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.