In Competition No. 2569 you were invited to describe a modern social ill of your choice in the style of Charles Dickens.
Ills singled out included bellowing down mobile phones in public, elusive plumbers, and that scourge of the modern age, the potato wedge. Many entries ably demonstrate what George Orwell describes as Dickens’s ‘undisguised repulsion’ at proletarian roughness. Josephine Boyle captures Dickens at his moralising best, while D.A. Prince, on bad language, nimbly slips in a topical slant: ‘Filth even on the answering devices of frail grandfathers…’. Great stuff.
Bravo to those narrowly pipped to the post: the above-mentioned, as well as Adrian Fry, Brian Murdoch, Paul Griffin, Frank McDonald and P.C. Parrish. Bill Greenwell’s impressive Bleak House pastiche takes as its subject the contemporary craze of ‘dogging’, which I had to look up and rather wished I hadn’t. The winners are printed below and get £25 each except a masterly Alan Millard on torture by telephone who gets £30.
They were stressed times, they were cursed times, it was the age of agony, it was the age of angst, it was the epoch of apoplexy, it was the epoch of hypocrisy, it was the season of insensitivities, it was the season of insensibilities — in short, a period of pain and perplexity. Call centres, the curse of the age, were spreading abroad like the plague linking no one to no one. Patience among the populace waned as hapless souls, burdened with speaking machines, sought contact with any who cared to answer only to hear the disembodied voice, as of a ghost, repeating incessantly, ‘Press this, press that. You are in a queue. Please hold the line, your call is important to us.’ And yet, notwithstanding such iniquity, rebellion by those deprived of intercourse with their fellows was not to be.
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