Spectator Competition: It is what it is 

In Comp. 3373 you were invited to mull on a line that Sigmund Freud almost certainly did not say, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, substituting another object if it seemed apt. In the event there was plenty about cigars as substitutes and not so much about their substitutes as substitutes. A word in praise of Frank McDonald’s lovely poem about the transformations wrought by imagination and Gail White’s ‘Cat is simply cat’. Also deserving of a mention: Alex Steelsmith, Janine Beacham (‘Cigars are just cigars, no deep complex… Good Lord, stop thinking everything is sex!’) and George Simmers, whose poem ends:

Then he, being an utter bastard,

Quoted Kipling to provoke:

‘A woman is only a woman,

But a good cigar is a smoke.’

The following win £25.

Perusing Ludwig Wittgenstein I read

‘The world is everything that is the case’.

Does this mean, as my mother would have said,

A place for everything then? Watch this space.