TRIBUTES are being paid to Scotland this morning after the entire country laughed itself to death.
The alarm was first raised at around 10pm last night as thousands of phone calls and text messages went unanswered.
Small groups of volunteers from Berwick-Upon-Tweed and Carlisle ventured north just after midnight only to find houses full of dead people gathered around still blaring television sets.
By dawn, as RAF helicopters flew over deserted city streets, it was clear that the whole country had suffered a catastrophic abdominal rupture.
Wayne Hayes, a special constable from Northumberland, said: “We went into one house in Dunbar and found three men sitting on the sofa with huge smiles on their faces, still holding cans of 70 shilling. They seemed to be at peace.”
He added: "In a house near Edinburgh we found a man face down on the living room floor with his trousers and pants round his knees.
“It seems he may have been showing his bare buttocks to the television when he keeled over.”
Roy Hobbs, a civil engineer from Northampton, said: "I got a call from my friend Ian in Stirling at about 9.50pm.
“He was already laughing when I answered the phone, but after about 25 minutes of the most vigorous and uncontrollable hilarity, everything suddenly went very quiet.”
Moving tributes are already being placed along the Scotland-England border with many mourners opting to leave a simple bag of chips or a deep fried bunch of flowers.
It was as grim a night as could ever have been conceived of by Prince Grim and his grim princess in Castle Grim in Grimsville, Grimland. I have two redundant St George’s car-flags that will now have to be mothballed until the next Ashes series (during which I’ll probably have to mothball them again by the end of the first Test anyway). Never mind. At least we can take some positives from the defeat. Huh? Yeah? NO??
Hey, don’t forget that the old Yugoslavia had a good football tradition. Croatia are no donkeys. They did come top of the group! Anyway, stick to chopping down trees!
Now then, Amar, it’s obvious that we failed to qualify on purpose. After all, what self-respecting team would want to risk having to play in the Wanked-off Stadium - oops, I mean the Wankdorf Stadium…
