COMPETITION
Fourth Leader
Jaspistos
In Competition No. 1438 you were asked to imitate a Times Fourth Leader on one of three subjects: the return of the mini-skirt, the scoring of two consecutive Test ducks by Botham, and the decline of the apos- trophe.
Last Saturday's Fourth Leader let me down by being laboriously unfunny about a recent Chinese decree abolishing guaran- teed employment, while bang next to it was a letter to the Editor on a much more suitable topic: on which side does one butter a Bath Oliver? That should run and run. The right tone and style (fathered surely by my first literary aversion, Charles Lamb) proved hard for you to capture and sustain. Both your jocosity and your ped- antry often went too far — a juggler's face shouldn't betray strain or merriment.
But there were plenty of good things, such as John Stanley on the mini-skirt: 'This opinion has not been reached lightly or in any unscientific manner. It is based firmly on a poll taken from a significant cross-section of the female population — all those within earshot,' And on the apostrophe I especially liked 'No Scotsman would put one in St Andrews or any Welshman omit it from St David's, though neither could explain why' (Patrick J. Fairs); 'It is difficult to be possessive about something that has little of its own to possess' (John O'Byrne); and 'That it will go the way of the quill pen, the bustle, the Churching of Women and the dodo is, in the succinct locution of the turf, a "racing `Oh God! Not mess of potage again.' certainty" (Gerard Benson).
The five winners presented below get £10 each, and the bonus bottle of Pol Roger White Foil Champagne, presented by Colin Dix, Wolseys Wine Bar, 52 Wells St, London W1 , will be drunk by Noel Petty.
English cricket suffered another misfortune yesterday when Mr Botham registered his second successive failure to score. As Lady Bracknell might have remarked, losing one's wicket without scoring may be regarded as a misfortune, but doing so twice looks like carelessness. Carelessness was indeed much in evidence yesterday. Yet there is something engaging about it. If Mr Boycott was our Achilles, Mr Botham is our Hector. The now traditional English batting collapse would lose all its piquancy without the prospect of the mighty dells ex tabernacula striding forth to death or glory. However acute the crisis, he is always ready to die on the wire. As George II remarked of Wolfe, 'Mad, is he? Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals.'
(Noel Petty) In one of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories a single pair of inverted commas is scissored from a writer's manuscript, thus chang- ing a fictional dialogue to the semblance of a suicide note. We cannot pretend that the fate of the apostrophe is a matter of life and death; nevertheless, the minute expenditure of ink involved has a usefulness out of all proportion to the space occupied.
Devotees of semiotics may argue that arbit- rary placing of apostrophes erodes the distinc- tion between the possessive and the plural and represents a gratifying accommodation between the hitherto irreconcilable property-owning and collectivist schools among humanity. But when yesterday's mark of possession is today inserted as an otiose wedge between a singular and the one-character suffix which multiplies it, decline of function becomes travesty of meaning. In homely terms, the word has acquired what Father Brown would call 'the wrong shape'.
(Charles Mosley) We do not suggest that the eye of the mature car-owner could ever be diverted from the subtleties of the pelican crossing or falter in its attention to the vagaries of lady drivers' gyra- tions on a roundabout. There is, however, a danger that the soaring hem-line could create among the more susceptible of our young Jehus a genuine traffic hazard. An appraising glance at a comely knee may be allowable at a road Junction, but the time necessary to appreciate a whole expanse of golden thigh could prove fatal during a move from the slow to the fast lane.
Let the arbiters of fashion consider that the blood that ran hot at such sights in the Sixties coursed in the veins of Morris Minor drivers; now, more dangerously, it pulsates through hands whose grasp on the wheel alone restrains the surging power of the Ford Sierra.
(Alice Renton) The return of the mini-skirt is being explored in depth: especially expansive are the columnists in the ladies' pages. We could perhaps better address ourselves on the matter to that section of our readership whose breakfast-time perusal begins at about page 17 and for whom the level of Dow Jones is of more concern than that of hem-lines currently favoured by daughters and secretaries. Brief skirts, however, can have serious implications. They could occasion lower outputs (and dividends) from already hard- pressed textile firms; and the recent article in The Forceps, showing a positive correlation between the incidence of acrocyanosis and thigh exposure, might suggest a timely investment in the equity of a retail chemist chain. Indeed those seeking a haven for savings or winnings would do well to recall the adage of a pragmatic economist: 'When hem-lines fall, stock markets rise.' Presumably the reverse also is true.
(Ralph Sadler) The news that hem-lines are moving upwards, not merely an inch or two, but to an extent destined to reveal an area of the female anatomy that was terra incognita to the Victorians, will not be greeted with universal approbation. Accustomed though we have become to Eve's uninhibited revelations of what James Laver dubbed her 'shifting erogenous zones', there are still Adams conservative enough to prefer some- thing more than the ultimate fig-leaf as a challenge to their imagination. Moreover, it must be admitted that not all feminine limbs are of a size and shape to justify exposure. One cannot but feel sympathy for her whose unhappy choice it will now be either to defy the dictates of Vogue and be thought demodee, or to obey them and invite ridicule. Brevity may indeed be the soul of wit, but Polonius was no arbiter of female fashion.
(Peter Hadley)
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