A tricky hand

In Competition No. 2385 you were invited to incorporate 13 given words into a plausible piece of prose, using them in a non-card sense. Searching for Tolstoy’s ‘happy families’ quotation in my Bartlett’s, what did I find bang next to it? This from War and Peace: ‘The old man used to say that a nap after dinner was silver — before dinner, golden.’ ‘Finesse’ was the tricky one: I didn’t think it sounded unforced on the lips of either Gerard Benson’s plodding policeman or Brian Murdoch’s violent burglar. Blackjack and poker led to a lot of GBH, but the top prize (£30) goes to Margaret Joy’s peaceful rural scene, in which the zoology may not be plausible but the joke is. The other winners, printed below, get £25 each.

Mrs Jenkins was having a nap by the fire. Her newt crouched on a table nearby. As the barmaid refilled her glass from a blackjack on the bar the loo door shut with a slam and a customer returned to the fire.