Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: Mr Micawber’s Christmas round robin (plus: sell the Bible to modern audiences)

This year’s festive comp asked for Christmas round robins as they might have been written by a well-known fictional character. It was all there: the boasts, bad jokes, inappropriate intimacies and inconsequential detail. Most of the entries were bursting with forced jocularity, but Basil Ransome-Davies, in the shape of an unusually frank Jeeves, neatly subverts the round-robin tradition of presenting a relentlessly positive face to the world. And John Samson’s Phileas Fogg takes holiday bragging to a whole new level, thereby earning the yuletide fiver. His fellow winners take £25. Happy Christmas, one and all!

John Samson Where have all the days gone? I know where 80 went! But lost count of number of ships, trains and wind-powered sledges(!) I’ve taken this year. Fabulous world tour. All in less than three months. A record? You bet! Staff change at Fogg Towers saw the arrival of Passepartout. So very proud of his achievements in French.

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