Spectator competition winners: Love in the Time of Covid-19

In Competition No. 3143, a nod to García Márquez’s 1985 novel, you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘Love in the Time of Covid-19’ in the magical realist style.

Magic realism has been contaminated somewhat by overuse and is in any case not to everyone’s taste. But if done well it can be wondrous and transporting, and it lends itself well to trauma narratives. As the late poet and translator Alastair Reid wrote of Márquez: ‘What … [he] is showing us all the time is the humanising power of the imagination. In all his writing, the imagination is no mere whimsy, nor a Latin-American eccentricity: it is a way of survival, as we say nowadays.’

This was a tricky challenge but attracted a decent-sized entry nonetheless. As well as the old hands, there has been a surge of newcomers, which is cheering to see. Commendations to Timothy Clegg, Jeremy Carlisle, Margaret Bond, Nick Syrett and Philip Sheahan. The winners earn £30 .

On his 90th birthday, Umford Nairn caught fire. Twelve weeks of lockdown in his tiny apartment catalysed with the presence, in an apartment of the opposite block, of Ms Consuela Ximenez, causing the conflagration. They’d never been close, though he’d lusted after the shadow on her bedroom wall as nightly she retired. Now, socially distanced by decree, he was aflame with unquenchable passion. Cawing at one another from their balconies like ancient ravens, neither able properly to see or hear the other on account of the usual geriatric infirmities, they had become an odd couple. He’d sent, by means of online retail, romantically speculative love tokens: bagpipes, carnivorous lupins, a semaphore edition of Proust. The entitled smile with which she accepted his tribute lit frustration into incandescence. Nairn leapt from his balcony to hers, ecstatic flames of love immunising and immolating them both as the pleasures and terrors of touch resurged.Adrian