Competition: Allegory on the Nile

This was an enjoyable comp to judge: I have some sympathy with the actress Celia Imrie’s (who played Mrs M) view that, given the current trend towards the use of dull and overused verbal short cuts, the much-mocked Malaprop’s attempts to improve herself by expanding her vocabulary are actually rather creditable.

Printed below are the best of an entry brimming with novelty and hilarity. They earn their authors £25 each; Chris O’Carroll gets £30.


Amsterdam is crisscrossed by so many canards that it has become known as ‘the Venison of the North’.  No visit to the city is complicit without a cruise on its Pinteresque waterways. The Anatole France house distracts many florists who care about the moral lesions to be learned from the Adolf Heimlich era and Nazi chimes against humidity. Germinations of readers have been touched by the wartime diorama of a young girl coming of age in her family’s Arctic hideout.