‘Poundland and Prejudice’: book titles tweaked for straitened times

In Competition No. 3254, you were invited to tweak a well-known book title to reflect the straitened times we live in and provide an extract. Honourable mentions, in a closely contested week, go to Mark Ambrose’s To Grill a Mockingbird, David Silverman’s The Great Gas Bill and to a trio of Alice’s Adventures in Poundlands (John O’Byrne, Celia Jordan and Richard Spencer).

The prize-winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

Here it was, Guesthouse du Lac, an unexpectedly wearying half-hour walk from the Lowestoft seafront. ‘Guesthouse’ struck Edith as a rather grandiose appellation; bed and breakfast, with its suggestion of the exhausted yet somehow uncomfortable slumber following a journey and dangerously fried food, might have been more apposite. A creased postcard of Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Landscape with Mountain Lake’, incongruously affixed to the pinboard in its subfusc hallway, strained to justify the latter part of its name. This, Edith reflected, unpacking her few grey skirts and secretarial blouses, was what she could afford. Her fellow guests were a boisterous quartet of Polish bricklayers and a fastidious yet threadbare salesman with receding hair whose gingerly manner of segmenting black pudding suggested a civilised upbringing on which he had failed to capitalise. As they cautiously exchanged sallies about the weather, Edith began to imagine the relationship they would never quite have.  Adrian Fry/‘Guesthouse du Lac’

It is a most extraordinary thing, but there is nowhere so cold as the vicinity of a radiator that has been turned off. Out of habit, the three of us huddled around it, and yet I swear we should have been warmer in the snow outside. All the same, we persisted, warmed only by an outsize greatcoat George had found in his garden shed. It must have belonged to a giant, and was holed and incompetently patched, but it afforded us some semblance of dignity after fuel bills crossed the Rubicon of £1,000 a month.