Famous writers get to grips with DIY

In Competition No. 3151 you were invited to imagine famous authors reflecting on their struggles with DIY.

Highlights in a terrific entry included John Osborne on grouting, A.E. Housman on the torture of cutting your own hair and several accounts of W.B. Yeats’s botched attempts at sorting out the plumbing (‘things fall apart’). I much admired Mike Morrison’s reworking of Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’ and also tip my hat to strong -performers -Patrick Massey, Dominica Roberts, Nick Hodgson, Bill Greenwell, George Simmers and Anne Parsons.

It was especially tough to choose the winners this week but those who made the cut appear below and pocket £25 each.

While we were shut in there was an outbreak of cleaning the barbecues. This you did personally, in an intimate way, which created the element of tragedy. Without the element of tragedy, there was only disgust and the hollow feeling you have when you watch a cowardly matador. Those who have laid their barbecue away for the winter uncleaned face harder work and, too, the disgust that comes with handling filth. But in truth without the disgust there is no tragedy, only a vague disappointment such as you find in the novels of Henry James. A man needs to know this. There was a waiter in Key West whose mother cleaned his barbecue, and he is not spoken of by name. For myself, I cleaned like a mitrailleur, first the stripping down, then always the soaking, then the fine detail, the streets outside as empty as a whore’s promise. Basil Ransome-Davies/Ernest Hemingway

Smiling Mfanwy, beguiling Myfanwy Changing the bulb in my high-hanging light, Nanny and mum to me, d-i-y chum to me, All of my life I have cherished the sight Of you standing tiptoe there, high on my nursery chair, Wobbling and laughing and stretching up while Your skirt rises up to show glimpses of what’s below — Ankles in stockings of flesh-coloured lisle.