I have been intrigued for some time with how people become locked into social groupings. Research has been going on to identify exactly what happens in our brains when we are exposed to people of a higher or lower status than our own. Scientists have tested the brains of a variety of volunteers from all walks of life by wiring them into a computer. The subjects interacted in pairs to ensure scientific credibility.

The first thing that was discovered was the existence in everyone’s head of a small area in the hippocampus region. This was named by the researchers as the Celebrity Gland (CG). It reacts when we meet someone of a different status to our own. If he is of a higher status, our CG’s expand enormously and we become very pleased with ourselves. If we meet someone we perceive to be of lower status than ourselves, our CG’s shrink in size and we feel depressed.

One person’s CG expands while the other’s shrinks. The danger is that like a disease, the effects are extremely contagious; an ordinary person who merely rubs shoulders with a high status individual like a celebrity or a billionaire for instance, will become infected indefinitely. He becomes a carrier of Celebritis and is doomed to searching forever for people whose CG’s are either similar in size or larger than his own. It one is not yet infected it is worth avoiding people of higher status altogether. I won’t even risk meeting HRH in Waitrose’s at Poundbury now. It is hoped that there is an antidote; being shut in a room for 48 hours with only a ‘nobody’ to talk to.

I shall stick at all costs with who I am now at the expense of ‘social mobility’. As a further precaution, I have designed a CG ‘size warning indicator’ which is undergoing final testing at Westminster where I am informed Celebritis is rife.

Mike Joslin

Dorchester