COMPETITION

A rough crew

Jaspistos

In Competition No. 1767 you were in- vited to supply, for a modern opera, a chorus of sailors aboard Beachcomber's imaginary craft, HMS Horrible.

Horrible and rough your crews duly turned out to be. Mary Holtby's sailors were mere floating paparazzi, Ba Miller's dreary Wrens, and Alyson Nikiteas's a sickening boatload of smug, politically correct Lefties:

Our chat at meals is baby seals — we're planning a big rally -

And soon all hands will make demands for a vegetarian galley.

Maureen Jones's entry was accompanied by the intriguing stage directions: 'These lines can be repeated in almost any order, ending on a high note which only one singer can reach. The performance should take place in a village hall with no wings and interesting wiring.'

The prizewinners, printed below, get £20 each, and the bonus bottle of Aberlour Single Malt whisky goes to Stanley Sharp- less, despite the ingenious Gilbertian com- petition.

We sweep the seven seas, And never a foe in sight, With one accord We're horribly bored, There's nobody left to fight;

A hopeless crew with nothing to do,

It's enough to make you puke, A bunch of sore-heads With nuclear war-heads, And nobody there to nuke; We're nervous wrecks For want of sex, Our tempers are getting short, So sod the sea, And sodomy, And let's get hack to port.

(Stanley J. Sharpless) If you would see a modern, model nautical facility,

Behold the good ship Horrible, in all its horribil- ity:

You may think she rules the waves as in those battles great and glorious Of powder-monkeys, hearts of oak and fusil- lades victorious; But, sad to say, such notions are outdated and erroneous When she's stem-to-stern with gadgetry Ferran- tic and Marconious; For it's mechanised, computerised and laserised hostility That goes to make a modern, model nautical facility!

We've no time for shanties, hornpipes or such jolly-jack-tar funnery While calibrating systems of sophisticated gun- nery, And we'd all be down in Davy Jones's locker in a jiffy, sirs, If we didn't have our complement of boffins and artificers; So you see, with all her Stingrays, Sea-Darts and other SAMmery, Her combat-data systems and her intercepts and jammery, Her optronics, electronics and her weapons capability, How Horrible's a modern, model nautical facil- ity!

(Philip Dacre) We might sail the 'ocean blue' But we see no sea nor blueness; Just computer screens to crew In our cabin grey and viewless. The Atlantic, Gulf or Med, Whether Force-10 rough or wavy, Might as well be Berkhamsted When you're in the British navy.

It's all tap, plot, chart and track, And once-rationed rum's abolished; We're just floating clerks who hack And it's seats — not decks — get polished.

Air-conditioned Hell — that's what On the Horrible we're stuck with; Sour and womenless, our lot Isn't one we've had much luck with.

(D. A. Prince)

We aren't the wholesome hearties who inhabit South Pacific -

There's plenty like a dame if you are sexually prolific.

There's goats and geese and platypi, or, if you're really randy, A crab, a dab, a slab of shark, or just a stick of candy.

We roam about the rigging in our boxer shorts, perspiring, While we pick off any puffins that the captain's wife's admiring, And we like to croon the tune that opens episodes of Neighbours While we're filleting an albatross with very rusty sabres. We smell of rum and pilchards, a dish that is our staple (Though sometimes we add flavour with some syrup, mainly maple); We toast our foes in porpoise fat until they're not so nervy, Then let them die (first come, first served) of scabies, scurf and scurvy.

You wouldn't call us finicky unless you were a cynic, And a handshake with the best of us will book you in a clinic, But worse, and here's the vision of the crew which often lingers, We worship Captain Birdseye and his fabulous fish-fingers.

(Gen. L. Wilberell)

No. 1770: OAP opera

Magazines, especially the Oldie, are reg- ularly bombarded with boring, unsolicited articles by ancients who have taken up writing in retirement. You are invited to supply a yawn-worthy example of such a submission. Maximum 150 words. Entries to 'Competition No. 1770' by 12 March.