Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Toe-curling analogies

[Heather Broccard-Bell] 
issue 12 November 2022

In Competition No. 3274, you were invited to supply toe-curling analogies.

Bad writing has attracted some high-brow fans. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis revelled in the overwrought prose of the ‘uniquely dreadful’ Amanda Kittrick Ros, and used to take it in turns to read aloud from her work to see which of them could last longer without laughing. Some competitors accompanied their entries with apologetic notes, commiserating with me for having to judge this challenge, but it was a hoot.

The winners earn a fiver per analogy.

His hand slid up her thigh like a string of partly defrosted sausages that had been imbued with lascivious intent, inexpertly animated, but then denied any sense of decorum.
They skipped together through the park, accumulating on their bare feet a mixture of dog faeces and sweet wrappers that formed a pungent metaphor of the human condition.
A.H. Harker

As Gerald read his fiancée’s Dear John, he felt the catastrophic end of their relationship as the swamping of a primordial land bridge, leaving a drowned, irrecoverable Doggerland of separation.
Five minutes of soul-crushing suspense at a lonely bus stop generated the anxious intensity of a hushed nation awaiting news of Waterloo.
The scornful, humiliating glance she gave him etched a dotted line across his neck and tore his head off at the perforation.
Haaland’s scoring record suggests that Nietzsche‘s postulation of an eternal recurrence is fighting a grudge match against Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty in a Promethean bid to counter the entropic winding-down of the Premiership.  
Basil Ransome-Davies



Her intervention was as timely and useful as a man running along the steeply sloping deck of the Titanic, shouting ‘I’ve found the binoculars!’
It was as gorgeously satisfying as thrusting rancid custard pies into the faces of all the TV pundits on Earth, in alphabetical order.
Frank Upton

She was as quiet as a timid, tongueless and Trappist moth in fur slippers tiptoeing stealthily along the edge of an angora sweater fresh from its stint in a freezer.

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