In Competition No. 3055 you were invited to take a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. There is space only to high-five the winners below, who take £25 each. Bill Greenwell gets £30.
My boyfriend says I should ‘give in’ to his advances. What’s your advice?
Some boyfriend; some cheek. I would observe that many of his ilk have tried to break down such defences, but few have succeeded, at least not honourably. Upon resistance rests your future. Upon the strength of your redoubt rests the probity of your family, future as past. Your toils, be they in the woods and forests, or behind the bicycle sheds abutting your place of education, and no matter how ingenious the perfidy that this young man seeks to perform, are trials which all our young people must endure. At any rate, that is what you must try to do. You must fight them in the parks, you must fight them in the clubs, you must fight them in leisure centres and shopping malls, you must fight them in their many private automobiles; you must never surrender.
Bill Greenwell (Winston Churchill)
Dear Comrade Stalin,
I am so perplexed. I am keeping company with Igor, an engineering student at the People’s Technical Institute here in Smolensk. He is older and very clever and I do not always understand him. The other day he laughingly said that Lenin ‘leapfrogged the dialectic’ and would not explain. Is this something I will have to do when we are married?
Olga (17)
Dear Olga,
You are a sweet, sincere girl, and you have done right to report this problem. Please do not feel too sad if I tell you that Igor is playing with your emotions and not the person he seems.
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