[John Whitworth]

Allegory on the Nile
LUCY VICKERYSATURDAY, 17TH SEPTEMBER 2011
In Competition No. 2713 you were invited to supply a spiel Mrs Malaprop might give in her capacity as a tour guide to a capital city or famous monument of your choice.

This was an enjoyable comp to judge: I have some sympathy with the actress Celia Imrie’s (who played Mrs M) view that, given the current trend towards the use of dull and overused verbal short cuts, the much-mocked Malaprop’s attempts to improve herself by expanding her vocabulary are actually rather creditable.

Printed below are the best of an entry brimming with novelty and hilarity. They earn their authors £25 each; Chris O’Carroll gets £30.

Amsterdam is crisscrossed by so many canards that it has become known as ‘the Venison of the North’. No visit to the city is complicit without a cruise on its Pinteresque waterways. The Anatole France house distracts many florists who care about the moral lesions to be learned from the Adolf Heimlich era and Nazi chimes against humidity. Germinations of readers have been touched by the wartime diorama of a young girl coming of age in her family’s Arctic hideout. Some less histamine-minded visitors are drawn to the city’s comfrey shops, where cannibalism is available for just a few euros per gram. Although marinara is technically illegal in the Neverlands, costumers can purchase small quandaries with relative importunity. In the city’s red light district, procrastination is legal and practiced openly. Women dressed in nothing but skimpy longitude pose in borstal windows, soliciting walk-in custom. (Condoms are de Rigoletto.)
Chris O’Carroll

Before you stands the munificent Colosseum, built under Emperor Titian in the late first centurion. Notice the instinctive captions on the columns, all proscribed in Vesuvius’s book on architecture — plain Doris, then Ironic and finally the elaborate Crustacean. What instigation they gave the Italian Reconnaissance! Inside, while we may shudder to think of Christians being mulled by lions, we still thrill at the sceptical of gladiators in moral combat, one armed with a butler and gladiolus, the other wielding his tripod and reticule. ‘Moribundi te salutant!’ they cried to the great Imprimatur before a calamitous crowd of Roman civets. What a phlegmatic scene it must have been! Of course, the years have seen considerable desiccation of the original conjunction, largely by robbers and pilasters who viewed the stones as treasure grove. But much remains as an emolument for us to fast our eyes upon.
W.J. Webster

...unfortunately hidden behind the dabble-dicker bus. And now, ladles and gentlemen, if you look quirkily to your right and then straight awry to your left, you will see two famous strictures built to commiserate Albert, Prince Concert to Queen Victorious. Although our coach pissed by in a flush, we might reflux for a moment on the porpoise of these two impotent architectural wanders. The Royal Albert Hell was constricted to provide a spice for artistic predictions raging from film premiums to the annual Pram concerts originally perfumed in the Queen’s Hill under the bittern of Sir Henry Wood. Apposite was the Albert Memorabilia with Albert, who was to parish prematurely from typhoon fever, seated at the centaur of the statute surrounded by beautifully scalped cravings. His untimely dearth shuttered the Queen who retreated into solicitous confinement. And now, if you look to the font, you might catch a glimpse of...
Alan Millard

We startle at Buckingham Palace, which has been home to the resigning monarch since Nash reconverted it in Victoriana’s time. The present Queen and her familiars decide here, except when they’re visiting one of their castiles, like Winter and Immoral... New Scotland Yard is the headquarters of the Cosmopolitan Police, who are fatuous throughout the world for always gutting their man... Westminster Abbey dates from the bloody evil period. All English monarchs are drowned in this Goth church, and many royal beddings also take place here... The House of Parleying compromise the Lords and Commoners. The expectorate in each constitution vote for an MP to reprimand them in the Commons, but the Lords aren’t electrocuted — they’re inherited... Trafalgar Square, with Nelson Mandela’s colophon, commensurates Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of the Traffic. Nearby is the National Cattery, which is home to the finest collation outside Italy of Italic art...
Virginia Price Evans

So now we leave Dawning Street, the official residue of Mr Macaroon, and re-enter Whitehall. Soon we come to Travulgar Square, a gathering place for Londoners since time unmemorable. If you glance to your right you will see Nelson’s Colon, erected in honour of the great sea-captain, known to his contemptibles as Admirable Nelson. At the foot of the monument you can see the quadruped of lions scalped by Lancier. Preceding now into St Jones’s Park we find the Maul flanked on one side by several Grace and Flavour Houses on the other by grassland, as an American visitor remarked ‘almost a priory’— and standing proudly at its head, Buckingham’s Phallus, guarded by malicious men in their gay uniforms and wearing their busbies or buskins as they prefer to call them. That excludes our visit for today. Tomorrow we shall visit Exhibitionist Road where many of our museums are elocuted.
Gerard Benson

We’ll go from the Gravy Fountain to the Vatican, where the Supreme Pontius keeps his Swiss Gourds. When he dies there has to be a General Election, which has to go on until they all start smoking. The dead Pontius is then carried off on a cataract and celebrated. The new one, who used to be Cardinal Ratswinger, has been touting around the world, also celebrating. I expect he misses his view of the Seven Hills of Rome: the Levantine, the Querulous, the Palatial, the Scalene, the Adventurous, the Capitoline and the Verminous. How wonderful to be universally warshipped! But sad when you have to do without your Marbles.
Paul Griffin

[Jayne Osborn]

Many conflagrations, Chris! Your entropy was Brillo pad!

[Roger Slater]

My consolations as well. Your entry was four straight and simper rail.

[FOsen]

Christ, I succumb that.

Frank

[Chris O'Carroll]

Thanks, everybody, for your kind (and often even comprehensible) words. I knew that sex and drug jokes would be hot commodities in an Amsterdam entry. But I feared that making light of "Nazi chimes against humidity" might trip the bad taste alarm. Guess I dogged a bullion there.

[Lance Levens]

Chris

Irreparable work!

[Gail White]

Delighted to see one of our guys get the extra 5 pounds!

[Susan McLean]

Congratulations, Chris! Yours was very funny.

Susan