a draft assisted suicide bill on its Facebook wall, which 60 MSPs have ‘liked’.

28 January 2010

The presenters will be housed in a purpose-built lookout for the week-long duration of the programme, which has been disguised as an overflowing lavatory so as not to disrupt the prisoners’ natural habitat. ‘We’ll have cameras trained on every potentially self-harming prisoner, with nightly updates on the day’s action. Digital viewers can even use their red button to lay bets on who will make it to the next night’s broadcast – it should be great family fun,’ explained Bill Oddie, who will also be reporting live from the shower block every night to witness the curious mating rituals that abound in the all-male penitentiary.

‘Our filming trials have unearthed some real characters, to whom who’ve we’ve already given little pet names. We’re sure that viewers are going to love following the adventures of Archie the Arsonist, Willie the Wife Beater and Roger the Repeat Offender as they are observed around the clock. And some of the footage should be priceless – if Dave the Dirty Protester is on form that week, Dennis Norden’s going to have a field-day.’

Mary Evans (hat tip to ajblacker)

14 January 2010

Had to go back for his briefcase

Police investigating the death from a heart attack of insurance broker Gerald Murray, yesterday found evidence that he was planning to throw himself under the very train he was rushing to catch.

‘6:59 am. So this is it,’ read Mr Murray’s note. ‘Looks like we’ve got a good morning for it. It’s been two years since my wife left and I’m stuck in a tedious job commuting on the 7:26 every bloody morning with the same bloody people who never say anything to each other. Well! The bastards will have something to talk about today when they watch me SHIT look at the time! I’ll miss the train!’

After the coroner’s verdict of death by natural causes, Network Rail officials solemnly scattered Mr Murray’s ashes onto the track ahead of the arrival of the 7:26.  ‘It’s what he would have wanted,’ said a spokesman at 7:51, apologising for the delay caused by the wrong kind of ash on the line.

Stan Laurel (one line sauce)