In Competition No. 2569 you were invited to describe a modern social ill of your choice in the style of Charles Dickens.
Ills singled out included bellowing down mobile phones in public, elusive plumbers, and that scourge of the modern age, the potato wedge. Many entries ably demonstrate what George Orwell describes as Dickens’s ‘undisguised repulsion’ at proletarian roughness. Josephine Boyle captures Dickens at his moralising best, while D.A. Prince, on bad language, nimbly slips in a topical slant: ‘Filth even on the answering devices of frail grandfathers…’. Great stuff.
Bravo to those narrowly pipped to the post: the above-mentioned, as well as Adrian Fry, Brian Murdoch, Paul Griffin, Frank McDonald and P.C. Parrish. Bill Greenwell’s impressive Bleak House pastiche takes as its subject the contemporary craze of ‘dogging’, which I had to look up and rather wished I hadn’t. The winners are printed below and get £25 each except a masterly Alan Millard on torture by telephone who gets £30.
They were stressed times, they were cursed times, it was the age of agony, it was the age of angst, it was the epoch of apoplexy, it was the epoch of hypocrisy, it was the season of insensitivities, it was the season of insensibilities — in short, a period of pain and perplexity. Call centres, the curse of the age, were spreading abroad like the plague linking no one to no one. Patience among the populace waned as hapless souls, burdened with speaking machines, sought contact with any who cared to answer only to hear the disembodied voice, as of a ghost, repeating incessantly, ‘Press this, press that. You are in a queue. Please hold the line, your call is important to us.’ And yet, notwithstanding such iniquity, rebellion by those deprived of intercourse with their fellows was not to be. The centres continued to flourish. God help Us, Every One!
Alan Millard
It is far from a pleasing novelty to learn that one’s very identity is at the mercy of footpads conducting their dark trade not in the prehistoric mud and gloom of London’s streets, but in the invisible ether, as though a multitude of angels had disowned their glorious destiny and taken to stealing people’s souls. The theft of self is now the key to the larceny of pelf. The surprise that leaps out at one, when studying a bill for lucullan repasts and entertainment in Bratislava or Gdansk on a day spent in the British Museum, is quite dizzying. It inclines one to suspect the reliability of the individual personality, and it requires a good blast of city air — St Giles will do — to remind ourselves that we cannot divide like amoebas to send one half off on extravagant junkets while a dutiful 50 per cent serves the grindstone.
Basil Ransome-Davies
The Mainchance Home was no home from home. But then, reflected Mr Mickleworth, you can’t have everything. He had to share a room with two others, one of whom emitted an eerie whistle throughout the night, while the other had a liberal attitude to personal property. The food was wretched, and was often whisked away before he could eat it; he was becoming painfully bonier by the day. Still, you couldn’t have everything. The staff, who were in mortal terror of the never-seen Mr Mainchance, were extremely rough, especially on Fridays when the inmates were ‘scrubbed up’ for family visits, which often never happened. But Mr Mickleworth knew that both staff and family were very busy, and you couldn’t have everything. It slowly began to dawn on him that, unless you counted the debilitating heat and the blaring television in the room denominated ‘lounge’, you actually couldn’t have anything.
Noel Petty
Dogging everywhere. Dogging up the river, where it shifts among the picnic benches and the nature trails; dogging down the river, where it drools between the dire dockland housing and the detritus of hostelry car parks. Dogging by the ancient Essex power station, dogging on Margate Sands. Dogging by the pungent pill-boxes at Canvey; dogging at Ebbsfleet, on the platforms and on the walkways; dogging in the precincts and pathways on the Isle of Dogs. Dogging by the front and back seats of ancient Vauxhall Astras, their engines expectorating droplets of diesel; dogging outside light aircraft, resting on the runways like hearth-less crickets; dogging near abandoned omnibuses, rusting in their stations; dogging beside the barges and converted wherries that lounge on a low tide. Hooded figures, fingers sparking dully with half-spent cigarettes, gasping like visitors to a flea circus, with doggers circling on drab early evenings in London’s hulking metropolis.
Bill Greenwell
‘Hold hard, my dear,’ said Mr Hobblechoy, laying a veiny hand on his wife’s arm. ‘Do you propose allowing our boy to leave the house unwarned?’ Master H, hopping slightly from leg to leg, cast longing glances towards the door at this interruption to his escape.
‘I thought —’ began Mrs Hobblechoy, but her husband cut her off with a smile — if, that is, a mere unveiling of the teeth may be called a smile.
‘Never fall to thinking, my love,’ he said. ‘Thinking is blind to peril. Thinking says, “Here is a tree. I shall climb it.” Thinking knows nothing of breaking boughs and broken bones. Thinking is obdurately ignorant of all the Dreadful Possibilities. Only obedience, unthinking obedience, can save us from them.’ He paused and turned his vinegarish eyes upon his son. ‘Now let us hear the child’s health and safety catechism.’
W.J. Webster
The cold caller — that most mysterious of beings, at one and the same time anonymous and familiar, like the signature on a banknote — has ways of his own, as might, one supposes, a far-off civilisation with a regular panoply of customs and beliefs that, to our eyes, would more resemble music hall ‘turns’ than an inventory of cherished rites. Yet the music hall, though not without its rough side, has no disregard of true propriety. It never insidiously intrudes. If it has its eyes upon the wallet of the spectator, it lets him know, clearly and publicly. If its shows occupy the hours of darkness, its candour in the matter of price shares the daylight. A dog that jumps through paper hoops awakes the glad child in everyone; a man who does so with hidden pecuniary intent is a repellent nuisance, like a hungry rat in the scullery.
G.M. Davis
No. 2572: Swing low
You are invited to provide a rugby- or football-style song for another sport (16 lines maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2572’ by 20 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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