[John Whitworth]

Hallo Jayne. Are you there? My PC is not connecting with my printer so all I can do is type this up.

There have been heated arguments in the press about which county is best. You are invited to write a poem with the title 'The Best County' or 'The Worst County'. Maximum 16 lines. Send your entries by post (The Oldie 65 Newman Street London W1T 3EG or email (comps@theoldie.co.uk) to Competition No 190 by 29th May. Don't forget to include you postal address

[John Whitworth]

Hard Cheese on you furriners I do see. You could try Yorkshire. Like Texas but even more so and they speak funny. Kent, ah there is nowhere on God's earth like Kent!


The Best County

Kent, Kent, glorious Kent!
Your fare from Saint Pancras is money well spent.
A week in the city
Is very tough titty.
It’s ever so pretty in glorious Kent.

Kent, Kent, glorious Kent!
When Saints spoke of Paradise that’s what they meant.
So hurry on over
To Margate or Dover.
You’re living in clover in glorious Kent.

Kent, Kent, glorious Kent!
It won’t cost a packet to buy or to rent.
Though London is blightful
And perfectly frightful,
It’s always delightful in glorious Kent.


Oh, Bazza won the dictionary and Rob Stuart won too. Congratulations to you both!

[Adrian Fry]

'It won't cost a packet to buy or to rent', John? Poetic licence indeed.

[John Whitworth]

Very true Adrian. Keeps out the riff-raff though. My daughter's house cost £190,000. You won't get a lot of house in London for that. Agreed you could get a palace in Yorkshire. But you'd have to live in Yorkshire and you don't want to do that, do you?

Among Yorkshiremen? People like Geoffrey Boycott? Brrrr. I was having breakfast in a Canterbury caff and there was the Kent Cricket Captain (a great man who drinks and smokes like the rest of us) plus charming family. And all for the price of an English Breakfast.

Wiltshire huh. Do you live in Stonehenge? Come on Adrian.

[Rob Stuart]

That's a good start, John.

In Norfolk folk are vile and base,
They’re foul of heart and foul of face
And make this unappealing place
A living hell.

Their sordid taste for incest shows
In supernumerary toes.
A local with just two of those
Is doing well.

They spend the damp and dreary days
In philistinic, bumpkin ways
Like using books of Shakespeare’s plays
As toilet roll.

And even though these missing links
May like their county’s country stinks,
The out-of-towner gags and thinks
That it’s a hole.

[Ann Drysdale]

Rob, perhaps you should have a closer look at line 6. As it stands it suggests to me a spiritual element to the nether digits of these folk. Was that what you intended to convey?

[Rob Stuart]

Er, no. 'Super-numenary' just means additional. Is it better without the hyphen, do you think?

[Ann Drysdale]

Forgive me, I was confusing it with supernumerary, a term with which I am more familiar in relation to extra toes, nipples etc. I was adept at removing the latter from goats, with surgical scissors, so it once formed part of my everyday vocabulary, thus blinding me to your alternative.

[Rob Stuart]

Oh dear. That is what I meant, I just misspelled it. Thanks Ann! I'm still not seeing any spiritual element, though.

[Ann Drysdale]

Because a numen is a divine spirit and I thought if they had supernumenary toes, those toes must be especially possessed of such unworldly qualities.

Look upon this either as a warning against the insidious encroachment of sanserif fonts, wherein burn all too easily becomes bum, or as a divine revelation from your Aunt Jobiska.