Competition No 3709

Set by George Cowley, 26 November

Jason Cowley wrote in the NS that "modern travel writing is in crisis, too often no more than an indulgence of the ego". We asked for just such a piece.

Report by Ms de Meaner

I liked Frank Murray: "Visit [the Eiffel Tower] by all means, but if you have your camera with you, you may wish to do what I did: take your photo and then digitally remove the offending structure to capture the Chaillot Palace as it is really meant to be seen." The rest of you all did pretty well, and hon menshes also to W J Webster for twice using the word "palimpsest" (". . . myself and Rome. This city of palimpsest set upon palimpsest uncannily echoes the layered phases of my own development") and to Paul Sweeting (". . . eventually my travails bore fruit: I did indeed book a fortnight in Majorca - perhaps next season's Cuba? - with Thomas Cook". £20 to the winners, and the goes voucher to D A Prince.

"The centre of the universe travels within us," I write in my journal, a leather-bound notebook made to my particular requirements by some ancient Cambridge bookbinders whose links with literary elites would make a fascinating study. If only I had the time. I sit here in Les Deux Maggots, the latest in that long line of literati who find Paris so conducive to the development of higher thoughts, impressing my pensees not just into this paper, but into the table, the floor, the very air.

Fantasy takes over: future Rough Guides, Time Outs, recording my presence here, my use of this corner table in the genesis of the next wave of literary exploration of our desperate, broken world. So many questions - where? why? - and the largest, the constant "Who am I?", which keeps me on the move, pushing at the edge of countries, continents, into the spaces beyond. Paris - and me: why Paris? I could go anywhere - that's what travel means. But the subtext, the relationship between the permanent but ever-changing here and the pure fire that drives my quest, is the subject. Moi, je dit - and the city takes on a new, exciting shape.

D A Prince

I felt awed by being in Rome - more, it was as if fateful coincidence had brought me there, of all places. Here, on 22 March 1957 - uncannily, just six weeks before I was born - a treaty was signed that laid the foundations for the European Union. And Sheffield, barely 20 miles across the Pennines from my birthplace, was, like Rome, a city built on hills. I realised I was not a foreign visitor, but an orphan returning, a native of a special kind who had always, at heart, belonged to the culture I was now encountering for the first time in the flesh. No matter that I couldn't speak the language: I related at a deeper level than words to the sights and sounds around me - atavistically and intimately.

Such a profound revelation was inevitably a shock - and one that para-lysed me till I roused myself and managed to find my way to the hotel lift for a tremulous three-storey ride to the ground-floor coffee shop. The coffee was bitter, and served in meagre quantities considering the price - no doubt what tourists were fobbed off with - but I knew that I had recovered my spiritual home.

G M Davis

When London was visited by me recently, I was not at all what it had expected. I have a surprisingly sunny temperament, with a year-round dry sense of humour, and am altogether friendlier and more hospitable than my reputation might lead one to believe. My visit was in the autumn, so I was less busy than usual, and the city was able to have almost all of me to itself. During the day, it opened up its parks, museums and art galleries to me, and at night staged West End shows for my pleasure. In all, London enjoyed my presence for two weeks, but cannot pretend to have discovered everything that I have to offer - it would take a lifetime of being me to do that. But at least it caught some of my flavour, which is all any major city can ever hope to do. Would that they could all be visited by me ("Had we but Reeve enough, and time . . ."). But I, the Eternal Traveller, will now grant Rome a visit, and so London must bid me a tearful farewell. It joins those other fortunate cities that can say: "Be seen by Reeve and die!"

Peter Reeve

I'd sooner have stayed in Brighton, watching whichever sex I'm fancying this week, but it's a free trip from the Guardian - naff paper, good money. As my old mum - a decent, working-class woman who hated foreigners - would have said, I can't refuse a freebie.

Anyway, I was the only person in the world who knew how amazingly popular the Russians were in Afghanistan. If that fat ponce John Simpson can go, so can I. And he gets paid more than me, which proves that the struggle for women's equality isn't over.

Those Northern Alliance guys have wonderful legs; I'd be happy to shag one - or more. In our postmodern world, that's surely the only meaningful way of deciding which side you're on in a war.

I'm now changing my mind about the burqa. I've been putting a bit of weight on, and I think I'd look good in one. I do hate the way lefties let their old-fashioned principles get in the way of their fashion sense.

Ian Birchall

No 3712 Set by Gavin Ross

The Ground Force team set out to transform a famous garden: for example, the Garden of Eden, Cold Comfort Farm ("Charlie, take a look at this woodshed!"), Babylon, the Secret Garden or any other famous plot.Max 200 words by 10 January (to appear in issue of 21 January 2002) E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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