Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition.
In Competition No. 2682 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of a Shakespearean character who has woken up to find him or herself transported to the present day.
John O’Byrne, Frank Osen, Gillian Ewing and Josephine Boyle impressed this week but top honours go to George Simmers, who nets £30. His fellow winners, also printed below, get £25 each.
Next week’s competition slot will be given over to a celebration of the 2,000th crossword so the results of Competition 2683, After the Dance, will appear in the issue dated 12 February.
Indeed, Princess, ’tis a strange country we are in, for though this be Forest Gate by all the signs, yet see I no forest, nor no gate neither. You bade me enquire for the swain who has despoiled all surfaces here-abouts with his markings and his remarkings, and therefore have I contacted his agent, for he is a graffiti artist much praised here, most expeditiously sought after, and paid more for these his efforts than was the knight who sold his honour thrice over to buy codfish. To this agent I remarked that I thought this art nothing, and that a fool could better it with a greater nothing, whereat he straightway placed me under contract. I too am an artist now, and to that end have taken this Audrey for my muse, or more truly my amusement. ’Tis a strange country indeed, princess, but one where fools thrive wonderfully.
George Simmers/Touchstone
These naked legs and arms so writ upon —
you’d say the painters were in want of canvas
and that these bitch wolves were a moving
easel, sporting dragons and their open-arse,
and such a scurvy, bosomy ebullience
for all to let their eyeballs feast on till the lust
swells like a bursting boil to steep the brain.
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