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11 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY

COMPETITION

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Awful writing

Jaspistos

In Competition No. 1627 you were asked for a piece of prose worthy of winning the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest for awful writing.

This interesting annual competition, sponsored by San Jose State University in California, concentrates on opening sent- ences in honour of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who once began a novel, It was a dark and stormy night . . .' (a reasonable enough opening, it seems to me). This year the historical fiction category was won by Kenneth Leffler with: 'Paul von Hinden- burg, only one month old and wrapped in a blue blanket, rested peacefully in his cra- dle, oblivious to the tragedy that would one day befall a dirigible named after him.'

I shouldn't like to be one of the judges, for sifting the awful is harder work than grading the excellent: there are so many different ways one can write awfully ungrammatically, pompously, periphrasti- cally, incoherently, imitatively, or just plain boringly. The prizewinners printed below, who get £13 apiece, were all disting- uishedly bad, and Edward Rose did awful- ly well to take the bonus bottle of Chivas Regal 12-year-old de luxe blended whisky.

`That the majority of those emburdened with this dilemma decided to condemn, without consultation, the tragic couple who've this past week stood, together in mind at least, emo- tionally entwined in the magnificently carved oaken dock placed so prominently in this typi- cally petite, yet not unworldly, nineteenth- century market-town courthouse (a fitting testi- mony to the judicial and judicious sensibilities of bygone provincial textile barons), is not unex- pected,' began Reuben.

`It merely shows that yesterday's "twelve good men and true" are today languishing as second- eleven players in that complex cricket-like game we call the legal process; the professionals of which surely deserve the following volley: 'Re-

tire! You're simply not fit to hold the crease!'

'In short, whither the jury, if the judges themselves don't inhabit the house of reason?,

He stopped and the wind snatched the last of his words from his mouth. No one heard save the moor. (Edward Rose)

Fanning golden over snow-crisp pillows, her hair was as silk spun from the breath of sleeping angels. Arched in rictual tension between an aesthetic apprehension that mantled his con- sciousness with gules of porphyry, and a shaft, a glistening beam, of primal desire whose very root threaded all manhood to the loins of Adam, Jolyon let, for a moment, slip and loosed a soft and feathery susurration. White mists over stilly deeps of blue infinity, her eyelids minutely trembled. Presently the bounteous line of her lips made as if for motion. Jolyon bent to sip of her outbreathing.

`Penny for them?' came the murmur. (A/ • Webster)

The sun having interposed his fiery visage uP°11, the blue vault of heaven, it, vault-like, describe

u (to such as chose to observe it) an elongated but entirely semi-circular ellipse whose seeming

commencement was the extremity of our im- agined observer's leftward gaze, whence it proceeded, with uninterrupted continuance of ellipticality, to the utmost limit of his vision upon the right. Yet had, rather, our observer so affixed his piercing left eye — a gleaming pair of Compasses, those optical orbs! — as to make such aerial tracing move from, in contradistinc- tion to to, the point where the sharp pencil of his right eye proceeded (under the former supposi- tion) no farther, that tracing of an elliptical line would have travelled in so directly opposing a direction as, did the subject of our study consist of the march of an army, could only be described as retreating where that other army had former- ly advanced. (P. I. Fell) 'And?', she said.

'And?' Nigel querulously said, but Dolores wasn't for hearing his speech.

'Call me! At five o'clock. But. . . .' Her wording faded up to oblivion but only insofar as Nigel could endure their audibility. At the end Nigel grasped the nettle with all five senses reverberating, his feverish resentment coursing through his clenched teeth and fists.

'You bitch Dolores! Don't you know when a person feels!'

`Oh yes, Nigel. You lost your chances weeks gone by, and I cannot forget to remember that so soon after!' As Nigel sank into a single-knee position, his hands pleaded for the unencumbered Light.

'Oh, God in Heaven! Where did I start making some errors?'

Dolores swung a large boot quickly, at his pathetic appearance.

'Grow up much more quickly than that, you idiot Nigel!'

The striding of her legs showed two fingers to his dreams, and his heart felt unrepairable. (David Oliver) Such a vivacious quartette, closest of chums since babyhood days when rosy little toes boasted crocheted and strictly pink bootees, mop-headed Joanie and sloe-eyed Olive,•sleekly fringed Petunia and Marge of the provocatively freckled nose, so felicitiously feminine and frivolous, yet able to adopt the most becoming air of gravity when occasion demanded, not only participated joys redoubled but also, by sharing them, halved their girlish sorrows — as the saying goes! Until there dawned the dread and fateful day. . . perfidious Petunia flashing an extravagantly gemmed engagement ring before her bewildered erstwhile chums — gorgeous Ron, the boy-next-door, 'in' advertising but known above all to the fair quartette as Marge's 'steady' — Joanie and Olive not unsusceptible to his boyish charms — the proven and hopefully the 'lucky' man — Petunia's brazen announce- ment leaving a trail of bruised and broken hearts, the green-eyed monster following in their wake. . . not far behind!

(Monica G. Ribon) Once more I beheld the formidable form of our Mam. Her moustache had now turned to the colour of the Guinness froth with which it had so often been mixed, but that sturdy frame which had so often borne our dad home from the Dog and Duck, frothing Boddington's bitter, and that corset which creaked and clanked when she was on the warpath like a destroyer leaving harbour, were unchanged.

'Oh, you're back, are you? Here, make yourself useful and get us some coal,' she said, handing me a pickaxe.

Good old Mam! In her blunt way she was hiding her heart like Fort Knox, so hard to get into but just as full of gold. Oh Mam, the spice of life and the salt and vinegar of the earth, may your sort never die out, for you carry the whole slagheap of the world on your invincible shoul-