Now most people who want to collect something for a hobby collect something sensible and practical like stamps or coins or picture postcards or CDs — but not my pal Nury. He has to be different.

Whenever he sees an eye-catching headline in a newspaper or magazine, Nury writes it down in his notebook. He then adds it to what I term his ‘storehouse of useless information’ that he keeps on the hard drive of his computer. Sometimes I think that when he has nothing to do he sits in front of his computer screen and studies his Headlines File (like my Scrabble-mad nephew diligently spends his leisure hours studying the dictionary or my Toastmaster neighbour hopefully studies his Book of Jokes).

When we lived in Hong Kong we used to enjoy Nury’s visits to us because from time to time he would delve into his memory and recount one of these amusing items of information for our listening pleasure.

"Did you know" he asked me once "that in the American state of Illinois there is a town called Oblong and a town called Normal?"

"No" I admitted.

"That explains" he continued "why the local paper was able to run a story entitled Normal man weds Oblong woman".

"I suppose this sort of thing only happens in America" he went on "because in another state, in Minnesota, there are actually two towns called Climax and Fertile. So one day, when there was a particularly nasty car accident in the first of these towns, the local paper carried the unfortunate headline FERTILE WOMAN DIES IN CLIMAX."

There were times when I used to suspect that Nury was making these headlines up in his fertile imagination. But whenever I took the trouble to check the atlas or the internet, I would find that the places he mentioned actually did exist, along with towns in the US having names just as unusual such as Hell, Whiz Bang and Crazy Woman.

No wonder the country produces political leaders with names like Gore and Bush! If the first of these towns voted for Al Gore, American newspapers could have written ‘HELL FOR GORE’ while if little George won in the third town mentioned above the headline would have read ‘CRAZY WOMAN LIKES BUSH’. America is a land of opportunity, not least for headline writers.

On another occasion, Nury recalled an American newspaper which published a scoop reporting how the Vietnamese currency (known as the Dong) was going to be revalued following a recent rise in the value of the American dollar. On the front page of the Sunday edition the headlines crudely screamed: VIETNAMESE GET BIGGER DONGS.

Nury also explained to me about a previous Maldivian prime minister called Mohamed Didi, who succeeded in scoring a surprise victory in the Maldives’ general election. In those ancient days when reporters had to file their stories by telegraph and Morse code, the national paper ran its election story on the front page with a banner headline DIDI DID IT!

"Speaking of politicians of yesteryear" Nury chuckled, "there once was a fellow called K. C. Pant who was foreign minister of India. After his official visit to Sri Lanka, one of the local papers had a photo of him and his wife saying goodbye to his hosts at the airport.

"I believe the prize for the best headline of all time should go to this newspaper. Can you guess the caption they used for the photograph? PANTS OFF!"