COMPETITION

Dirty dozen

Jaspistos

12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY

In Competition No. 1659 you were in- vited to incorporate the following words, in any order, into a plausible piece of prose: classless, maroon, bankers, Kant, shenani- gans, hump, spelling, vice versa, gradient, farewell, rip-off, squelch.

This dozen was less dirty than usual, in the sense of less difficult, but it was, in another sense, dirtier in that I unwittingly included two words with a tempting sexual double entendre. Six of you dug out of a quotation dictionary, or your memories, Kant's lugubrious dictum: 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.' Two nice open- ings pleased me — Nicholas Hodgson's 'As part of the classless society I'm taking the Sun instead of the Times: vice versa for my chauffeur. I don't, as I expected, have to correct the spelling, but is it a newspaper?' and Ruth Taylor's 'I had to squelch across the vile, maroon-coloured mud of the river and crawl up the steep gradient of the other bank to rescue our cat Immanuel (known as 'Kant' in spite of his unreasonableness).' The most amusing ending was Katie Mal- lett's (jealous wife speaking): 'His shenani- gans were giving me the hump. Her spell- ing was appalling — "Kant make it tonight," the note said. I'm pretty classless myself, but I felt she could have taken a couple more lessons.'

The prizewinners printed below get £14 each. Ian Dunlop, despite two little in- fringements, is included for sheer brevity and for taking witty advantage of what I laid myself open to. The bonus bottle of Chivas Regal 12-year-old de luxe blended whisky goes to 0. Smith, the most plausible.

'I've left Paul,' Marion said, removing her hat. 'Are you sure it isn't vice versa?' I asked, remembering how exasperating her pedantic

12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY ,

husband had found her inconsequential chatter, scatty spelling and even worse arithmetic.

'Oh, no,' she replied. 'It was me. I'd put up with his shenanigans far too long. First it was his passion for philosophy; daily lectures of Kant and Hegel nearly drove me bonkers. Next, he developed a craze for social reform and creating a classless society. Then last summer he decided to go back to nature and maroon us in a tumbledown old hovel in the back of beyond. The price was a rip-off, anyway, for a place with no mod cons whatsoever. He expected me to squelch through a bog every morning and hump piles of logs up a track with a one-in-four gradient.

'It was either "Farewell, Paul" or men in white coats for me.'

(O. Smith) 'A philosophical question which constantly exer- cises me, the Kant Professor declared, swaying back into his padded chair with a heavy squelch, is this: if a dromedary is a camel with one hump, is a camel necessarily and inevitably a dromed- ary with two — and, of course, vice versa?' He made to rise, then, evidently finding the gradient too steep, waved an airy farewell and began snoring. `Legless,' muttered the student in the maroon sweater. 'Unless he's just bonkers. You realise he's drawing a salary for this? Talk about a rip-off!'

`Drowning his sorrows,' said his friend. 'Didn't you hear about the shenanigans when the Selection Board blocked his headship? They said he talked down to undergraduates. They're all rabid egalitarians, and he's the old-style upper-class don — always on about falling standards and students' shocking spelling.

'If he keeps lecturing like this,' said the first student grimly, 'he'll soon be classless himself.' (Chris Tingley) Major Plumtree, who regularly sported a ma- roon blazer and grey slacks — or vice versa considered the 'classless society' bonkers — his own word. Certainly his invention of power- assisted trousers, in which to `go over the top', did not endear him to the other ranks. This endeavour led him eventually to stand before a large hump of earth while his club-mates lit a fuse leading to his turn-ups. 'Ignition!' Dead silence for a moment, then a fearful tearing noise. 'We have rip-off Repeat, we have rip-off!' The Major's trousers had remained static, while the military man, with a heart- rending cry of farewell, shot bare-bottomed up the gradient, took off parabolically and landed with an ominous squelch, spelling the end of active service.

Before the Committee he pooh-poohed accusations of some sort of shenanigans with the words of Kant, claiming the experiment was 'a categorical imperative . . . objectively neces- sary in itself. (M. R. Woodhead) Maitland Chalmers, RA, answered critics of his 'Metropolis' who have called it a 'sociological rip-off . Tonkers,' he told me. 'All the figures in the picture are classless: I painted the rich ones in jumble clothes, the poor dressed for Ascot. The latest shenanigans only show critics are out to destroy me. They won't succeed. As Kant nearly said, "I paint, therefore I survive". Or —' his voice rose to the scream of an articulated lorry hitting the final gradient of the Simplon Pass — 'vice versa.'

About to say farewell, I was startled to see the old man spelling out his defiance of his critics. He began to squelch words from a tube of bright maroon paint onto a canvas: HUMP oFF!

(Adrian Vale) From Frank Keating's Review of the Football Year The class team of Italia 90 was Italy: the classless team, as it were, was USSR. Tabloid journalists made England's players out to be drunken, insatiable bonkers. (Vice versa, shurely?) Initial performances suggested this was a spelling mistake for plonkers — their victory over Cameroon was not so much a rip-off as a mugging. Scotland had their usual high hopes, but had to say farewell after Costa Rica deli- vered the perfect squelch. Ultimately the trophy went to West Germany. Beckenbauer's boring, intellectual tactics suggested some soccer equivalent of Hegel or Kant.

Back home, developers cast greedy eyes on Easter Road, the pitch with football's most notorious gradient, but Hibernian repelled the Heart-y advances of Wallace Mercer's maroon empire.

And there was a blast from the past — George Best showed up on Wogan, but his boozy shenanigans gave his host the hump.

(John MacRitchie) My prize pupil, this Lolita, put the honk into bonkers and probably the vice into versa as well: it is futile to expose her to pure reason, let alone a critique of Kant. Classless this afternoon, she corners me. I see the look in her eye spelling shenanigans; I see her rip off her maroon knickers; I am invited to hump her. Naturally, under pressure, I fail to make that already well-worn gradient and accept with relief the squelch implicit in her contemptuous farewell.

(Ian Dunlop)