Competition | 11 July 2009

In Competition No. 2603 you were invited to submit a newspaper article on a subject of your choice currently in the news containing as many excruciating puns as possible. I’ve never been a big fan of puns but something of a pundemic broke out in a discussion thread on the web about swine flu — ‘I rang NHS Direct and got crackling on the line’ — and it made me laugh out loud. True to Edgar Allan Poe’s observation ‘The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability’, I chortled and winced my way through the entry. Top seed topic-wise was Wimbledon, which produced various painful permutations on ‘Murray mints net profit’. Graham Grafton was unlucky to be squeezed out of the winning line-up, printed below. It’s £25 each, and £30 to W.J. Webster.

D’Oyly cartographers had it easy. These days would a Mappa Mundi still be accurate by Tuesday? As far as our coastline is concerned it’s far from shore.