For Competition 3461 you were asked to submit toe-curling analogies.This invitation produced a stream of entries that were glorious in their banal, laboured, overwrought and tasteless awfulness. Bad writing, it turns out, has some high-brow admirers: the notoriously dreadful poet and novelist Amanda McKittrick Ross’s fans included Aldous Huxley, C.S Lewis and Siegfried Sassoon, while Mark Twain pronounced her novel Irene Iddesleigh ‘one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time’.
The offerings below earn their authors a £5 John Lewis voucher per analogy printed.
The noise he made, if expressed in writing, could be taken for the surname of a mildly dyslexic Polish plumber.
His face was the colour of the water in a tin bath that had just been used for the ablutions of nine grubby children on an autumn evening in 1887.
The ball went winging down the pitch like a flight of angels carrying the soul of a particularly pious nun directly to the bosom of Abraham.
He was about as energetic as a bookworm which had burrowed as far as page 327 of Middlemarch and had then been rendered comatose through a mixture of overeating and general depression.
Brian Murdoch
I was so tired that I felt as though I’d been knocked on the head, chopped up into small pieces, and rendered down into fat, bone meal and dog food – in a word, I was knackered.
She tucked into her plate of ice cream with all the gusto of an epicure during the Qing Dynasty scooping the brains out of a live monkey.
Brian Allgar
She tipped out the huge bag of cherries, and they piled up like Lords amendments to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
The golf ball lay on the putting surface like the reverse image of a roundel of snot on a pristine white handkerchief.
Nicholas Hodgson
Derek wept, feeling that his hopes of love and happiness were as vain as a search for Donald Trump’s superego.
His sense of the appropriate was such that he would have turned up in full fig as best man at a nudist wedding.
She gave me a contemptuous glare, as if I had vomited on her pet corgi while exposing myself.
Basil Ransome-Davies
The T-Rex devoured its meal like Julia Child consuming her first Dover sole with a crisp Pouilly-Fumé.
His heart thrilled at her beauty, like a nit on the first day of primary school sighting a full classroom.
He felt as smug as Shakespeare bequeathing his wife the second-best bed, knowing that the best had woodworm and this secret would seriously puzzle future scholars.
Janine Beacham
The aquarium was as blue as a chameleon would have been if the chameleon had been standing right in front of the aquarium.
She was as sad as a motherless kitten offered a dish of water when it had been expecting a strawberry daiquiri.
Max Gutmann
Sir Keir’s speech landed with all the impact of a drunken Geordie’s stomach contents splashing on to the pavement after ten pints and a curry.
After so long apart they fell into each other’s arms and were like dog faeces caught in the intricate chevron grooves of an expensive training shoe: inseparable.
Joe Houlihan
Love them as she did, Fliss found it impossible to think of the twins as individuals, a problem she also experienced trying to single out a Cairngorm.
Elon boredly opened and closed blank Word documents like a capricious God gifting life to infants, only to extinguish it in a Victorian diphtheria epidemic immediately thereafter.
Adrian Fry
She woke up feeling as jubilantly full of poetry as Simon Armitage’s briefcase on a bright spring morning when he was on his way to perform at a poetry festival.
George Simmers
As Spain prepared to lift the World Cup, the President lingered around like a toxic ex-boyfriend.
Death is just Nature’s way of telling you that you need to slow down.
David Silverman
She poked her little tongue out flirtatiously, like her lover’s glans peeping out of his underpants.
Gently, with the respect of a slaughterhouse director removing valuable glands from a carcass, he caressed her body.
Roger Rengold
The work of the committee was like slugs copulating: there was much frothing, no conclusion for a long time; and then more problems hatched out.
She approached social occasions like a nervous passenger, who curls her toes whenever the driver approaches a red traffic light.
He was laughing like a demon in Hell, who has just opened the suggestions box.
They were thrown together, then separated, like underpants in a washing machine.
Frank Upton
His gleaming teeth glistened like glazed iced buns on display in a baker’s shop window.
As they embraced, she felt her heart beating like a blacksmith hammering an iron door-knocker into shape on his anvil.
Alan Millard
No. 3464: Ods against
A modern man (or woman!) tries to get home after a decade away but obstacles keep presenting themselves and excuses are needed. You are invited to submit a passage or poem relating one such episode. Please email entries (max. 16 lines/150 words) to competition@spectator.co.uk by 19 August.
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