Ground work

In Competition No. 2853 you were asked to incorporate the following words (they are real geological terms) into a piece of plausible and entertaining prose so that they acquire a new meaning in the context of your narrative: Corallian, Permian, Lias, Kimmeridge, Oolite, Cornbrash, Ampthill.

The inspiration for this comp came from a bit in Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful The Old Ways where he muses on the names of the surface rock formations in the British Isles: ‘It’s tempting to lend them hypothetical definitions. Great Oolite (the honorific of the panjandrum of a non-existent kingdom). Cornbrash (a Midwest American home-baked foodstuff)….’

There was a great deal of wit and ingenuity on show in the entry this week and competition was hot. Like Macfarlane a lot of you saw cornbrash as some sort of foodstuff; permian was often a synonym for permanent; and corallian a colour.

Adrian Fry wins the extra fiver. The rest take £30.

Four days into our torrentially rainy cottage holiday in Devon and we’re still indoors playing Kimmeridge. It’s a tiresome game of Nigel’s devising, thus incomprehensibly complex. On day one, the wretched man appointed himself Permian — a role somewhere between pettifogging bureaucrat and capricious God — and hasn’t stopped explaining, elaborating and enforcing arcane rules since. We’re all supposed to be competing for the oolite, a tiny plastic ovoid no one could conceivably want. Kate walked out on day two, unable to play ‘Danny Boy’ on a three-stringed cornbrash as the rules — punctiliously extemporised by Nigel — supposedly demanded. For three days, Geoff relished the game, amassing points — Lias, Nigel calls them, pronouncing the italics — before being disqualified for not knowing that an ampthill was a 14th-century alchemical flask. Now, Sally and I face the Final — the Corallian, Nigel calls it — an Esperanto riddle.