Rip Van Winkle

In Competition No. 2468 you were invited to imagine that you fall asleep and wake up 20 years hence, and then report your impressions without moving from the place where you awoke.
Brian Murdoch reported new stamps issued for the Queen’s 100th birthday and the 2012 Olympics postponed yet again, for the 17th time. Mike Morrison envisaged an aged Ken Barlow supervising a pedestrian crossing in Coronation Street and Madonna in the news for adopting a Lithuanian grandmother. Last week I read H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes in which the hero, after a nap of a mere 203 years, is faced with ‘the nightmare of Capitalism triumphant — higher buildings, bigger towns, wickeder capitalists, labour more downtrodden than ever and more desperate’. Read or reread it. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Richard Ellis.

I stared up at the heavily veiled face. ‘Trisha?’
‘Yeah, Dad.