The latest challenge, to supply an entry by a well-known diarist describing the wedding day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, saw you at your waspish best. Here’s Noël Coward’s verdict on the groom: ‘Massively butch but far too hairy, when he wasn’t even in the Navy. Are beards de rigueur these days?…’ And Alan Clark on Meghan Markle (though he spares us a reference to her ‘juggling globes’): ‘Harry initially appeared to have done equally well with the succulent Miss Markle, but a glance at this morning’s Telegraph informed me not only that she is of below-stairs stock but a bloody yank…’ Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies and Rob Stuart for those contributions.
Sylvia O. Smith, meanwhile, imagines a somewhat bewildered Samuel Pepys: ‘In honour of the occasion, it would appear that even the lunatics have been granted temporary leave of absence from the asylum, for many of those present are wandering around clutching small metallic objects and speaking animatedly into the air, although they are quite alone…’
In a smallish and rather patchy entry, the enjoyable and accomplished five printed below stood out and are rewarded with £30 each.
I adhere to a pretty iron-clad rule: not only do I avoid the bumper cars of social media, but I don’t read the comments after my columns. Many other journalists avidly lap up reader responses to their work, and there’s certainly something to be said for confronting detractors, thus learning to anticipate counter-arguments and to
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