[John Whitworth]

Competition: Ouch!
SATURDAY, 9TH APRIL 2011
Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition

In Competition No. 2691 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies. Gratitude and respect to my opposite number over at the Washington Post’s Style Invitational contest from whom I plundered this idea. So impressed was I by the sublimely funny winning entries this challenge generates across the pond that I felt compelled to throw down the gauntlet to Spectator competitors. You did me proud: I squirmed and chuckled my way through an entry of inspired awfulness.

The first five winners, printed below, pocket £18 each; the rest get £10.

The state of the bathroom could only bring to mind the surface of a remote planet in which dungheaps and memphitic swamps co-existed with the entire toiletries and fragrances range of Galeries Lafayette.

The accountant had the world-weary air of a ferret that had been up so many trouser legs that life held no more surprises.

How to describe this novel? Picture it as The Aeniad meets Othello meets Moby Dick meets Peter Rabbit meets Mein Kampf meets the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus meets The Highway Code. In that ballpark, anyway.
G M. Davis

His morals were as twisted as an expensive Sicilian corkscrew that had been used as a way of extracting the pith from a bad apple before being driven over by an Eddie Stobart truck.

She gazed at him as lovingly as if he were her ear-lobe, replete with a diamond-encrusted earring, as reflected in a Parisian mirror.

She spoke as throatily as if a frog and its family had got into her throat and smoked a few packets of Peter Stuyvesant before growing claws and scratching at the inside of her thorax.
Bill Greenwell

Her manner became so suddenly grim it was as though she had injected all of Aberdeen directly into a vein.

The cat’s eyes were as malevolent as those of a High churchman who has just caught sight of a woman bishop.

The tarmac was grey, as though someone had inadvertently mixed whitest snow with darkest midnight, and had carelessly unloosed the result upon the unsuspecting roadway.
George Simmers

His bald head shone distinctively like one of those really expensive duck eggs that you see in the aisle next to the ordinary supermarket eggs on special offer — and you just know it’s not for you.

The prosecuting lawyer’s searching question left him as perplexed as if he were a contestant on Countdown and had to make a word from nine letters, five of which are Ns and Rs — with no help at all coming from the three vowels and the one remaining letter.

Her new phone was so cool, OMG! so cool like it used to be in the North Pole before those stupid gases melted all the icebergs.
John O’Byrne

The winding country lane snaked endlessly ahead like a continuous series of lavatory S bends joined together and laid flat.

Being tall with a slim waist, straw-coloured hair and unusually large head, she reminded one of the BT tower with a thatched roof.

Seeing her fast asleep in bed, he tucked her up as tenderly as a man spreading a car cover over his newly polished Porsche.
Alan Millard

The main course was as sinful as if loin chops cut from the Beast of the Apocalypse had been marinated in ambrosia and then flambéed over the fires of Hell itself.

Watching this film is like snuggling amorously down into a warm four-poster and then finding that the other occupant is the unwrapped mummy of Rameses II.
Brian Murdoch

He clumsily tried to fold her into his arms, a bit like folding a bottom fitted king-size sheet but not getting it right and starting over and getting it wrong again and finally saying oh the hell with it.

He was as angry as an eight-year-old who spends six hours building a Lego battleship and then his three-year-old sister smashes it to pieces and stomps on it so he whacks her and he gets severely punished.
Mae Scanlan

Her earrings swung like a glittering rain-drenched rainbow chopped into small pieces, with the gleam of bacon-rind hung under the bird table.

He punched in his pin number like an ex-public schoolboy delivering an efficient sexual experience before going on to contemplate whether it was to be bacon or sausages for breakfast, or both.
D.A. Prince

The sea was agitated, like an old man demanding directions in a library as his wife is telling him to put the batteries back in his hearing aid.

He was as dull and uninspired as, I don’t know what.
Frank Osen

The arsenal of nuclear missiles stood ready, each one like a mercury-coated sausage full of death.

Across the Libyan capital, machine guns stuttered like Patrick Campbell in the early 1970s incarnation of Call My Bluff.
Adrian Fry

[Jayne Osborn]

Oh, what clever people!

These are really funny. Everyone deserves 25 quid for those. Well done Bill, Frank and George.

[Jerome Betts]

Indeed, Jayne, this was a gorgeous one, and kudos in spades to Bill George and Frank. My favourites were GMD's ferret, George's Aberdeen-injection and High Churchman and Brian Murdoch's ,
unwrapped mummy.
But wouldn't the first three of these be perfect for PGW if he were still writing?

[Chris O'Carroll]

Truly, the winners shine out like a golden stream of bat's piss when all around is dark. Congratulations.

After reading the Spectator results this morning, I came across this quotation, attributed to Sam Anderson: "The culture of major league baseball is a jumbo platter of deep-fried masculinity: it's like a y-chromosome throwing a bachelor party for a penis with a beard."

[John Whitworth]

By God, Chris, that would have won something. Meditate on a bearded penis.