Competition | 14 February 2009

In Competition No. 2582 you were invited to submit proverbs for the 21st century.
Reading the entry brought to mind the magnificently mangled proverbs of Patrick O’Brian’s Captain Jack Aubrey (‘There’s a great deal to be said for making hay while the iron is hot’; ‘A bird in the hand waits for no man’). Your nuggets of contemporary folk wisdom made rather more sense, though.

It was a large postbag bristling with wit and cynicism. That scourge of the television schedules, the celebrity chef, was a popular target. Brian Murdoch sums it up neatly: ‘Too many cooks. Period’. An equally hot topic was the credit crunch and its related horrors. Several of you came up with the heartfelt ‘An Englishman’s home is his millstone’ and there were plenty more along the same gloomy lines.
On a more cheerful note, the best of the bunch, printed below, get a fiver per pair of proverbs.