Seven seas

My selection of words was harsh in that there wasn’t much in the way of alternative meanings to play with. You rose to the challenge admirably, though, and submissions were impressively varied and convincing. As Jaspistos has observed before, this type of comp tends to produce a bumper crop of entries, and this week was no exception. It was tough, once again, to whittle it down to six. An ingenious few managed to coax a non-plant sense out of celery. Here’s Nicholas Poole-Wilson: ‘He was from Sydney, and I didn’t immediately recognise what he meant when he said he was on a six-figure celery.’ John Plowman strayed from the brief, but I liked his haiku all the same.
The winners, printed below, scoop £25 each. Alan Millard pockets the bonus fiver.

The vicar deemed it meet to mark the occasion of St Mark’s 100th anniversary by inviting the corpus of the church to celebrate the opening of a new century with thanksgiving. Accordingly Tobias, the long-serving secretary, was asked to copy an announcement in the forthcoming newsletter. Being almost a centenarian himself after living on a diet of fruit cordial and celery, Tobias considered it a privilege and readily agreed. The resultant announcement, instead of suggesting a service of homage, seemed to be more of a summons to carnage. The error deserved the Almighty’s wrath but, being excused by advancing years and advancing cataract clouding his eyesight, Tobias was spared serious censure. It was, after all, a forgivable clerical error to mistake inviting the ‘corpus of the church to celebrate the opening of a new century’ for ‘corpses of the church to celebrate the opening of a new cemetery’.
Alan Millard

Attempting to censure my eco-warrior friend was tougher than I thought. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you are so green, that you look as if you’d swallowed an emetic.