Spectator competition winners: adverbial short stories

In Competition No. 3183 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘My Year of Living [insert adverb of your choice here]’. Highlights in a varied and engaging entry included John Priestland’s ‘Year of Living Paradoxically’, which combined elements of Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel Paradox with the Grandfather Paradox (think Back to the Future), and Janine Beacham’s teleportation of Henry David Thoreau to the 21st century for a ‘Year of Living Deliberately’.

The winners — led by Adrian Fry, whose nonsense-inspired story captures -especially well the discombobulation of living in a world where all bets are off — earn £25 each.

I started my year midway through Lecteveril, a month of my own devising falling between Gallimaufry and a clump of Concurrent Tuesdays. Quitting my job repurposing the between-movement silences in Beethoven symphonies as a solution for noise pollution in Chinese megacities, I reinvented myself as an author, penning a book of stamps critics found indistinguishable from Roald Dahl, if only from the distaff side. My publisher, impressed, demanded an autobiography; I mimed Soviet gerontocrat Konstantin Chernenko’s, alas without the junket recipes. Wanting to spend more time with my ankles, I went cloud shooting off the North Face of East Grinstead; bagged a cumulonimbus I now (don’t tell the ocelots!) keep in the fridge to prevent the milk turning lucid. Celebrated Christmas twice; I didn’t get the wassailing right first time, confusing it with deflowering the ombudsman. Earlier, as my year drew to its close, I unexpectedly woke up Walloon. Adrian Fry/‘My Year of Living Nonsensically’

Lockdown has been such a blessing. Masks became acceptable in public; mine are full-faced. I can have everything delivered (not to my real address, of course) and spend many fascinating hours devising new passwords of devilish complexity via VPN and an anonymous proxy server. I have three decoy email accounts, as well as my real one, and my phone encrypts my position in a way that only I can decipher.