Competition | 25 October 2008

In Competition No. 2567 you were invited to submit a letter of application for a job of your choosing written by a character from a novel or poem who would appear to be a very unpromising candidate. Thank you to Michael Cregan — the idea for this comp is one of his, tweaked by me. Keith Norman made a persuasive pitch on behalf of the Pied Piper of Hamelin for the post of Head of Music at Eton: ‘I can, with all confidence, promise to take your entire student body with me in whatever I undertake…’, while Andrew Mason’s Ancient Mariner, applying to be Seabird Conservation Officer — ‘If you do give me the job, I can assure you that I will give it my very best shot…’ — made me groan and smile in equal measure.

Commendations to Alanna Blake, G.M. Davis and Gregory Whitehead, and £25 each to the winners printed below. This week’s extra fiver goes to Noel Petty. Several of you had Wilkins Micawber applying for a finance-related post but the Life Coach touch swung it for me.

Esteemed Sir, Not being a personage given to obfuscating my import with superfluous verbiage, I will come to the matter without protraction — in short, I desire to apply for the post of Financial Advisor and Life Coach. I have been Officer of Marines, have considerable acquaintance with the Medway coal trade and the Plymouth Custom House (where I was deemed excessively qualified), and have laboured in the service of the law (Kings Bench). True, I am not an alumnus of our ancient universities, but: ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ (BURNS), and, to employ the vernacular, I have ‘knocked about’ and know Life. I am eloquent on the implications of the necessary relationship between Income and Expenditure, a subject upon which I have frequently expatiated to admiring interlocutors, and the very apostle of Optimism, having found that something will always turn up.