Doctors told Paul N’Ohope that he was just “one phone call away from death” when he checked into the Norwich Royal Hospital last week. N’Ohope told doctors that he was “painting the ceiling”, and fell in an awkward position, leaving his iPhone perilously up his back passage.

“I always paint the ceiling naked,” explained N’Ohope. “It’s just one of our little traditions round our way. I fell at such a terrible angle that my iPhone went all the way up, and I couldn’t get it out. Naturally, I went straight to the hospital and while yes, the doctors found it very funny, their faces straightened pretty quickly when they realised that I may be one vibrating phone call from death.”

For several days, N’Ohope lived in gratitude that very few people ever called him on the iPhone, although said he was “quite excited” at a couple of text messages. “It was bizarre,” he explained, “but it made me realise that life is so precarious. One day you can be trying to insert your iPho… I mean, falling off a stepladder, the next you could be in hospital thinking a text might kill you.”

N’Ohope was given a chance of survival by a plucky iPhone app designer, IT technician “Guru” Nigel Pasdamis from Farnborough, near Ipswich. Pasdamis had been working on an app to make the iPhone find its way out of a maze, something that he himself admits would be “one of the most useless apps ever invented”.

“I was bored,” he said, “and I thought – hey, what if you could write an app that would make a vibrating iPhone find its way around a maze independently of human interaction. I was working on it for several weeks, and wasn’t really making much progress. Then I read Paul’s story in the local paper and realised I could be of assistance.”

Doctors managed to activate the app using revolutionary keyhole surgery, and prayed that the app would find its way out, and not work its way up N’Ohope’s rectum.

“We basically stood back and said a little prayer”, claimed Dr Tueurdejoie of the Norwich Royal Hospital. “Installing the app wasn’t a problem – it took a while to install, and for a second, we thought – hey, what if it’s not compatible? But within a few minutes, it was on its way out and Mr N’Ohope was able to leave hospital.”

N’Ohope claims that he has learned his lesson: “I owe my health to an app developer from Farnborough. That’s the last time I erm, paint the ceiling naked, I tell you.”

“The data is compelling,” said Greek economist Spiros Notalotahopealous. “We’ve got data for the last fifty years showing the number of bums pinched, the number of bums smacked, the number of police reports, and we’ve compared that with the economy. It clearly shows that the better we’re doing economically, the more bums get pinched on the beach! Right now, English girls’ bums are as safe as they have been for years, so I guess if you want the positives – it’s a great time to visit Greece!”

The data was compiled by a group of economic experts in Athens who went out onto the beaches themselves to study behaviour of randy Greek males. They found that when the economy was booming, Greeks were “spritely, amorous and somewhat lusty.” However, since the country’s debts were revealed they were found to be “not bothered at all in female bottoms.”

“It’s just the first of many indexes that we have found accurately reflect the true state of the economy,” said Notalotahopealous. “In Italy, for example, we measured the number of times a large-chested woman received beeps from a car horn while walking down the via Stronzo in Verona. By measuring this over a period of two years, we have found close correlations with the state of the Italian economy. We experimented with smaller-chested women and found that the worse the state of the economy, the more beeps smaller chested women received. Extraordinary. We can only conclude that Italian men, during a recession, downsize their chest preferences.”