COMPETITION

Rus and urbs

Jaspistos

cOVAS REGA

12 YEAR ROLD SCOTCH WHISKY

In Competition No. 1642 you were asked for a letter to a friend, in prose or verse, from someone in the country in August who wishes he or she were back in town.

'I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave,' wrote Sydney Smith to a Miss Harcourt. And, in the realm of verse, Browning's 'Up at a Villa — Down in the City' says it all.

Poets did better than prose-writers this week, Sarah Burton providing the most memorable opening stanza:

Oh, to be in London now that summer's there, With the streets knee-deep in tramps asleep In last year's underwear!

Many of you won my plaudits, but the money (L15 apiece) belongs to the prizewinners printed below, and the bonus bottle of Chivas Regal 12-year-old de luxe blended whisky goes to John E. Cunning- ham for a charming letter in hexameters, as from Horace.

You are well? I am well, it is well. Lovely the weather in Tivoli, Gardens quite charming as usual, but somehow I find I am missing All sorts of things in the City — only the slaves speak demotic To remind me of Athens — and soon now the tourists will come here like locusts To join the weekenders already installed in their big, flashy villas.

Funny how soon this rusticity, though it's an in-thing to praise it, Palls and you long for the row of a dole queue all sweaty and swearing; Long for the Circuses even, now that Augustus has put all Womenfolk where they belong, which is right at the back of the circle; Long for the evening light touching golden the Capitol's dust-cap;

Long for a bit of good talk -- not tedious, repetitive burble,

Fig-crops and dates and the bees and the god-awful vintages round here.

As for philosophy, Heavens! the best of provincial wisdom Is that we've all got to die, so we might as well snatch every minute --

To talk yet some more of the figs and the dates and the vines and the beehives. . .

Give me some gossip, the baths, oil, sleek young boys and the strigils! (John E.Cunningham) My dear and greatly envied Ka,

Oh would I were where you now are —

In many-shaded Russell Square, For here there's only heat and glare.

A fetid river crawls and stinks; And anyone who, swimming, drinks A drop of it will, by and by, In hideous convulsions die.

No more do friendly breezes stir The leaves of listless Grantchester.

The pools are dry where finches plashed — All Nature lies inert, abashed.

Whie you, dear Ka, stay trim and cool, I curse and sweat. Oh what a fool I was to flee the joys of town!

Your loving Rupert (Country Clown).

(Martin Fagg) Dear Town Mouse, God, this place is hell: The loos don't work; the drains all smell; Farmyard machines grind on all night; The field in front's a camping site; Car after car adds to the strain Of strolling down a country lane; Kids in Bermuda shorts bike-ride Like zanies through the countryside; Armies of ramblers going Green Have occupied the rural scene;

Arrests are made and battles fought Over some harmless country sport; Even the village church can't keep Things as they were and let us sleep. Please, can your lovely London house Take in a tired-out Country Mouse?

(Robert Roberts) 'You're overworked', said Doc. 'You need a break.

Surely you're owed some leave that you could take?'

I was; I did; I hoped for sylvan fun, For pastoral joys beneath a cloudless sun.

Well, here I am; and how my hopes have dwindled!

I'll sue the Tourist Office. I've been swindled. It's just like home, but worse: a 'rural' hell Whose urban substance I know all too well.

Where once the farmer toiled, the shopping mall Tentacularly spreads, corrupting all,

Its video stores crammed with such modish japes As Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tapes.

Nor are there rednecks to augment one's cheer: Just umpteen poofy clones of Richard Gere. Oh for the city, where at least I knew

How much my habitat would make me spew!

(R. J. Stove) My Dear Watson, This is just to say that, as I do not foresee the trifling matter of Lady Enniskillen's emeralds detaining me much beyond the weekend, I hope to be home by Wednesday evening at the latest. The relief will be inex- pressible. The sheer all-pervasive corruption of country life is casting a positively Stygian pall over your friend's never altogether reliable spirits. The 7 per cent solution is, I fear, in frequent requisition. It is not just the malignan- cy engendered by centuries of inbreeding that one meets glinting out of every rustic eye.Nor is it the appalling purity of the air. No — it is the way that in the country everything seems to be simultaneously rotting, rutting, procreating, pul- lulating. The sense of flux is intolerable — it minds one all too often of one's mortality. 0 for the bricky salubrity of Baker Street, the eupep- tic ebullience of the Edgware Road! 0, above all, for the fumes of a true, inimitable sulphur.