In Competition No. 2536 you were invited to take an apparently unpromising holiday location, or a superficially unappealing activity holiday, and give it the hard sell in prose or verse form.
One of my favourite spots is Dungeness in Kent. A nuclear power station might not be everyone’s cup of tea but its brooding presence adds considerably to the haunting charm of this eerie wilderness.
I wasn’t convinced, though, by Sue Cain’s utilitarian case for a holiday spent cleaning her house: ‘…you can take all your newly learned skills back home and put them to good use’. Hmm. Nor Basil Ransome-Davies’s call to holidaymakers to turn their backs on the standard Parisian experience in favour of a ‘worm’s-eye view’ of the city’s seamy underbelly: ‘…body shops, petty crime and part-time prostitution’.
A commendation to Alanna Blake and to George Sparkes for his sales pitch for Hell, which was imaginatively presented. But the bonus five goes to Adrian Fry, who manages to imbue the army training ground of Imber with an edgy romance. The other winners, who each get £30, are printed below.
Set like a flawed gem amid the austere, epic beauty of Salisbury Plain, the village of Imber combines the battery-recharging quiet of a long depopulated hamlet with the battery-charging thrill of modern urban warfare. With its bombed cottages and lightning-damaged church, Imber’s picturesquely shell-striated ruins are an aesthetically invigorating monument to the generations of military heroes trained here, to which live ammunition and the possible presence of snipers add a piquant paranoia. Whether exploring the Hardyesque site of the former smithy or the hastily constructed hideaway rumoured to have been the work of Prince Harry, your senses will be treated to a range of refreshing new experiences, from the distant rumble of approaching tanks to the telltale glint of an ill-concealed landmine.
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