Born into a family of English sparrows, Riib was a cuckoo in the nest.

Geraldine, his mother, told me that even in the womb, Riib - or ‘Ribster’, as she always called him - was most unusual.

“Doctor!” she’d called out, as herds of them galloped by her birthing bed, “Doctor, come quick. I can hear it!” It took her saying this much more than once before one cut away from the pack long enough to placate a stethoscope over her babyripe belly. And then the doc stood there and he stood there... and whilst standing there, became still unto rigid. Finally, gesturing frantically at the passing medical types, he hissed, “Clock this, fellow professionals.” And so they had. Gathered round Geraldine, they took turns on the listening end of the stethoscope.

Eventually one of them found the wit to say, “My God! It’s... humming!”

After birth, Riib only got more tuneful - and scarier.

: Much as he hated arguments or any kind of unpleasantness, Ron Shirt thought things had gone too far when, returning from a weekend at Clacton, he found that his neighbour had trimmed the hedge dividing their mutual gardens into the shape of a human leg. Beside himself with rage, Ron seized his garden shears and trimmed his white poodle Leo into a coffee table. 'That'll fix things', thought Ron. But he was wrong - the next day his neighbour had his bushy waist-length hair trimmed and permed into a model of the Queen Elizabeth and went sailing. Everywhere he went, people shouted 'Hooray'.

Sometimes you just can't win.

: Pop singer Hugh Nique was pleased to find himself the centre of controversy at a recent bazaar. No sooner had he finished judging the Gracious Grandmother event when he expressed a desire to enter himself in the pie-eating competition. After polishing off fifty one pork and seven steak and kidneys he was violently and some say deliberately sick over several of the spectators. The next day, a photograph of Hugh disgorging appeared on the front page of the Daily Bugle. His single record, 'Macaroni Puke' which lasts for three and a half days, enters the chart this week at number two.

: After his second wife passed away, Percy Rawlinson seemed to spend more and more time with his alsation, Al. His friends told him 'Percy - you'll wind up looking like a dog, ha ha'. He was later arrested near a lamppost. At his trial, some months later, he surprised everyone by mistaking a policeman for a postman and tearing his trousers off with his bare teeth. In his defence, he told the court 'It's hard to tell the difference when they take their hats off'.