In Competition No. 2512 you were invited to submit a description of a hangover in heroic couplets. I judged the comp after a night’s carousing and your couplets, which were clearly informed by bitter experience, elicited shudders of queasy recognition and the inevitable doomed resolution never again to touch a drop. Simon Machin’s reference to being beaten up by secret police recalls Kingsley Amis’s unforgettable, wince-inducing description of Jim Dixon’s hangover: ‘And body sprawled as if in pained release,/ From being beaten by the secret police’. And thanks to Virginia Price Evans for a vivid description of drunkenness rather than its consequences.
The winners, printed below, get £25 each and the extra fiver goes to Basil Ransome-Davies.
A punk band is performing in my head,
Its fanbase pogoing in boots of lead,
While several mad dictators rant and scream,
Preaching to slaves their cruel, demented dream.
My eyelids have been chargrilled, and my tongue
Coated with creosote and chicken dung.
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