Spectator competition winners: ‘She had the type of fake tan that would be of great service if she ever had to hide in Oak Furniture Land’ – and other bad analogies

Your latest challenge was to come up with toe-curlingly bad analogies. This is an idea shamelessly pinched from the Washington Post, whose contests have produced the impressively so-bad-they’re-good ‘Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze’ (Chuck Smith) and ‘Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever’ (Jennifer Hart). Yours, too, were gloriously cringe-inducing. Laboured, overwrought, banal, tasteless — yet grimly compelling for all that. The winners take a fiver each per analogy printed below.

Adrian Fry As the narcotic took effect, Frank felt extremely odd, as if he were sole occupant of a set in a Venn diagram containing men who loved the novels of Barbara Pym and people who sought the reintroduction of bear baiting.

The bare branches of trees struck stark and angular against the pale sky, as if a bunch of swastikas had been haphazardly doodled too close together to be decipherable as swastikas without recourse to this analogy.

That Becky should love him seemed, to Gerald, utterly impossible, like scooping your first lottery jackpot the week after your second.

Chris O’Carroll The minister’s speech was as jerky and erratic as if he were shouting the words to amazed onlookers while bouncing on a pogo stick through a minefield.

He broke wind with the menacing thunder of ancestral voices not only prophesying war, but actually launching a poison gas attack to get the hostilities started.

He burst through the front door like a hollow-point bullet exploding through an exit wound.

Robert Schechter The crescent moon was as lovely as a perfectly clipped fingernail on a manicurist’s velvet table top.

He moved with the resolute purpose of a man who had four cups of coffee and now is in desperate search of a public loo.

He was as flexible as a strand of spaghetti...