Competition | 19 February 2011

In Competition No. 2684 you were invited to take a well-known literary figure and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. Some of you interpreted ‘literary figure’ as a fictional character; others as an author. Either was acceptable. You were all so good this week that it was difficult to whittle down what was a larger-than-usual entry to just six, so congratulations all round. The winners earn £25 each. George Simmers gets £30.

Dear Uncle DHL. There is a pleasant young lady in accounts, whom I wish to invite to the firm’s Christmas ‘do’. What should I say to her?
 
Say little. There is a look, unflinching, intimate, direct, that will establish from the first the basis of your relationship — that you will be master, as a man must. It tells her firmly that she can be nothing to you if her responses are in the mind alone — mere sex-in-the head; instinctively, she will know that you mean to arouse deep longings in her solar plexus, and to explore the core of her physical jungle, the last and deepest recesses of organic shame. Should she shy away from you like a frightened foal, dare to touch her, and with strokes of infinite gentleness let her understand that you are in tune with the rhythms of her most private nature.
George Simmers

Dear Uncle Eddie. Our daughter Henrietta aged 7 has a lively imagination and the potential, we believe, to become a notable author, essayist, poet and playwright, just like you. Unfortunately her teachers to date have equipped her with scant knowledge apropos the finer points of grammar. An understanding of syntax, parts of speech, spelling, semantics, punctuation and parsing is essential to her future career. What should we do? Anxious.
 
dear anxious) grammar is i guess (may children always gather flowers) to growing as a grimace is to half a smile or no is to perhaps.