COMPETITION

Self-portrait

Jaspistos

IN Competition No. 1480 you were invited to provide a self-portrait in prose, accurate or plausible. A kind reader has added a postscript to my competition 'Worse than gnomes' of a few weeks ago by enclosing a cutting from Newsweek announcing that Detroit entre- preneurs Robert Lebow and Peter Gahan are offering 'a 30-inch garden implement which shoots water from the out-turned palms of a plywood Pope John Paul II ($55). The marketing slogan is "Let Us Spray": To go less far back, an equally kind reader from Long Island answered my appeal for the words of the misquoted lyric Which was the basis of last week's competi- tion. He recalls that he often sang them in his distant youth round the drawing-room Piano after a selection of Hymns Ancient and Modern. The first four lines go:

Don't tell My mother I'm living in sin, Don't let the old folks know. Don't tell my twin that I breakfast on gin — He'd never survive the blow.

As for the self-portraits, there were fewer female competitors than usual, more self-

dislike than self-satisfaction and a tendency to concentrate on physical rather than other characteristics (Gerard Benson wrote his no doubt accurately worded entry gazing into a mirror). I cherish the glimpse of himself provided by John O'Byrne: 'The hunched figure seated at the typewriter, fingers reddened by the blood of squashed moths, is approximately 26 . . subtly jowled' and I feel free indiscreetly to reveal that when Basil Ransome-Davies eats a fried egg, he be- gins by piercing the yolk with a torn-off portion of bread. Other secrets I shall take to my grave. The winners, liars or truth- tellers, but all worthy of a Thackeray or Lear illustration, earn £12 each. The bonus bottle of 904 Gran Riserva from La Rioja Alta, the gift of Mr David Balls of Wines from Spain, belongs to Martha Ann Hodg- son, who I like to think isn't fooling. I've been living with myself for some time now and still don't understand why I tell everyone I'm a year older than I am — 83 next birthday. Odd, isn't it?

I once had fiery red hair (and still have, particularly after the monthly session with Jane, the hairdresser, who's just died of a stroke). I'm the same weight now as when I left Roedean in 1924 and I've held it steady through two marriages, childbirth, a nervous breakdown, a mayoralty, a religious conversion, the WRNS, politics, archaeology, conchology and cancer. When I'm unhappy my rather small blue eyes sink into my head, the left deeper than the right.

I love to laugh, am a smashing cook and used to enjoy making love; but I'm off, sex now. Everyone makes such a fuss about it and you have to be a gymnast these days. Favourite things; Don Giovanni, the sea.

(Martha Ann Hodgson) He is of about average height, weight and girth; Northern in complexion; and anonymous in his general appearance, a quality which he empha- sises by habitually wearing a grey flannel suit, though he is a little inclined to worry that the adoption of such an obvious cliché may itself constitute a demonstrative gesture.

Excessive exposure to mathematics in youth bred in him a mildly compulsive trait of order and symmetry, and he clearly finds it impossible to set down a glass in any position other than the precise centre of the beer-mat. Neurotically law-abiding, he will frequently return to a parked car to ensure that it is equidistant from, and parallel to, the white lines provided by authority.

He is, in truth, not much given to self- revelation; and his only deeply held conviction is one of distrust for all deeply held convictions.

(Noel Petty) I am five foot nine, having just grown half an inch at the age of 32. I would like to be six foot by the time I'm 40.

I have an unusual body. A kid called me 'bionic' when I climbed somebody's scaffolding, a French naturist said! made 'a fine spectacle' in the sea, and a Greek producer told me I had balls. Apart from this, I know I am peculiar because my breasts are the same size as each other. Women's magazines declare this is not normal.

I am very pale because I hate lying in the sun. When forced to go abroad I take refuge in catacombs or sibyls' grottoes.

I have large malevolent green eyes.

My hidden talents are many — I can sit on the sofa with both feet on my head, carry 70 pounds of plaster up the stairs and sing four octaves.

(Fiona Pitt-Kethley) At 60 nothing of beauty and a mere handful of teeth survive, but pedestrians and motorists stop in astonishment or perhaps awe as the still upright but weak-legged figure in simple dress that shows undying allegiance to the Franciscan and Gandhian ideals of his youth wambles with a stick to the nearest post-box. The ascetic blue eyes seem perpetually to be searching out a heavenly nirvana beyond the desert of Western materialism all around, but the focus will abruptly change as the survivor from a simpler age darts forward to seize a young dandelion, nettle or chickweed spray to be borne to his cell for consumption in a salad or stew.

(George Moor)

At 36! am trying to accustom myself to being, by strictly biblical standards, over the hill. My prematurely grey locks, testament to a decade of Spectator competitions, serve as a useful aide- memoire. For most of my adult life I have worn a beard; shaving it off a year ago I was astonished to find my father lurking underneath. I am of average height: I refer, alas, to the average Bushman. I sometimes console myself with the undoubted personal magnetism of people of restricted growth such as Napoleon and Dudley Moore; lacking either a white horse or a good agent, however, I generally fail to magnetise. The gap between my teeth, held by some to be lucky, gives me a more than passing resembl- ance to the late Freddie Frinton I have long

since ceased to blame my parents for their unique genetic legacy, but occasionally I fear for my children.

(Peter Norman) Nurtured not quite a century ago in the grey mists of Scotland, I have myself acquired a benign greyness. In my grey car, on grey weekdays, I drive slowly with a grey expression.

Just occasionally, someone mistakes the pati- na on the surface of my existence for genuine silver. Friends, at such moments, say I am flushed with success; I am merely blushing.

Those grey hairs I once plucked out with vain and feverish concern, I now protect. I am old enough to be able to recite vast tracts of Gray's 'Elegy', belonging as I do to an era when schools did poetry instead of sponsored break-ins.

A cautious man, I avoid those areas where impetuous youth likes to congregate, its video- powered imagination seeing in grey locks the signs of easy lucre.

(Frank McDonald)