The most recent competition invited you to incorporate the following seven words (real geological terms) into a piece of plausible and entertaining prose so that they acquire a new meaning in the context of your narrative: corallian, permian, lias, kimmeridge, oolite, cornbrash, ampthill.
The inspiration for this challenge came from a bit in Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful The Old Ways where he muses on the names of the surface rock formations in the British Isles: ‘It’s tempting to lend them hypothetical definitions. Great Oolite (the honorific of the panjandrum of a non-existent kingdom). Cornbrash (a Midwest American home-baked foodstuff)….’
There was a great deal of wit and ingenuity on show this week and competition was hot. Like Macfarlane a lot of you saw cornbrash as some sort of foodstuff; permian was a often a synonym for permanent; and corallian a colour. I especially liked John O’Byrne’s ‘corallian music …light metal (harpsichords and flutes) with background chanting by Irish monks’, and Charles Curran, Virginia Price Evans and Peter Meldrum were also on top form.
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