Spectator competition winners: the hell of a foreign holiday

In Competition No. 3188, a challenge designed to make us all feel better about the looming prospect of another enforced staycation, you were invited to submit a postcard from a friend on holiday abroad that makes you relieved you aren’t there.

Whenever I find myself dreaming of a trip to see the Northern Lights, I console myself with ‘Northern Dark’, Geoff Dyer’s hilarious account of the crushing disappointment of his pilgrimage to the Svalbard Archipelago (only on the return journey do the stars of the show, those ‘swirling geysers of psychedelic green’, make an appearance — but on the opposite side of the aircraft from which Dyer and his wife are sitting).

I enjoyed Paul Freeman’s account of guillemot and periwinkle stew atop Hall’s Ledge, Rockall, and Brian Murdoch’s valiant attempt to look on the bright side of hotel quarantine: ‘…the view from the window is a restfully empty car-park, so no crashing waves to keep us awake all night’.