In Competition No. 2446 you were invited to provide a poem with the title of ‘The Danger of Queer Hats’. There are one or two queer hats in literature, like the one worn by Lear’s Old Man in the Kingdom of Tess, which was ‘a loaf of brown bread, in the middle of which he inserted his head’; or the one shared by Chesterton’s two friends who companionably smoked the same cigar underneath it. Dangerous hats are a different matter. Apart from some desperate puns — ‘bodyline bowlers’ and ‘poisonous berets’ — your hats were odd rather than lethal except for Shirley Curran’s judge’s black cap, ‘the real one to dread,/ For the day that he dons it he tells you, “You’re dead.”’
The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each. (It is amusing to see Nelson dying twice in a fortnight.) The bonus fiver is J.H. Smith’s.
Mrs Melissa Antimacassar
Loved different coverings for her head.
Sometimes
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