Pacemaker    (1) Medical device implanted in a patient who has an irregular heartbeat.  (2) Member of the backing group of 1960's pop singer Gerry Marsden, who very probably all need one of (1) by now.

Page Turner    (1) Exciting book that it is difficult to put down.  (2) Homosexual King.

Palaeontology     The study of past life based on the study of fossils.

Pantaloonology    The study of past life based on the study of Frenchmen's' trousers. See Crabs.

Pan    Mythical God, half goat, half man.

Pan American    Mythical God, half goat, half grossly overweight man in flowered shirt and Bermuda shorts.

Pancho Villa    Feared Mexican bandit and revolutionary. Brother of Aston Villa, equally feared bandit from Birmingham who specialized in robbing anyone in a claret and blue football shirt.

Pan Fried    Expression beloved of restaurant menu writers, who seemingly have never stopped to ask themselves the question: 'If not a pan what else can something be fried in?'

Parapsychologist     A specialist member of the Flying Doctor Service, the parapsychologist parachutes down to Australians living in the outback to counsel them about any guilt feelings they may have about off-loading onto Great Britain the likes of Rolf Harris and Jason Donovan.

Participle    In grammar, a form of the verb. For example, the verb 'to drink' - present participle, they were drinking; past participle, they had drank; pissed participle, they were drunk.

Passover    An annual religious festival which celebrates the Jewish civil engineering firm of Cohen, Cohen and Cohen being awarded the contract for building motorway bridges.

Pearl Bailey    Brilliant American blues singer, not at her best after 1941.

Pearl Harbour    US Pacific naval base, Hawaii, scene of an air attack on 7 Dec 1941 by 74 Japanese aeroplanes. There should have been 75 but one of the pilots misunderstood his instructions and bombed Pearl Bailey instead, narrowly missing her, but putting the shits up her enough to affect her singing thereafter.

Pelvis    Basin-shaped cavity of the kidney. It was a nickname of the unsuccessful American rockabilly singer, Elvis the Basin-shaped Cavity Of The Kidney.

Perpetual Motion    Something that operates continuously, such as the door on Tony Soprano's fridge.

Personal Fitness Trainer    A man or woman who has perfected the art of extracting £50 an hour out of people with more money than sense, in return for listening to them bitching while they sweat their tits off doing physical exercise.

Personal Manager    A manager who calls a member of his staff a lazy good-for-nothing and a useless bastard, along with other personal remarks.

Personalised Number Plates    Car number plates which feature the owner's name or initials, e.g. TED 23 and 2246 HW. These plates can cost as little as a £100 to in excess of £50,000, depending on their rarity. Under a new system due to be introduced in the near future all personalised number plates will cost £1200 and the figures and letters configuration on all of them will be 1 AM A PRETENT10US PI110CK.

Perspiration    Moisture exuded from the skins of the aristocracy. Exactly the same moisture, but exuded from lesser mortals, is called Sweat. (The aristocracy have also on occasions been known to sweat, but only when they thought they might have to do some work.)

Peter     The name of three tsars of Russia. They were Peter I (The Great), Peter II (The Not Bad), and Peter III (The Bleeding Useless).

PG     Film Classification which informs children under fifteen that the film will be worth seeing for the sex and violence.

Phallusy     The belief, held by most men, that the size of their penis doesn't matter.