Roald Dahl books to be re-written to remove all gender references and mix up the tenses for good fun

In the latest bizarre news reported earlier today by well-known bastion of good humour and integrity, The Telegraph, the Roald Dahl Estate have declared that all future prints of works will remove all references to gender. The move, said by one source to be "poppycock", immediately angered everyone who believed it.

"It's an outrage. I've been reading Dahl books since I was a young un. And it never did me any harm. We need to leave things alone and stop meddling in 'woke' practices."

In a sample edit we undertook in order to understand the latest suggestion, we used the book James and the Giant Peach, and monkeyed around with it. You'll agree, I think, that it is actually improved in almost every conceivable way.

Until they were four years old, James Henrybo Trotski has lived with their parents in a beautiful house beside the sea. They have a wide, sandy beach to play on, and the waves are turquoise blue. They have lemonade to drink in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter, and delicious meals every day. They are very happy.

Then, one day, James's parents go to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing might have happened. Both of them could suddenly have getted eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinocerosian which has escaped from the London Zoo.

James is not with them at the time. They are at home, in the garden, and they are not eaten up because they are too quick for the rhinoceros. Also, they are too small and insignificant to be noticed, which always helps.

You read all that? Good grief. Hopefully you just skipped to the bottom. Anyway, the whole story is ridiculous and nonsense. Probably deflecting some latest ministerial scandal. Wonderful.