Competition: Ouch!

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition

In Competition No. 2691 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies. Gratitude and respect to my opposite number over at the Washington Post’s Style Invitational contest from whom I plundered this idea. So impressed was I by the sublimely funny winning entries this challenge generates across the pond that I felt compelled to throw down the gauntlet to Spectator competitors. You did me proud: I squirmed and chuckled my way through an entry of inspired awfulness.


The first five winners, printed below, pocket £18 each; the rest get £10.

The state of the bathroom could only bring to mind the surface of a remote planet in which dungheaps and memphitic swamps co-existed with the entire toiletries and fragrances range of Galeries Lafayette.

The accountant had the world-weary air of a ferret that had been up so many trouser legs that life held no more surprises.

How to describe this novel? Picture it as The Aeniad meets Othello meets Moby Dick meets Peter Rabbit meets Mein Kampf meets the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus meets The Highway Code. In that ballpark, anyway.
G M. Davis

His morals were as twisted as an expensive Sicilian corkscrew that had been used as a way of extracting the pith from a bad apple before being driven over by an Eddie Stobart truck.

She gazed at him as lovingly as if he were her ear-lobe, replete with a diamond-encrusted earring, as reflected in a Parisian mirror.

She spoke as throatily as if a frog and its family had got into her throat and smoked a few packets of Peter Stuyvesant before growing claws and scratching at the inside of her thorax.
Bill Greenwell


Her manner became so suddenly grim it was as though she had injected all of Aberdeen directly into a vein.