Actually I'm not at all sure that 75-year-old Sir Norman Frank Sisson, the Australian former goldminer who was granted Malaysian permanent residency as he lay comatose on his deathbed last week in Ipoh, ever got to enjoy the joke. But I certainly hope so, because he sounds to have been a friendly, down-to-earth bloke who loved to see the funny side of things.

Sir Norman, who despite his elevated title was apparently content to be known simply as "Norm," was described to the press by one of his friends, a Datin Dorothy Khoo, as a good man who lived a simple life, wore shorts, drove an old car and "had this funny way of laughing that made others laugh as well."

So it seems a fair bet to me that he would have got quite a chuckle out of the fact that it took news of his two-month terminal coma to awaken the Immigration Department out of the eight-year coma it had fallen into while "considering" his application for permanent residency.