Love lecture

In Competition No. 2425 you were invited to do as Ovid did: give poetic advice as to how to pick up, seduce and keep a lover of either sex.

Here’s one of Ovid’s shrewd pieces of advice to girls (my translation, The Modern Library, New York, rush out and buy it):

Steer clear of the young professor
Of elegance, the too good-looking snappy dresser
Who’s always arranging his hair — he’ll tell you a stale,
Thousand-times-told tale,
But his heart’s a gipsy, it camps, it moves.
What can a woman do when the man she loves
Is smoother than she is and, for all she can tell,
Has more men than she does as well?

Not many of you successfully caught ‘the sweet witty soul of Ovid’, in the happy phrase of a contemporary of Shakespeare. The bludgeon was more in evidence than the rapier. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Alanna Blake has the bonus fiver.