Blushes of the past

Jaspistos

In Competition No. 2328 you were invited to recall a shaming public moment in your life.

Here are four snapshots of shame from my own life. I am 11, and it is my turn to read the lesson in school chapel. The text includes the words, 'Lord, it sufficeth us', which my thick lisp and dental plate make unnegotiable. In front of the congregation I give up after four attempts and, crimson, move on to the next verse. Two years later, I have won the boxing tournament, having beaten three boys heavier than myself. Parents have come for the presentation of the cup by Field Marshal Montgomery, who had witnessed my final bout. He hands it to me with the words: 'I'm sorry but I'm obliged to say that in my opinion Michie did not show sufficient aggression.' I am now 21, working as a brickie in a pacifist group building houses in Bavaria for refugees from Prussia. The temperature is way below zero and the grub disgusting. One day, while mealtime grace is being said by our leader, hoping that all pious eyes would be shut in prayer I transfer a particularly nasty gobbet from my plate to my neighbour's and am caught in the act. Lastly, I am 50 and parachute for the first time, watched by my small son. Owing to incompetence, I land in a nearby marsh and have to be rescued by a van. On return to the aerodrome. I am greeted in public by Jake with 'Dad, that was a rotten jump!'

The prizewinners, printed below, get DO each, and the Cobra Premium beer goes, without Montgomery-like qualification, to Catherine Benson.

My first baby was a week old but I'd been in hospital longer. Exhausted by the whole physicality of breastfeeding (the nurses had dubbed me Mrs United Dairies), I was fast asleep during the doctor's morning round. The gentle hand shaking my shoulder half woke me. I took it, placed it on one of my united dairies, said, 'Cuddle me, darling,' and turned over. The laughter woke me up. The doctor, his hand still clamped by mine and pulled across me, was grinning. The nurses were grinning. I released the doctor and shot under the covers. He gently peeled the covers back, asking how long I'd been in hospital. I said, 'Eleven days,' face red as a beetroot.

He said, 'I think we'd better send you home to your husband then!' I feigned a dignified silence in front of the knowing smiles around me.

Catherine Benson

At the age of IL I suffered from my first all-consuming crush — on a girl called Alice Wilson, a 12year-old from Edinburgh. We were on a 'school cruise' which occupied a fortnight of the Easter holidays. two of 700 sardined into a converted troopship. the Dunera, It mooched about the Mediterranean, stopping briefly to visit Delphi. Pompeii, Gibraltar; but mostly we were afloat, our prepubescent hormones behaving like Mexican beans. I wasn't best placed to attract anyone of either gender, since my father, who had been in the navy in the second world war, declared that it would be 'very hot', and had arranged for me to have a savage crewcut. Nevertheless, I managed to get close enough to Alice to have a starry-eyed, twominute conversation. 'You're insipid,' she advised me, and I ran, high and delighted, all the way to a dictionary.

Bill Greenwell

I was 14 and making my first visit to Paris, unaccompanied. I was due to stay with the Husson family in Aix-en-Provence. but M. Husson, who was in the capital, would meet me there and put me on the afternoon Mistral. We took a Metro from the Gare du Nord to have lunch at his chosen restaurant. The carriage was packed and rich with Gauloise fumes. With the added nervous excitement, I soon found breathing a chore. Eventually came the sick, wavy feeling and ebbing of consciousness that heralds a faint.

I came to on the platform and M. Husson led me to a pharmacy where I swallowed some pills with a glass of water. That gave me an appetite. But I have only one memory of that restaurant: the sight of my own vomit as it erupted from my helpless mouth the second I stepped inside.

Basil Ransorne-Davies This happened when I was driving in a funeral cortege in Birmingham. I was following the coffin of a famous Quaker in a rust-ridden, defective Greg Vauxhall, The sister of the deceased was with me and there were a lot of other cars, filled with various dignitaries, travelling from the Quakers' Meeting House to the cemetery. Then, due to some defect in my car's electrics, the horn decided to sound itself. It blasted continually as if it had discovered an emergency under the bonnet. I would have stopped and pulled over, but we were in the centre lane of an urban triple carriageway, hemmed in by vehicles, right behind the hearse. So on we went, blasting as if furious at the solemn pace and anxious to overtake. There was nothing I could do about it for a very long and sweaty five minutes.

Josh Ekroy

When my supervisor forbade me a day's holiday to attend Newbury races — `Too many others off at the same time,' he smirked — my only option was to `throw a sickie'. My afternoon started well, with a good — by which I mean liquid — lunch and a 10-1 winner in the opener. My spirits rose further when my selection romped home in the three o'clock. It seemed churlish not to cheer the horse into the winner's enclosure. Through a drunken, elated haze, I dimly registered that the name of the company I worked for was prominently displayed for the prize-giving. Cold sweat broke out when the MD of the company, together with my supervisor, stepped forward for the presentation. Perhaps they haven't noticed me. I thought. They had. A broad smile cracked my supervisor's face and he made a swift throat-cutting gesture more final than any formal sacking.

Adrian Fry

No. 2331: No oil painting It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of humankind,' said Congreve. You are invited to do just this. Maximum 16 lines, entries to 'Competition No. 2331' by 4 March.