Spectator Competition: Surreal estate

Comp. 3389 invited you to submit an estate agent’s blurb advertising a property development on Mars. There were many excellent entries, not all of them enticing. Sean Smith’s seemed potentially the most realistic, offering for £4.5 billion a 12 sq m dwelling with private sleeping quarters: ‘private on a rotational basis with other residents’. Nicholas Lee advertised ‘Mars-a-Lago, where namby-pamby accommodation is a thing of the past; where you can hang out with your backwoods pals, eat baked-bean tablets and grow a beard’. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Kay had ‘two enviable corner plots … with magnificent views of the glorious Prekrasny Putin, previously known as Olympus Mons’. Brian Murdoch went full Trump: ‘Frankly, the place was a bombsite, but we’re going to clear away all the broken-down rovers, and any inhabitants (most books describe insignificant greenies or BEMs) will be resettled happily in the methane–rich seaside camps on Titan’, noting also that golfing opportunities abound. Big-ups to the above, along with Janine Beacham, John O’Byrne, Tracy Davidson, Frank Upton and others, and the £25 vouchers go to the following.

Imagine this. The sky is the colour of butterscotch. From the windows you can see blue rocks lying across the spectacular sandy floor. Outside: the desert, deserted. Inside, the perfect breath of the latest ULTRA aircon, with its 17 gorgeous settings, devised by Teslatica™. You’ve seen the high-rise, windowless beasts upon Earth, the way they crowd the soul and cram neighbours together like krill. Now you get an orangery for entertaining, a state-room as your kitchen, a ballroom for your dreams. Sink into the sumptuous red waters of your courtesy pool; pad noiselessly along the lyrical corridors, or take a driverless buggy. All this can be yours. Name your own craters. Gaze up at very your own illuminated manuscript, your slice of Martian sky. This is a forever land.