My attention, never exactly up to speed until I’ve had a
couple of intravenous morning coffees, was grabbed by this headline on the BBC website. It read:
"Major Parkinson’s Study Launched”
Which prompted visions of the old chap’s comfortable nicotine-tinged
den, complete with worn brown leather armchairs, open smoke-blackened
fireplace, walls covered with prints of past military glories and ancient
yellowing photographs of the young officer and his colleagues, being taken
apart, re-assembled inside a hermetically sealed capsule and being hurled into space, for the
edification of any non-terrestrial life-forms that might come across it.
“But why”, I thought. So I clicked on the link, only to find
that the story referred not to the inter-stellar journey of a hitherto unknown
and unsung army man’s habitat, but to a research project initiated by a Glasgow
doctor into the causes of and cure for
Parkinson’s disease.
Worthy indeed, but compared to how I’d read the headline,
how boring. What a let-down.
Don’t they have sub-editors any more?
