THE relatives pocketing the pension of a Japanese man who had been dead in his bed for 30 years were last night asked exactly how they thought this was going to pan out.
Sogen Kato was thought to be the oldest man in Tokyo until local officials offered him a piece of cake to celebrate his 111th birthday and his nose fell off.
A Tokyo City council spokesman said: “The grand-daughter picked up the nose and tried to stick it back on saying, ‘oh, it does that all the time, doesn’t it grandad?’.
“We then noticed a couple of other clues. One, he’d been very quiet since we arrived, and two, he didn’t have any eyes.
“But it was only when we all shouted ‘Mr Kato, we have cake for you’ as loud as we could that we realised he was probably dead.”
Helen Archer, some opinionated cow from Hatfield, said: “At which birthday were they going to stop. The 135th? The 190th?
“Or perhaps he was to be passed down through the generations, each one pocketing the pension of the unbelievably old man with the detachable nose.
“You can really only do Weekend at Bernie’s with a brand new corpse. If you try and do it with a skeletal mummy that’s 30 years-old someone is eventually going to twig.”
And Bill McKay, some arse from York, said: “If you try and make out that your grandad is still going strong at 135 then somebody in the pension office is going to notice that and there’s a good chance they’re then going to phone the Guinness Book of Records.
“They are then going to turn up with a photographer and the expectation of a pulse. And even though old Norris McWhirter has long since passed, those boys are no chumps. They verify old people’s ages all the time and they’ve gotten very good at telling whether or not someone’s incredibly dead.”
He added: “They could at least have bunged him in the fridge or hired a ventriloquist.”
