We’ve got to admit, we have a habit of coming down with the odd case of ‘man flu’. It doesn’t take much more than a sniffle for us to diagnose ourselves with a life-threatening case of bird flu - last week we even got SARS.

Thanks to the story of Debie Royston we now have a new symptom to fake - developing a French accent! (Note to my editor: I would never conceive of faking an illness, I just said that to make the story more interesting, honest).

After a genuinely serious bout of flu the mother-of-two suffered a series of seizures that would see her whole body lock and go into spasms.

Doctors couldn’t work out what was wrong with her, but as a result of one of the seizures Debie was left unable to speak.

Thanks to intensive speech therapy she gradually got her voice back, but noticed that something was different - her native brummie accent had been replaced by something altogether more exotic (no offence, Birmingham) - she now sounded French.

‘Everybody said I sounded French but I've never even been there,’ Debie told the Telegraph.

‘People speak to me and say: 'where are you from?' and when I say Birmingham, they look at me like I'm lying about it.

‘They say: 'no, you're French.'’

Months later Debie’s diagnosis of Foreign Language Syndrome was confirmed - this is when someone speaks in a different accent, or even language, after a brain injury, stroke or migraine. It affects just 60 people in the entire world.

[Image: mcfarlandmo]

Tags: Odd news