3136: Love me don’t

In Competition No. 3136 you were invited to submit a lonely hearts ad guaranteed to send those looking for love running in the opposite direction.

This assignment was a nod to the charmingly idiosyncratic personal ads that have appeared over the years in the London Review of Books — ‘They call me Naughty Lola. Run-of-the-mill beardy physicist (M, 46)’; ‘I like my women the way I like my kebab. Found by surprise after a drunken night out and covered in too much tahini’ — which proved such a hit that they’ve been collected in two volumes.

In an entry where the flatulent rubbed dandruff-sprinkled shoulders with the gout-ridden and the unashamedly unwoke, lowlights included Liam Hogan’s ‘Prepper seeks female for propagation of the human race’; Barry Baldwin’s: ‘Looks unimportant apart from filling sweaters nicely; as they say, “You don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re stoking the fire”’; and, very much in the LRB spirit, Gail White’s ‘Marquise looking for her Valmont… Call me and we’ll go on a pub crawl and then go to the dump and shoot rats’.