COMPETITION

In Competition No. 1532 you were in- vited to supply an extract from an obituary of Jaspistos, points to be deducted for accuracy of fact, deliberate or accidental.

My mother was a Jehovah's Witness. I can speak Hungarian. I was trained as a parachutist by the Metropolitan Police. I have had mumps twice. I once played croquet for Scotland. I have worked in a mortuary. I was locked in a police station cell last month. I hate champagne. My middle name is Garsington. My hair is not all my own. True or false? Since I must cling to my tatters of mystery, all I shall reveal is that five of these statements are correct.

Your malice and lunacy charmed me entirely: 'Mr Izzy Eastman, Jaspistos of The Spectator, died yesterday in the Maze at Hampton Court' . . . 'he returned to Eng- land and worked as a comedian at golf-club banquets' . . . 'he gave his name to his own

Nil nisi falsum

Jaspistos

invention, the octagonal wheel, designed to cut down speeding' . . . 'he remained active up to his tragic accident with the toaster' . . . 'this tiny energetic woman with bright red hair and a matching temper was not always the most comfortable of companions' . . . The eerie thing was how often, firing at random, you managed to score inners, even if not bulls.

Affectionately but, I hope, still elusive- ly, I award £15 each to the winners printed below. The bonus bottle of Anares Tinto Rioja, kindly presented by Atkinson Bald- win and Co., St Mary's House, 42 Vicarage Crescent, London SW11, goes to Richard Parlour.

Among casual acquaintances he could be re- served, but to know him well was to be granted access to an inexhaustible fund of mean-minded malice. His professional life was a restless quest for the ideal outlet for his misanthropy: he was successively a school cook, a time-share sales- man, an ASLEF shop steward and a pioneer in the field of privatised wheel-clamping. In his last years, after a brief period as a VAT inspector, he combined his best known work setting pitiless literary competitions in The Spectator with a part-time job disconnecting bankrupt pension- ers' electricity supplies. His favourite hobby was directing Americans inquiring for Harrods to the 41 bus to Crouch End; but he was almost as fond of touring railway stations and attaching signs reading 'Closed — out of order' to the doors of their public lavatories.

He is survived by a pet bird-eating spider and seventeen anagrams of Bill Greenwell.

(Richard Parlour)

The death of Hector Jaspistos brings to an end the notorious group of Marxist Apostles who gathered in pre-war Cambridge. Others under- took daring acts of espionage. Jaspistos's less spectacular task was to undermine the British Establishment by irony. Awarded the Order of Lenin in 1977, Colonel Jaspistos — as he was known in the Kremlin — started his career by entering competitions in the political weeklies using several pseudonyms. `Basil Ransome- Davies' and a variety of Normans proved to be the most successful. By 1981, his entries had virtually a monopoly of prize-winning in most journals. He had also become resident competition-setter in the prestigious Spectator, so he could scoop the pool there. His loss will be deeply felt in the KGB where they believed that his ability to make a mockery of all that the British held dear was subliminally removing their will to fight.

(Rob Hull)

Much as we lament the untimely death of The Spectator's renowned Competitions Editor, Jas- pistos, at least and at last the true identity hiding behind that mysterious pseudonym can finally be revealed. Unforgettable was the familiar figure striding down Doughty Street any Friday noon to collect final entries for that week's conundrum, brogue-shoed and Harris-tweeded for the customary rustic weekend as a remarkably successful Herefordshire pig-farmer. Sports cap tilted at a saucy angle over a riot of copper- golden curls, sherry-coloured eyes twinkling, Jasmine Postlethwaite would greet one with a hearty backslap and welcome the suggestion that we repair to the Duke of York for 'a quick one'. As Prudence Gently, prolific writer of homely verse, she appealed to an even wider if some- what different following from that of her Specta- tor devotees. Pig-farmer, poetess, it is as the magisterial `Jaspistos' that Jasmine Postle- thwaite will be most keenly missed.

(Monica G. Ribon)

. . and thus, in a dilapidated Staffa croft, his life ended on the same note of passionate asceticism as had dominated it throughout. Inanition was the immediate cause of death; for the rectified seaweed on which he had lately subsisted was not only uncontaminated by any meretricious appeal to the palate but so devoid of nutritional value as actually to register a minus calorific value. Born not with a mere silver but with a positively platinum spoon in his mouth, Jaspistos exhibited in his very cradle signs of the spiritual fatigue incident to all infant inheritors of incalculable wealth. His life be- came one long series of renunciations: of amphetamines at four; of alcohol at five; of nicotine at nine; and of sex at ninety-two (the revelation that his last, Hebridean, decade had fathered no fewer than thirty-seven offspring will arouse speculation regarding the next trus-

tee of that earthly treasure from which he, alas, drew so little true inner sustenance) . .

(Martin Fagg)

Jaspistos, whose bizarre death at the hands of an undistinguished entrant to one of his competi- tions occurred recently, was a man of vast, if sometimes inaccurate, learning and great liter- ary ability. His enthusiasm for style and the mot juste was such that it tended to become an end in itself; when he sat for his degree his examiners were at pains to say that the brilliance of his answers justified Honours, but that since they only peripherally touched the questions they were forced to fail him. It was this contretemps which started him on his career as a setter and judge of literary competitions.

His detractors alleged that the frequently recurring names of successful competitors were in fact his own noms de plume. He disdained to answer this charge, but pointed out correctly that these entrants were always worthy winners.

(D. Shepherd)