Spectator competition winners: finding love in unlikely locations

In Competition No. 3321 you were invited to provide a love scene from a novel set in a location that might not be considered conducive to romance.

There was a distinctly scatological flavour to this week’s postbag. Rubbing shoulders with the abattoirs and morgues were sewage treatment plants and waste-contaminated waters. Adrian Fry’s description of romance blossoming in a post-thermonuclear apocalypse government bunker earns an honourable mention: ‘Their past as local authority officials retreated to irrelevance, their future as irradiated cannibals above ground proved literally unimaginable…’. As does Nick MacKinnon’s glue factory tryst: ‘Julianna had been warned about the men in Industrial Adhesives. “They’ll treat you like another Post-it Note on their bedroom mirror: easy-on, easy-off, no residue. Find a nice boy in Consumer Stickies.”’

The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each.

– You’re quite a catch, he said.

It was the best he could do, and she loved him for it, although the pit of half-alive fish into which they’d slipped was causing them problems with balance and breathing.