Competition | 4 April 2009

In Competition No. 2589 you were invited to submit an extract from the school essay of a well-known figure past or present, aged eight, entitled ‘What I Did On My Holidays’.
It was a large and vivid entry, and competition was hot for a place in the winners’ enclosure. Those narrowly pipped to the post include Adrian Fry’s scary eight-year-old John Stuart Mill: ‘We stopped at a fish and chip stall where, as a philosophical investigation, Father attempted to order only “and”; the linguistic and ontological implications arising from this incident proved unexpectedly sustaining.’ And J.C.H. Mounsey’s John Prescott, clearly already struggling with anger-management issues, who comes to blows with a donkey. Well done, too, to Mae Scanlan, Gerard Benson and Barry Baldwin.

The winners, printed below, get £25 each. The bonus fiver goes to Basil Ransome-Davies for his portrait of a young Sartre in the grip of the first rumblings of existential angst.

We went to the seaside. It rained and Papa and Mama were not getting on. At breakfast Papa said I could have a croissant or a pain chocolat but not both. So I had to choose. And a funny thing happened. I realised that I was not free not to choose. Even choosing to refuse to choose is a choice. I began to get a headache. But I wanted both so I cried and then I was sick.
The next day I went for a walk on my own. That was an authentic choice, or so I told myself. But can we ever know? And why did an ordinary pebble on the beach suddenly seem so horrible? Is reality a sort of false thing, like a play, with everyone playing parts? I thought these were really interesting questions, so I didn’t mind the rain.