Living dangerously | 6 September 2018

In Competition No. 3064 you were invited to supply a newspaper leading article exposing the hitherto unsuspected corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item. This assignment was inspired by the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’.
 
It was a smallish field with a narrow focus. You divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery. As usual with this type of challenge, the entries that stood out were those that retained a crumb, however small, of plausibility. Nicholas Stone was good but his piece was written as a news report rather than a leading article and so I reluctantly disqualified it.
 
Bill Greenwell takes the bonus fiver.