Competition | 4 April 2009

In Competition No. 2589 you were invited to submit an extract from the school essay of a well-known figure past or present, aged eight, entitled ‘What I Did On My Holidays’.
It was a large and vivid entry, and competition was hot for a place in the winners’ enclosure. Those narrowly pipped to the post include Adrian Fry’s scary eight-year-old John Stuart Mill: ‘We stopped at a fish and chip stall where, as a philosophical investigation, Father attempted to order only “and”; the linguistic and ontological implications arising from this incident proved unexpectedly sustaining.’ And J.C.H. Mounsey’s John Prescott, clearly already struggling with anger-management issues, who comes to blows with a donkey. Well done, too, to Mae Scanlan, Gerard Benson and Barry Baldwin.

The winners, printed below, get £25 each. The bonus fiver goes to Basil Ransome-Davies for his portrait of a young Sartre in the grip of the first rumblings of existential angst.