Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2615 you were invited to provide a lesson in the facts of life courtesy of Mrs Malaprop or the Revd William A. Spooner. This comp produced an especially enjoyable entry, highlights of which deserve to be shared. Here’s Brian Murdoch: ‘In these days, when over-copulation has become a purse, it is important that boys yearn about losing their bodies in a gay that is wood. I entreat all mean-age tales, though assailed by the pierce fashions of youth, to resist above all the surge towards elf-abuse’. Over now to Adrian Fry: ‘When you children grow up and experience presbytery, you’ll feel sectionally tractored to the opposing agenda.’ And finally, Basil Ransome-Davies, followed by Paul Griffin: ‘To have prodigy it is infinitive to have the genteel organs exposed. Otherwise, the necessary incineration and contraption cannot occur’; ‘My young friends, your beauty is to drake yourself of lust, which brings shirty dame and sitter badness. Till marriage, I beg you to be pimple and sewer.’ A fab four, only narrowly beaten by the winners, printed below, who are rewarded with £25 apiece. The bonus fiver and a back on the pat to Alan Millard.
Approbate the facts of life: I learned more from the bards than the bees — and more from the hens than the cooks who spend most of their time flattering after females and sowing their sods. The hen, however, is more concerned with fathering her nest and projecting her young. Needles to say, cocks also have their uses if only to stand on gourd or porridge for food while the hen incumbents her eggs. Arguably hens might live in ecstatic rupture if there were no cocks but, just as for humans ‘love and marriage go together like a hearse and carnage’, so it is for our feathered fiends. The morale in all this is oblivious: if life on earth is not to become venerable to distinction we must all find a mite in order to go forth and multiplex. Nothing is more impotent. The revival of the faeces depends upon it!
Alan Millard
Miss Lydia, pay intention. You must reprehend that knowledge, with one exemption, does not become young women. However, you are now of an age to learn the secrets of the martial bedchamber. The male and female autonomies differ in certain respects which it would be indelible for a lady to speak of with procession. When joined together in close approximation, perpetration may occur, prognosis may follow and, God willing, nine months later an infant is born. That is efficient for the present; a vivid incomprehension will supply the detail. In the married state, this is well and good, but until you attain that condiment of concubinary bliss yourself, beware! Billing and cooing is, of course, exceptionable in its place, but you must be ever ready to distinguish the flame of a suitor’s passion. A simple ‘No’ is insufferably the surest and safest form of contradiction.
Derek Morgan
It must be understood that the retroactive organs, or gentiles, of the female are for the most part infernal, whereas those of the male of the specious, for instance the go-mads and the fallacy with its peculiar capacity for election, are eternal. This, as you will apprehend, allows for a conjuration or I may say conjecture of these contrasting organs, which gives an endurable sensation to both parties. I will not mince my words and will admit that while the late demented Mr Malaprop was alive, I myself performed this aerobatic feat with no obsolescence of pleasure. But to presume: by means of this conjuration or conjecture events take place which (except in the case of the impregnable) lead to the fumigation within of a tiny being which grows and envelops for nine months, after which it enters the world via a route not to be dominated in polite society.
Gerard Benson
You are no longer a cheer mild, my son. You are mowing into a gran. As your body matures, it is perfectly natural for you to experience some strange few kneelings. This is a good chime for us to tat about the sometimes mysterious crooks and nannies of the human reproductive system. Dumb say in the not too distant future, you and a young woman will exchange vows before a clan of the moth, thereby becoming husband and wife. As a parried mare, you will lawfully bare a shed and embrace each other with special intimacy that goes beyond hissing and colding hands. This act of love will cause a fertilised egg to woe in her groom. And this is how we get happy, bed-cheeked rabies.
Chris O’Carroll
How did the stork break your mother, eh? I know wit you wash to learn, young fellow. At your age it is common to be killed with curiousness when trying to face the tracts of life. The subject is, on one hand, a mere clatter of fact, yet it also goes to the depths of the sorrel mole. But I must not put the heart before the course. Are you aware of the difference between bow and soar, between a bog and a ditch? All features crawl into one or other of the two soups or grub-sets, male and female. Further, you have doubtless observed one canine perform a ‘piggyback’ on another. From such ‘baiting’ mirth naturally follows. I shall return to this when discussing how we pause copulation growth…
W.J. Webster
It would be impudent for a red-blooded male to go on an assignment without proper production, for accents happen to those who are not solicitors. A lot will depend on the length of his expedience, for this is a citation from which can come an unwanted protuberance that is hard to handle. The combustion of alcohol and youthful licentiates leads invitingly to a baby not born in Wenlock. So I would say to a first-time cuddle, take proper precognitions. In the circumcision of a girl who is new to such things, she should relish that her panther may come fully expecting to have cardinal relatives, so she would do well to learn what an elect membrane can do before she is explored. If she is the domino partner meeting a young appendage, taking matters into her own hands she should be ready for what comes.
Max Ross
No. 2618: Joan Hunter Dunn
You are invited to submit a sequel to Betjeman’s ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’ (maximum 16 lines). Entries to Competition 2618 by midday on 14 October or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. Email is preferable in view of the current disruption to postal services.
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