CELEBRITY GOSSIP, Smile for the CAMRA, Sunday (NNN) — The number of women binge-drinking real ale has doubled in the past year to almost one in three, says the Campaign for Real Ale.

Z-list celebrities are regularly photographed in the London Lite supping a “pint,” little finger extended, a different beer each drink, discussing the shades of flavour in each beer, the state of network engineering at the BBC, their favourite computer programming languages and the latest gossip about Wikipedia editors, until their breasts accidentally fall out of their dresses and they start a drunken catfight over their favourite Terry Pratchett novel, at which point they start an extended discussion with the nearest paparazzo about his precise lens and camera settings.

Most of those trying real ale in the past year said it was brewed locally, and also thrown up again locally, if not directly recycled into Foster’s.

Almost 12,000 women were convicted for drink driving in 2007, with 2009 figures expected to mostly be on bicycles. Road safety experts blamed the so-called “spodette culture,” of women being loud, drunken, brawling, uncouth and foul-mouthed, usually concerning what one said about the other’s Perl code.

The newfound popularity of ale-drinking has extended to the City banking industry. “When you’re working and socialising with these people,” said one female trader, “it’s easy to slip into their lifestyle. I went with the guys to strip clubs and bars, spraying bottles of Tokyo* 18% stout around to celebrate a big deal. Being blonde and female I took my fair share of stick, but sometimes it’s in your favour to be underestimated. Think I can’t tell how long the Bodgett’s Wyrd Brew has been in the barrel? Fuck off!”

The government has started a new series of advertisements against binge ale drinking, warning of the dangers of drunk texting, drunk Facebooking, drunk Wikipedia editing and drunkenly falling pregnant to that cuddly middle-aged Star Trek enthusiast who lives with his parents. And is pathetically devoted to you ever since. And is paid a fortune as a system administrator. So probably not completely awful on balance, then.

MINILUV, Oswiecim, Friday (NNN) — The Ministry of Health has applauded the Law Lords’ verdict in the assisted suicide case, suggesting it opens the way to fixing the NHS budget.

“Where there’s a living will, there’s a way!” said health secretary Andy Burnham. “Of course, the death of a patient is a tragedy every time. I cry real tears, smearing my eyeliner as you can see. But I cry more tears when I look at my budget. Sorry, the mike wasn’t on for that, was it?”

Hospitals will be rebranded as members of the Indignitas chain, in a PFI scheme run by EDS Capita Goatse in conjunction with IBM and Bayer AG. Entering an NHS hospital will, under law, be considered expression of a sincere and deeply-held death wish. “Anyone going into an NHS hospital has given up caring if they live, die or are slowly digested by MRSA anyway. This just lets us formalise the process.”

The Department for Work and Pensions has put into place a new rule that those unemployed for two years will have to enter into a Death Experience Scheme for six months.

Lord Peter Mandelson also praised the decision for “giving clarity to those cases where a loved one, who has lost all ability and awareness and is sadly incapable of going on, really does need to be sent to the knackers’ yard. The moves to allow life peers to relinquish their peerage and, say, re-enter Parliament via a safe seat, are entirely coincidental, though we may sadly have to employ them, say, next year. Purely hypothetically.”

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MRSA MEMORIAL, Staffordshire Hospital, Thursday (NNN) — There were an estimated 100,000 new cases of swine flu in Britain last week, the Health Protection Agency said today, after 55,000 new cases in the previous week. At this rate, every person in Britain will be infected by November.

Although considered a “mild” flu, with sufferers only experiencing a week of fever, puking and shitting, the new H1N1 variant is remarkably infectious, appearing able to spread across telephone lines and through lists of swine flu symptoms on Internet news sites.

“We have not as yet managed to link a lack of swine flu to poverty, deficient character and loose morals,” said Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, “but that is, after all, the cause of every other problem facing the NHS: patients.”

The World Health Organisation has proclaimed that swine flu will become “a new and vital part of the human genome.” To this end the National Flu Service has set up a website to make sure everyone gets their due ration of the disease. Built by a PFI consortium headed by EDS Capita Goatse, the site crashed within five minutes of launch this morning and should be up again within twelve months.

This morning, like every morning, Robert Neville woke to fight back the infected. The genetic recombinant H1N1 virus had infected almost everyone in the world. Of the survivors, almost all had permanently succumbed to the primary symptom: bacon. A genetic need for bacon. All the bacon you could want. Forever.

SHIPMAN BUILDING, University of Crippen, Monday (NNN) — The pain of childbirth is essential to proper bonding with the child and a “rite of passage” experience, said a male professor of midwifery today.

Dr Denis Walsh, who will never get sex again in his life, said pain helped regulate childbirth and prepared her for the responsibility of motherhood. In addition, epidurals were specifically condemned in Leviticus and would “lead to the souls of the damnable trollop and her odious whelp” being in danger of Hellfire for crimes against nature.

“It is essential for women to understand that they are failures as mothers and human beings if they do things that cost the NHS money that could be spent on management consultants or IT projects,” said Dr Walsh to a baying crowd. “Also, their BMI is high enough that we can blame anything we fuck up on that too, just to make them feel even worse.”

Several mothers, many carrying pitchforks, carried Dr Walsh off to put a barbed stick down his penis so that the pain would make him a better father. They also demonstrated to the crowd his suggestions for alternate birthing methods, in which they inserted a watermelon into his anus and pulled it back out again repeatedly with forceps, hypnosis and a birthing pool to hand to alleviate any discomfort he may have experienced.