Spectator competition winners: Mrs Malaprop turns tour guide

In Competition No. 3212 you were invited to provide a spiel that a well-known character from the field of fact or fiction might give in their capacity as a tourist guide to a capital city or notable monument.

In a hotly contested week, I was sorry not to have space for P.C. Peirse-Duncombe’s Tristram Shandy (‘To begin at the beginning of our tour — for to begin elsewhere might be a beginning though not the beginning and thence to a conclusion which we could not call The End, let us commence with this view of a tower, a mere 324 metres of lattice ironwork created by Gustave Eiffel…’) or David Silverman’s Buck Mulligan (‘Now behold Dublin Bay and its snotgreen, scrotumtightening sea. Thàlatta Thàlata! as the Greeks say — Epi oinopa ponton!…’).

Those who made the cut take £25.

Visitors! Let me traduce you to the beatitudes of our capital city and its hysterical heritage.