No. 2555: Last words
You are invited to write a poem or short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. Maximum 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2555’ by 24 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net.
In Competition 2552 you were invited to follow Bernard Levin (who liked eggs boiled for the duration of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro) and spice up a cookery column with similar cultural references.
Unfortunately Bernard did not tell us who was conducting while he was boiling; a Toscanini egg, for example, would be a much softer thing than a Klemperer one. W.J. Webster observes that Levin, of course, was being light-hearted, not pretentious; indeed, the Figaro/eggs recipe is also ascribed to Beecham, that most down-to-earth of musicians. But the idea of the comp was to use the reference as a base camp from which to scale the peaks of pseudery, the pyramids of piffle that loom when a skilled craft morphs into a Fine Art. Basil Ransome-Davies even managed to produce a recipe for . . . but read on.
Commendations go to Alanna Blake for a Keats-inspired autumn feast, Barry Baldwin for a Shakespearean fry-up, and Josh Ekroy for a musical pudding. The winners, printed below, get £25 each while Mr Webster wins the bonus fiver.
I was re-reading Adam Bede the other day — ah, for a world where one churns one’s own butter! — when it struck me how few people nowadays would realise that Hetty Sorrel shares a name with one of our most magical vegetable-herbs. Alone, sorrel is sharply subtle, Daumier made edible. But sympathetically matched, it has the power to transfigure even a classic dish.
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