COMPETITION

Heavens!

Jaspistos

In Competition No. 1598 you were in- vited to describe a day, or part of a day, as it would be spent in your personal heaven.

Lunch with Peter Ustinov, tea with Joanna Lumley, dinner with Freddie Ayer . . , what curious definitions of heaven some of you have. I've tried all three experiences; rapturous, no, pleasant, yes. Several of you cited winning this competi- tion and doing the Times crossword in ten minutes as examples of perfect felicity, but I know someone who does both and still has a very long face. In fact heaven is the very devil to imagine in any but rather crude terms, e.g.: 'A Waldorf salad and a bottle of the Widow fortify me for an afternoon thrashing McEnroe.' I liked John O'Byrne's celestial Titanium card (Infinite credit, no repayments neces- sary'), George Moor's island in the Inland Sea of Japan, and Tim Hopkins's unex- pected item of bliss: 'Miss Wetherall of Personnel sexually harassed me on a stair- way', but few of your heavens struck me as either inventive or all that enjoyable. Damn it, the Moslems managed to dream

up seven distinct heavens (the seventh and jolliest presided over by Abraham).

The prizewinners below get £15 each, and the bonus bottle of Cognac Otard VSOP, kindly presented by the Chateaii de Cognac, goes to Michael Heber-Percy.

. . where consciousness is indestructible, and curiosity the only self-indulgence . • .'

The Universe in an afternoon! From the humming of the electron to the lonely deeps beyond the Milky Way.

A clear cool dawn on a Mediterranean bay — Pantelleria or El Sabratah. Then, swift as thought, I'll know what Babylon was really like — Actium and Agincourt — hear the Sermon on the Mount and follow down the photon's path to the last perfect day on Earth. Bacchanalia in the Forum! Topping-out day at the Parthenon — Solomon's Temple the day Titus invaded — a royal burial on the Nile.

To clear up a few nagging puzzles before venturing further, I'll follow Oswald through those hours in Dallas, Lucan from the Clermont, Bormann from the Weidendammer Bridge and Aunt Thomasina from the Trocadero tea-room one warm October night in '56.

Then away, to the triumphs, the marvels and the lunacies of other worlds.

(Michael Heber–Percy) On waking I never fail to feel a pleasurable lack of dismay at being awake. I walk in some woods and worry about the kind of wine I am going to drink with my lunch, which I will be eating alone. Somewhere in the distance a very beauti- ful woman is beckoning to me, but I do not feel the need to respond. Instead, William Rees- Mogg and others appear and we share a joke or two before he is escorted away by an official who tells him there has been a mistake. The sun warms my neck as I tell the cook to roast the pheasant that has been hanging in the larder for the last two weeks. After lunch I fall asleep and dream of all the butterflies that used to exist in the world. (Jim Yorke) The day begins (after the consumption of more than a pint of very strong, dark roast, coffee) with complete silence. A power cut has silenced all forms of amplified music and speech in the neighbourhood. I pick up the telephone: it has gone dead. Two items of mail drop through the letter box: a magazine and a cheque. I look out of the window to see my neighbour's cat in its death throes. I pick up the newspaper and discover that a technicians' strike has silenced most television broadcasts and that Roy Hatters- ley is on holiday. I read an apology for the non-appearance of an interview between Ken- neth Branagh and D.J. Taylor and a brief note of the closure of Jeffrey Archer's long-running play in the West End. Overwhelmed by bliss, I fall into a deep pre-prandial slumber.

(Nicholas Murray) I seem to be in the semicircular bay of a high room. At the other end of the room glow shelves of books. There is music, apparently proceeding from within me. It sounds like Byrd.

The morning sun strikes gently on the large circular table at which I am sitting. Newspapers are spread in front of me, and coffee in a white china cup is at my right hand. Also on the table is my short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which I completed last night to Fermat's own delight and satisfaction. A cat sleeps in the chair beside me. There is no possibility of toothache.

The dew is lifting from the lawn outside. In the distance, lines are being marked on a cricket pitch.

A clerical gentleman joins me, bearing a plate of pates de foie gras and a rapt expression. He

speaks. (Noel Petty)

Revenge is sweet in Heaven as elsewhere; and the truly sublime days will be those where the usual delights of the place — like the truffled ambrosia and hangover-free champagne dis- pensed by warmingly friendly Mae West looka- likes — will be mere pleasurable trimmings as we view the drama eternally played out around the 22 yards of verdant empyreal turf (there is no hosepipe ban here) that shimmer beneath a sky of deepest blue. At one end of this strip of paradise a line of weary-looking Australian bowlers stretches literally into infinity. Each in turn hands the white-coated Seraph a large, green, sweat-stained cap, which, a short minute later, he snatches furiously back before trudging away, his face disfigured by bitter curses; while at the other end the effulgent Botham, haloed and exalted among the heavenly denizens, strikes six upon six, over every boundary, per omnia saecula saeculorum!

(Chris Tingley)