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COMPETITION

Dirty dozen

Jaspistos

IN COMPETITION NO. 1885 you were invited to incorporate a given dozen words or phrases, in any order, in a plausible piece of prose.

Like a fool I forgot to mention the maxi- mum word limit of 150 and must apologise to those who wildly exceeded it — they were not disqualified, but none of them was a near winner. I'm still not sure whether I know precisely what a flange is. Perhaps Watson Weeks felt the same — he had a neat get-out: 'Pomeroy spoke with messianic fervour, excoriating opponents as gutless or non compos mentis, but would then mystify his audience by referring to a Fascist organisation which he insisted on calling the Flange.' This was a difficult Dirty Dozen. Bill Greenwell, Peter Smalley, Peter Comaish, G. Marshall and Dominica Roberts all performed person- fully, but it's the five entries printed below that take £20 each, and Richard Dorman who gets his hands on the bonus bottle of Isle of Jura Single Malt Scotch whisky.

She looked at the open sewer running through the village, the dank hovel that was to be her home for a twelve-month, the extraordinary clobber that had been dumped on the mud floor, and for a moment she regretted her messianic urge to spread enlightenment in the dimmer regions of the tropics. Unnumbered scruffy chil- dren jockeyed for position to catch a glimpse of the apparition that had arrived in their midst. The broken zip added to her discomfiture. Was she really compos mends? Don't be gutless, she told herself. Willy-nilly she would cope. Her trea- sured bagatelle board would see her through, providing solace as she gathered material for her dissertation, 'The Flange — Benchmark of Civilisation', the modest opuscule that would make her name in the academic world she had

temporarily abandoned. (Richard Dorman)

Opening a tin of sardines was once a bagatelle: a very basic benchmark, surely, of culinary compe- tence. But now the key is gone, it represents a challenge comparable to prising up a manhole- cover to inspect a sewer. Rational people, previ- ously compos mends, have been driven hairless by an uncompromising tin of Rob Roy and forced, shamefacedly, to resort to up-market brands sporting a 'ring-pull' that works rather like a zip-fastener. Either a conventional can-opener must be jockeyed into position along the flange of the tin, and coaxed round the bends towards the final

straight; or you take a screwdriver to this sar- cophagus of the gutless, tomato-soused sild, and clobber it willy-nilly into submission.

One manufacturer usefully encloses an instruction leaflet: an opuscule which oddly favours the latter approach, ending with the mes- sianic injunction, 'Knock, and it shall be opened

unto you'. (Martin Woodhead) The flange round the ankles of the brogues, sir, may indeed be the benchmark of modernity, but...'

Sometimes Jeeves puts on a messianic air, and campaigns against some article of clobber. He had jockeyed for advantage once too often. I cut him off, willy-n4.

`Enough, Jeeves!' I barked. 'After last night at the Drones I may be somewhat lacking in zip, but I am fully compos mentis. I am not so gutless as to adopt apparel merely because it is modern.'

`Very good, sir. Do you still require my views on your letter to Mrs Travers?'

I had produced an opuscule for the old rela- tive, in order to ward off her match-making endeavours.

'Certainly. Tell me all. Is my bagatelle fit only for the sewer?'

'It might perhaps be improved, sir. Would you wish me to undertake it?'

`Ah! Well, Jeeves,' I said. 'About those brogues....' (Paul Griffin) The great playwright held up a tattered manuscript.

`What', he demanded, 'is this opuscule?' The actors, sensing excitement, jockeyed for a front- row view.

`Old Danish story,' said Burbage nervously. 'thought you might take it and zip it up. Modern clobber, naturally.' Hiding misgivings behind a show of almost messianic fervour, he outlined the plot.

'Heminge could play the main part,' said an actor, fanning the flames.

`Why not,' Shakespeare rasped, 'after his recent benchmark performance? The first sewer to have royal banqueters unhook him from a flange in the stage machinery.' He turned to Burbage. 'Let me understand correctly. You wish me, for the usual bagatelle payment, to con- coct a farrago of melodrama about ghosts, poi- soned swords and a gutless prince unable to kill his uncle.' Interest flickered, on his face. 'It is a moot point, of course,' he mur- mured, 'whether the unhappy young man is strictly compos mends.' (Chris Tingley) It is fitting that Magnus Crowe-Mannion, after a lifetime of messianic devotion to the cause of practical invention, should be remembered for designing the zip-fastened unisex underpants that came to be known as willy-nilly knickers.

From the formative moment when he first saw the word 'flange' in his Meccano instruction book, he was always committed to the odd and the small-scale: no bagatelle was too mere, no opuscule too minimal, to be beneath his eccen- tric curiosity. It was the curiosity, nevertheless, of one entirely compos mends, with a mind, as he himself said, like a sewer — 'deep, labyrinthine, and formed to reprocess what others consider waste'. Never timid, where others jockeyed for administrative positions his declared aim was to clobber his opponents, then 'eviscerate those not already gutless'. In doing so, he gave low-tech design a new benchmark — that sign, as he tartly observed, that someone had been sitting on his backside for too long. (W.J. Webster)

No. 1888: No ordinary man

'When Gerard Bassett was at Chewton Glen, I always felt it was worth the journey for him alone. He is, for those who don't know.... ' These words began Nigella Lawson's Restaurant column in our 3 June issue, but they might equally well have begun a novel or memoir of the John Buchan era. You are invited to treat them in this spirit as a springboard for up to 150 more words. Entr,ies to 'Competition No. 1888' by 29 June.