Competition | 18 April 2009

In Competition No. 2591 you were invited to submit an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information.

Your entries not only made me laugh out loud but also armed me with a mine of useless information with which to bring conversations to a grinding halt should the need arise. I have learnt, for example, that it takes four hours to hard-boil an ostrich egg; that Oxford Circus Tube station has 14 escalators; and that Georges Simenon required sexual intercourse thrice daily.

Commendations to Marion Shore, Michael Limb, Steve Baldock and Rosemary Fisher, but top dog this week is Basil Ransome-Davies, who bags the bonus fiver. The other winners, printed below, get £25 each.

The night bus was a 43 — the sum of three prime numbers — and Ryker rode it to the ferry terminal. Night hid the huge cumulonimbus with their mixture of water droplets and ice crystals, atypical for low cloud. In the shadowy terminal building a notice read ‘service suspended due to a technical problem’. Ryker lit a tab and grimaced; an adverbial construction required ‘owing to’. What it meant was he had two hours to get across the Bay, with no transport. Meanwhile, they had Angela… The bar was still open so he ordered a whisky and emptied his glass at once except for the unavoidable residue clinging to it through surface tension. He was on the same latitude as Rome, though not infallible like the Pope (on matters of faith and morals alone, however). He felt sick with fear, or perhaps it was the nausea associated with viral labyrinthitis.
Basil Ransome-Davies

A bullet thudded into the cliff barely a sawyer’s ell above my head. No ricochet, no splinters.