top of page
Search

Health Tourist leaves lousy TripAdvisor review


‘I’d come to have my appendix out and instead they made me visit Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach and gave me a ticket to a flint museum. I’m ill, but I’m not a masochistic.’ Following a day trip to Glasgow’s needle exchange and a weekend break at Pontins in Rhyl, the health tourist said: ‘I may not have been dying to begin with, but after caravanning in Tenby, I’m desperate for an all-inclusive fortnight at a local hospital.’


Meanwhile a legitimate holidaymaker complained that too many foreign patients were faking it: ‘There was this bald kid, with a Romanian accent, trying to jump the queue at Alton Towers – it wasn’t chemo it was alopecia.’


If you enjoyed this archive item, why not buy thousands of archive stories found in our eBooks, paperbacks and hardbacks?























Dad Forced to Watch Daughter Play Another Musical Cockney Orphan



This weekend, Jim Smith undertook the gruelling task of watching his youngest child perform in yet another sixth form musical that for some reason features spirited cockney urchins. She plays a spunky East End vagabond - again.


‘The second I see her bounding on stage, her ponytail pinned under a newsboy cap and her face streaked with brown eyeshadow, I know it’s going to be a long night,’ Jim says. ‘It wouldn’t bother me that much, but most of the musicals aren’t even set in Victorian London.’


Why an urchin? Jim’s daughter is, regrettably, a triple A: A cup, Alto and Androgenous. Predatory theatre directors already face the challenge of wrestling unenthusiastic sixteen-year-old boys into oversized suit jackets so they can mumble their way through the lead roles. With no boys to spare, the mantle of the juvenile rapscallion falls on female shoulders.


‘If I have to see that tattered brown jacket again I’ll scream,’ Smith’s wife says, wringing the photocopied playbill between her hands. ‘I swear every role she plays is the same: it’s all “spare a penny” this and “pick a pocket,” that. I actually feel relief when she dies at the end.’


bottom of page