COMPETITION

Dirty dozen

Jaspistos

IN COMPETITION NO. 1788 you were invited to incorporate 12 given words, in any order, into a plausible and entertaining piece of prose.

My apologies to those few of you who, because I omitted to mention the usual maximum length of 150 words, imagined you had a mandate to submit a novella. Competition was hot. I particularly en- joyed Nicholas Hodgson's ghastly rest- aurant ('When I order frogs' legs I do not expect half a tadpole') and D. A. Prince's scene from clerical life ('Any moment the tabloid press will have "hey-presto pries- tettes"! Does the Archbishop really decide the Church's future on the flip of a coin?'). Helen Keogh achieved an interesting sur- real effect by using some of the words in a highly personal way: "I heard she had dystopia," a Wykehamist ventured, break- ing the silence of the hatless, sombre crew sitting in the foyer of the moratorium . . The prizewinners, printed below, get £20 apiece, and the bonus bottle of Drum- mond's Pure Malt Scotch whisky goes to Ben Glover for making me laugh aloud.

Elderly male, Wykehamist, seeks nubile lady to share shambolic suburban dystopia situated biliously near to Croydon. Features four-poster, low-level loo and indoor lawn (flip living-room carpet and hey-presto!). Also furnished with dog, Jolly (misnomer), and tadpole (nameless). More pets welcome, but moratorium on cats. Jolly will not kowtow. Terms negotiable. This is not a hoax. (Ben Glover) Washing her hands one day, a Princess found a tadpole in her palm. She was about to flip it into the loo when it cried, 'No! Kiss me, and I will surprise you.'

Somewhat biliously, she did. The tadpole turned into a frog. 'Hey-presto!' it said, and performed a little kowtow.

'All tadpoles do that,' she said.

'Another kiss, though, and I become a hand- some Wykehamist.'

She obliged, and a suave man appeared wearing impeccable Glenurquhart checks. But his breast pocket held no handkerchief. 'How utterly shambolic!' she said. 'You are no Wyke- hamist: this is a hoax.'

`A slight misnomer. Wycombist, actually: High Wycombe Comprehensive. And if you kiss me again . .

'I'm calling a moratorium on kissing; I feel used,' she said, leaving. She never returned, and the Wycombist, inconsolable, knew that he would never now turn into Elvis Presley.

Moral: Utopia and Dystopia are neighbouring countries. (Noel Petty) Algernon 'Tadpole' Phelps, the Wykehamist, stirred biliously in his seat and glared at the dystopia that was (and indeed still is) Basildon.

`It is not,' he observed, 'the requirement to kowtow to the shambolic traffic regulations, nor indeed the flip idiocies of the local youths, nor that its continued appellation of "New Town" is either an accidental misnomer or a shameful hoax. What pains me is that, a moratorium on ugly buildings having at last been declared, hey-presto, the shopping plazas are replete with the computerised, coin-operated loo.'

(Paul Raynes) `You will find me by the Town Hall loo,' the note had concluded, 'carrying a tadpole in a blue-painted jam-jar.'

A hoax, no doubt, of the kind MPs receive periodically, but a Wykehamist leaves no avenue unexplored. I had almost given up, when, hey-presto, there before me was an unkempt individual wearing shambolic plus-fours and a biliously yellow pullover. To call him merely weird would have been a misnomer; he looked like a fugitive from some surreal dystopia. He pointed complacently at the tadpole. 'From Mr Gummer's pond,' he cackled.

`You wrote,' I said, 'of a secret moratorium on shadow ministers' wine-bar debts.'

'I had to say something. Security.' He knelt down and, to my horror, performed an elabo- rate kowtow on the pavement. Then, glancing furtively round, he proceeded to flip fifty pence into my hand. 'Trouser that, guvnor,' he whis- pered hoarsely. 'And fingers crossed for the next election.'

(Chris Tingley) Never one to kowtow to convention, Blenkinsop always referred to himself as a Wykehamist: an outrageous misnomer, since he had been expel- led in his first term for a tasteless hoax involving the headmaster's wife and a tadpole. Educated

thereafter in the University of Life, he launched various money-making schemes with a hey- presto panache that gave no hint of their eventual shambolic demise. The All-England Z.,00 Championships were quickly followed by his eqnally doomed Gastronomic Weekends in Scunthorpe, after which the biliously eloquent letters of complaint were matched only by his dismissively flip replies. Nemesis came in the form of heavies employed by a debt-collection agency, though an over-generous moratorium enabled him to escape unscathed to Northern Cyprus with his rather louche mistress and a foul-mouthed parrot. From this safe haven, he complained at length of his native land as a dystopia inimical to entrepreneurial talent.

(Watson Weeks)