A Dungannon fencer maintains he couldn’t resist licking and then eating a ball of yellow snow down an alleyway off the main street, but now regrets his actions after contracting a rare stomach bug called Urinas Meltas.

Barry Whitehair, 44, maintains that it looked too refreshing to resist and ‘a bit like frozen banana-flavoured ice cream’, even though logic told him it was unlikely to be that.

“Ach I feel like a bit of an idiot now, but I just love bananas. And seeing that ice-cool yellowy snow just made my mouth water. It was only after I’d finished the ball that I remembered all them wives in the street growing up telling us never to eat yellow now. I should have heeded them.”

This is not the first time Whitehair fell foul of not believing wives’ tales after he developed severe arthritis from cracking his knuckles too often and had to give up fencing.