Diamond George

In Competition No. 2554 you were invited to write an extract from George Orwell’s Twenty Eighty.
One or two entrants queried the seemingly odd choice of year. I arrived at this by following Orwell, who chose 1984 by reversing the last two digits of 1948, the year he completed his book on the Isle of Jura. You treated dystopia with fine gallows humour: in John Griffiths-Colby’s world, coffee was king due to everyone being hooked on caffeine; with Katie Mallett the main industry was measuring household rubbish; while Virginia Price Evans’s children were looked after by robots, with parents caught trying to touch them being branded as perverts. The winners, printed below, get £30 each and the extra fiver goes to Alan Millard for his monstrous Large Lady.

Bryony O’Brien (Jnr.), Vice Controller and Grand Mistress of Treblespeak, scrutinised the documents long since retrieved from the memory hole. ‘No doubt saved by some subversive male,’ she sneered.