A Clontarf man who took a picture of himself every day for the last 86 years says he is flabbergasted to discover that he appears to be immortal.

Philip Traynor began his project in 1921 and has taken a snapshot of himself every morning since. It was only when a neighbour, who he showed the collection to, pointed out that he didn’t seem to have aged at all that he began to think something peculiar was going on.

Man stunned as he fails to age

“You just get used to seeing yourself in the mirror, don’t you?”, he told us at his bijou home last night. “I hadn’t thought too much about how I looked, just assumed I was getting older like everyone else but apparently not. I had old Jimmy Bracken over for a bottle of stout last Wednesday week and I happened to mention my little photography project. Mostly because the conversation had dried up and it was all a bit awkward. I figured it’d be better than talking about the weather.

I didn’t think he’d be interested in it at all but when I took it down from the upstairs bedroom he said to ‘Jaysus Philip, you haven’t aged a bit’ to which I said ‘Ahh, go on out of that’ but he said ‘No, really. Not a bit’. It was only when I looked at it again that I realised he was right. I look exactly the same now as I did back then. I remember my poor departed wife Bridie, she died in 1987 after 68 years of marriage, and she always used to say to me ‘Philip, you look just the same as the day we got married’. I always thought she was just being a good wife, I never realised it was true”.

Since making the discovery Mr Traynor has been undergoing rigorous medical tests in the Blackrock clinic. Bone density, calcium deposits and various other samples have been taken and according to Dr Conor MacLeod it seems quite likely that he is immortal. “I have consulted with my colleague, Dr Lander Sanchez, and he is convinced that Mr Traynor can live forever. Oh look, there he is now. Hi, Lander!”

The news brings much relief to the many people who undertake such vanity projects just so they can get to the front page of Digg. Most right-minded people simply dismissed them as trivial saying they did nothing but prove to us that as we get older we get fatter and our hair falls out, but the discovery of an immortal is set to spark a whole new wave of photography based schemes.

Already there are rumours of a Palo Alto man inventing a special instamatic camera to insert in his wife’s womb so they can take a daily picture to capture the progress of their child’s gestation, while celebrities are getting in on the act too with Johnny Depp proposing to photograph Matthew McConaughey’s anus as he goes through his annual bout of hemmoroids.