MISGUIDED COMPASSION hit a fever pitch yesterday as a 12-year-old British boy, let’s call him ‘Timmy Featherstone-Hughes’, attempted to admit his ailing hen, ‘Gertrude’, to a hospital in Addis Ababa. The audacious check-in, which would have made even the most hardened travel agent weep, saw Timmy march up to the reception desk with a cardboard box labelled ‘PATIENT: CLAUDETTE (FAKE NAME TO AVOID DETECTION)’. The receptionist, a woman who had undoubtedly seen worse things than a cat with a cough, stared into the beady eyes of a parrot-faced patient and asked for an ID.
Timmy, with the unshakeable confidence of a boy who firmly believes in the NHS, replied: “She’s a British citizen, her passport is in the post.” ETHIOPIAN HEALTH MINISTRY OFFICIALS, whose day job involves actual diseases, reportedly spent an hour trying to explain that their facilities were for humans, not feathered fiends. But Timmy, a lad who had clearly watched one too many episodes of ‘Animal Hospital’, remained resolute.
“She’s been sneezing,” he said, brandishing a list of symptoms that included ‘loss of appetite for mealworms’ and ‘a general look of malaise’. HEARTWARMING MUM, 38, wept as she told reporters: “He’s always been like this. He once tried to take a spider to A&E with a broken leg.
” Meanwhile, Gertrude, now the proud owner of a hospital wristband reading ‘Bed 4: Possible Avian Flu’, pecked at a forms and demanded extra pillows. Hospital staff, whose training never covered ‘accidental poultry admittance’, eventually discharged the bird with a prescription for ‘lots of sunlight, fresh air, and a worm-based diet’. Timmy, undeterred, has already bought a second plane ticket.
We wait with bated breath for his next diagnosis: perhaps a Corgi with a limp?
