Man walks in to a restaurant. Grabs a kitchen knife then jumps up on a table and unzips himself. What happens next was caught on film .. No, only kidding, no-one with a 5.0 Mega-pixel mobile was on hand to film him hacking off his three card trick though it really did happen. Last Sunday a Polish man executed a self-dismemberment in Zizzis, a bustling Italian restaurant on the Strand. I imagine he awoke the next morning a bit confused especially as he’s been detained under the Mental Health Act.

I’m sure history could reveal many such incidents. The Romans probably told hearty jokes of slave abuse and then there was Farinelli (1705 - 1782) the most notable of Italian Castrato soprano singers. Although it was eventually made illegal to mutilate poor 8 year-old boys for the church choirs, it didn’t stop 4,000 from being put to the knife every year in the name of operatic art. Castrati were as popular then as the Bee Gees were in the 80s with their falsetto wine. Farinelli went on to achieve his own X-Factor fame, even performing at Lincoln’s Inn Fields - a yelp away from where Zizzis currently stands (the pizza is great so the Neapolitan Farinelli would indeed have approved).

There was also Wayne Bobbit who was notoriously separated from his ‘lolly lick’ in 1993 when his Ecuadorian wife Lorena lopped it off with an 8-inch carving knife .. as he slept. Well Lorena, she drove off into the night tossing the said item out the car window and it took a police search party to locate it. Bobbit’s pipework was satisfactorily re-attached - unlike the poor Pole’s whose plumbing is now sadly decommisioned.