COMPETITION

SCOTCH WHISKY

Whopping porkies

Jaspistos

SCOTCH WHISKY In Competition No. 1707 you were in- vited to supply an anecdote that beggars belief but enriches credulity.

In Cumbria, where the title of Biggest Liar in the World is awarded annually, they have the advantage of long-standing practice. 'West Cumberland's got a good tradition of lying. It flows from the hips,' says 'Doctor' John Reeves, a former title- holder, 'a liar's liar', who this year spun a yarn in which a pair of spectacles with the back end of a fox on the inside of its lenses was used to keep a slow-moving hound on the move. Your own pork pies tended to be a bit tired and lustreless, like the ones in Perspex cases that I used to avoid in Country pubs in the Fifties. The shameless inventiveness of Baron Munchausen was in short supply. Richard Blomfield, Basil Ransome-Davies and somebody who pork- Pleishly presented herself as Lucy Lurcher, do The Kennels, Barking, were the best of the second-best liars. None of the prizewinners printed below (£15 each since it's the season of goodwill) hails from Cumbria, but three come from places in Dorset beginning with W (are you there, Arthur Koestler?). The bonus bottle of Chivas Regal 12-year-old de luxe blended whisky goes to Brian Coates, and I send you all affectionate Christmas wishes and fearful hopes for the New Year. Yet `fears', remember, 'may be liars'.

My names is Lord Grimes. Abandoned by my father, a failed school-master turned infantry officer, in 1915, some weeks after I was born, I was adopted by a Spanish circus family. I

escaped to RADA in 1936, and with my languages to MI5 in 1939. In 1943 Winston decided that Monty required two doubles. The first one wrote a hook. I was the unlucky second. Monty was shot down and killed in a helicopter over Kent in 1944. British morale could not he allowed to flag or suffer, I took over — black beret with two cap badges, an insanitary sweater and a bloody caravan that followed me everywhere. De Guingand, Alan- brooke and Alexander briefed me. When baf- fled I scowled, especially at Patton and Eisenhower. The bastards didn't let me die till 1976. The worst part was being CIGS in the early days. I was always down with flu.

A life peerage was a pathetic reward.

(Brian Coates) Talking of aircraft, you'll remember how im- possibly cramped the seating is. They get over this by pressurising the cabin; everyone gets smaller and even in Economy the flight becomes just bearable. They never serve drinks on the ground because you'd notice that bottles and cans are sub-standard size to match the passen- gers.

You've heard of compressed air tunnelling? They say it's to keep out the water, but with enough pressure you can get a six-foot tall miner down to three feet - ideal for small tunnels. You've seen the little pairs of boots dangling behind windscreens? Don't scoff - it shows what can be done.

It's the same with diving bells. You think it's a seat around the inside, but lower away and there's a little man using it as a floor. They never employ chaps with hip replacements, of course.

No, it doesn't happen to divers. Water's incompressible, you know. (D. Shepherd)

A Nonagenarian Liar Recalls a 1925 Encounter They were dressed as lamas but hadn't made any real effort to disguise themselves - after all, the chances of a fellow Brit reaching such a remote part of Tibet must have seemed pretty negligi- ble. Directly I recognised them, I knew what must have happened the year before. They'd got to the top all right - no doubt about that - but, once there, it had hit them - how ghastly their lives would be if they just came tamely back down the same side, the endless publicity, the sycophantic interviews, the intolerable intrusion into their privacy. Remember, they were both deeply shy, retiring sort of chaps - they couldn't have stood it. and so - that sudden anoxic inspiration!

They were glancing at me apprehensively. so I put them out of their misery. 'George and Sandy!' I cried. 'Fancy seeing you. But don't worry - your secret's safe with me.!

(Jonathan Fernside) I invented dyslexia - for a bet. The word was coined in the 1880s, but I was the one who foisted dyslexia as we know it today upon an unsuspecting world. There was a group of us in my rooms in Oxford - we called ourselves the Sceptics - and I was reading a paper to the effect that acceptance of a concept depended not on validity but on demand. Then, digging this word out from an obscure corner of the OED, I bet them half a year's earnings that within an agreed period there would be shelf-loads of volumes on the subject and entries in all the reference books. Since there was a market for a stigma-free form of illiteracy for the middle classes, it didn't matter that the term was vague to the point of meaninglessness. Twenty-five years later I collected £155,000. I also invented the ploughman's lunch.. .

(Keith Norman) We were on a school charter flight to Bangkok when, as ill-luck would have it, we hit some turbulence and both wings fell off. Luckily I know something of aerodynamics, and, with the aid of a couple of skateboards, a chess board and a blackboard, I managed to rig up a pair of temporary pinions. We made it to an atoll, where I effected a landing. Unhappily we'd no idea of our whereabouts. I improvised a tele- scope from a pair of specs, a wine-glass and a bassoon and was able to ascertain that there was a land-mass some kilometres nor'-nor'-east. How to get there was the,problem. I hit on a scheme, organising the survivors to dig away the southern end of the atoll and transfer it to the northern. That way we soon shifted the place till we'd joined the land-mass, which turned out to be Switzerland. (Gerard Benson) My uncle was showing us these orchid seeds, whingeing how the variety's nearly impossible to propagate, when he tripped over the rake, and the seeds got mixed up with the sandwich in his other hand, and a starling rushed up and helped itself. Then, a bit later, we found the cat in the shrubbery wolfing this same starling (we recog- nised the mustard smear on the beak). And evidently something inside the bird and/or cat made the right conditions for germination - the vet thinks it was the way the onion in the sandwich reacted with the vitamins in the cat food, and the cat was a bit costive too, which may have helped. Anyway, the cat finally went about its business, and of course that's the perfect growing medium, and up came this stunning mutation, mid-scarlet petals and cream sepals with gold tips. It won last year's British