Three hundred muggers to be released’. So proclaimed a newspaper headline with ponderous dignity and my faint heart did a triple somersault and nearly fetched up in my throat.

As it is, our streets are menaced by pick-pockets, conmen and eve-teasers and I had nightmarish visions of this dubious brigade being joined in strength by 300 muggers, all armed, no doubt, with blackjacks, knuckle-dusters, coshes and other tricks of the trade.

It was only when I brushed up my knowledge of natural history did I realise that ‘muggers’ are a rare and endangered species of gharial crocodile native to the Indo-Gangetic plains, whose survival is essential to maintaining the environmental balance.

The relief, needless to say, was stupendous. I would rather be bitten in the ankle by a mugger than be relieved of my meagre worldly possessions by its ‘homo sapien’ variant.

Newspaper headlines have a savvy way with words and they are a delight to those who collect tit-bits and oddities.

The 1970s saw the crime rate rise in Britain and as risque entertainment in London’s seedy East End was also on the rise this led to heated debates in the House of Commons on the threat to the country’s ‘irreproachable morals’.

The then British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, personally intervened in the debate to assure the agitated ‘Right Honourable Gentlemen’ that his government would take stern action against purveyors of porn and restore Britain to its pristine prudery. The bubbly tabloid Daily Mirror headlined the story— ‘Obscene plays, Prime Minister to act’.

When the Labour Government, led by Harold Wilson, assumed office in 1965, one of its first acts was to set up a Royal Commission headed by Michael Foot, MP, to review the entire gamut of Britain’s arms export policy. The staid Gaurdian headlined the story— ‘Foot heads Arms Body’.

A few years ago, an inmate of a lunatic asylum in the English midlands town of Wolverhampton escaped after molesting a night duty nurse. A provincial newspaper headlined this saucy story— ‘Nut screws and bolts’.

When the financially strapped Indian Railways recently floated a bond issue and it met with cold investor response, a local newspaper headline read— ‘Railway bonds de-railed’.

In 1975, the British national rugby team, the Lions, decided to go ahead with a controversial tour of South Africa in the face of strong Whitehall disapproval. A miffed Foreign Office instructed its diplomatic missions in South Africa not to officially entertain and wine and dine the maverick team.

The Daily Mirror again came up with the following headline— ‘Don’t feed the Lions!’

Tongue-in-cheek newspaper headlines add spice to our otherwise drab lives.