Spectator competition winners: Dante’s holiday from hell

The seed of the latest assignment — to provide a tale of travel misery on behalf of a well-known voyager from the fields of fact or fiction — was a column in the Observer called My Crap Holiday, which invited readers to share their travel horrors: inclement weather, devil children, oven-like bedrooms, Arctic bedrooms, wardrobe-like bedrooms — you get the idea. I had high hopes of this one but it clearly failed to light your fire, producing only a modest haul of entries — albeit with a few crackers. D.A. Prince’s Lucy Honeychurch was thoroughly hacked off with Florence: ‘If it wasn’t Cousin Charlotte twitching at every imagined slight and petty irritation or the Ancient Britons gathered over the boredom of boiled meats every evening it was the Italians, jostling and shoving, loud and bad-tempered. Beastly, at best…’ And Adrian Fry’s Frodo Baggins won’t be recommending Mordor on TripAdvisor. Otherwise, explorers — Marco Polo, Scott, Shackleton — were a popular choice.