BY SHENGAS MCGLUMPHIE

A man from Clonoe was yesterday recovering after having spent the day close to permanent suffocation, brought on by putting on a pair of stone-washed slim-fit jeans he bought in 1986. 

Standing in front of the mirror, 18-stone lorry mechanic Marty ‘Nimble’ Flanagan from Coole Road had insisted to girlfriend Shauna that ‘they fit as well as the day I bought them’, and spent the rest of the day becoming progressively more purple in the face as he refused to admit they were at least four sizes too small.

“Aye, if my face hadn’t been so purple it would have really red”, admitted Flanagan. “I didn’t want to back down after telling Shauna that I could still slip into a 32 waist trouser and to be honest it took me so long squeezing into the damn things that it would’ve taken another hour to get them off. It was like trying to squeeze a balloon into a box. Besides, once I was up on my feet I couldn’t really bend down”.

The problem was worsened by Flanagan going to Loughran’s Bar to show off his slender frame to friends, consuming six pints of Stella, and then finding himself unable to either unzip his flies or undo the button.

“Aye, poor Nimble”, said one of his friends, Sean Gallagher, also from Clonoe. “He looked like an enormous Ribena berry. Still, it’s his own fault. He’s acts like he’s at his fighting weight all the time, pretending he’s always at the health foods and salads and suchlike. Some chance. His idea of salad is a plate of cold chips, the clift”.

The fire service were duly called who had to use a pair of bolt cutters to remove the button from Flanagan’s trousers, which was under so much pressure that it shot off and demolished the entire row of optics behind the bar, followed by Flanagan breaking wind with such force that one of the firefighters was taken to Dungannon Hospital with a perforated eardrum.

Flanagan previously had a visit from the fire brigade in February of this year when he had to be removed from a ‘Frankie Says Relax’ t-shirt that he had purchased in 1984.