[John Whitworth]

Bill Greenwell takes the fiver. Frank Osen and Janet Kenny also star. We are back in strength. Well done.

The new competition is for prose but I might dip my toe in.

NO. 2720: odd job
Harold Pinter wrote for the Dick Emery Show and Samuel Beckett was tempted by a career in grocery trade journalism. You are invited to supply a piece of prose written by a well-known author working in an unlikely context (150 words maximum).

[FOsen]

It was hot and fine that afternoon in the arena at Madrid. Marquez played the crowd with cape-work the way a practiced fisherman will play a marlin at the end of a light sash-cord line, tall and flat-backed and easy and swift. Then Marquez had faltered, gored deeply—in an ankle-length tulle skirt of contrasting taupe and fuschia, and the old Castillian spat contemptuously into his cosmopolitan. “Now the fashionistas will turn, the way they turn on everyone.” As the couturiers dragged Marquez off the catwalk, the crowd yelled “Bull!” with that arrogance that only fashionistas have and which makes all other arrogance seem not fierce in comparison. “Ah,” said the Castilian, “Marquez had not the footwork for those Manolo Blahniks. I would have given a thousand pesetas to see DiMaggio in the Manolo Blahniks. It would have been fierce”. “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it exquisitely pretty to think so.”

Frank

[Ann Drysdale]

Oh, glorious. All the wimmies will love this, Frank!

[Jerome Betts]

John, what is the deadline for this (Spec 2720 Odd Job) and also Spec 2721 Take 6?

[Chris O'Carroll]

Not meaning to trespass on John's turf, Jerome, but I figure I can pass along a couple of deadline dates without overstepping the bounds of propriety:

For Comp. 2720, the deadline is 26 Oct.

For Comp. 2721, the deadline is 3 Nov.

[John Whitworth]

Thanks Chris. You are not trespassing at all.

[Lance Levens]

During a dull, dark, and gaseous day immediately post-chicken salad repast , when the bile stirred oppressively in my bowels, I descended the gloomy steps at Walmart, alone, constipated, passed through a singularly dreary tract of sheet rock and building supplies and at length found myself, as the minutes of my lunch break ended, within view of the melancholy John with the Loud Flusher. I know not how it was --but, with the first sniff of lysol, a sense of bloated nausea pervaded my spirit. I say bloated; for the gas was unrelieved by any of those half-pleasurable releases of my delightfully fissiporous boyhood and I looked upon the scene before me anticipating the thunderous flushing sound that would reverberate through the building and render me the odoriferous laughing stock of Outdoor Aluminum Furniture.