Stranger than fiction

How good are you at keeping up with the news? Like to take a little test? OK, here are five stories that have appeared in the newspapers in the last week or so. One of them, however, is totally made up. Are you sufficiently in touch to spot which one it is? OK, get your thinking hats on and let's go!

1. A woman in California has had plastic surgery on her face, not for reasons of beauty, but simply to stop her spectacles falling off.

"I had my nose done twice," says 35-year-old Rose Krueger. "First it was just to change the shape of my nose. Then I found that my old reading glasses were now sliding right to the tip and falling off. It was maddening! So I had my nose done again and now everything is fine. Well, my nose does look somewhat the way it was before, so to that extent it's not fine, but reading-wise it's fine."

When asked if it wouldn't have been better to have contact lenses instead, or even have her glasses redesigned, Mrs Krueger said: "Maybe, but I never thought of that."

2. A whole edition of a new paperback selection of Wordsworth's poems has had to be pulped, because of a single misprint. The poem entitled "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" came out as "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tin Tin Abbey".

"I don't want to point the finger of blame at any one individual," says the general editor Ralph Nettles, "but this was entirely due to one stupid assistant, Miss Daisy Dancer, who has now been fired, and I hope nobody else is foolish enough to employ her. Being one of our ill-educated modern youth, she thought 'Tintern' must be a mistake and corrected it off her own bat to a word she knew: 'Tin Tin'. We were very luck she didn't change Wordsworth's poem itself, and put in references to 'thundering typhoons' and 'the barnacles that blister'."

3. A new history of Hollywood reveals that the Wars of the Roses were not just a historical subject for old films. They were refought in modern times, by none other than Burt Lancaster.

"Apparently," says historian Kurt Schneider, "Burt Lancaster took his own name so seriously that he identified very emotionally with the Lancastrians in the long and bloody Wars of the Roses that you had in England. And this extended to a dislike for anyone who bore the name of York. Believe it or not, he campaigned long and hard behind the scenes to have Michael York dropped from some major films, and I believe the same went for Susannah York. I have also been told that he spread malicious rumours about Susan Hampshire, until he was informed that Hampshire was not involved in the Wars of the Roses."

4. The Aga Khan has failed in a legal attempt to get Aga cookers to change their name. "The family has always felt that to have a cooker called an Aga was an insult to the Aga Khan, the man who was a spiritual leader to so many Muslims," said his lawyer. "We therefore determined to force them to drop this blasphemous name."

However, they should have done it earlier, as under international trading agreements any objection to the use of a name has to be lodged within 20 years of its registration.

5. A Suffolk cyclist narrowly avoided being killed by his own water bottle.

"It was my own stupid fault," said Reg Pope later. "I was driving to where I was meeting some mates for a bike ride, so I had put my bicycle on the roof rack of my car. As it was such a hot day I had opened the sun roof to let some air in. What I had forgotten was that I had loaded up the panniers on my bike with all the stuff I'd need on the ride, and that was now right over my head. Well, the water bottle worked its way loose, fell out of the pannier, dropped through the sun roof and bashed me on the head! I must have been knocked out for a split second – the next thing I knew I opened my eyes and I was heading for a wall! I only just stopped in time."

Well? Did you spot that the one about the Aga Khan was a load of baloney? Well done! Of course, all the others were made up too. It's sad the way you can't believe anything you read these days, isn't it?