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Competition No 3790

Set by George Cowley, 14 July

We asked for an article about or by one of Simon Heffer's "illiberal liberals".

Report by Ms de Meaner

I especially enjoyed the start of Bill Greenwell's entry (" 'I'm free!' . . . was the phrase on Mandela's lips when he strode out of chokey, even if he had borrowed the phrase from Are You Being Served?"). However, while sure that it was very clever, I wasn't quite sure I understood it. An hon mensh, nevertheless. £20 to the winners, and an additional wad of Tesco vouchers to the supreme champion, Anne Du Croz.

I grew up in the Sixties, when everyone understood the maxim: "You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives." You put yourself through so much while your children are dependent. You want to be out there campaigning for human rights, or against pollution, but you're stuck changing nappies and pureeing vegetables! I believe all parental obligation ceases once children are grown. My partner and I are on speaking terms with both our offspring, but see as little of them as possible. Our son, Spike, is gay, and naturally I am happy about this, but his lover is an Anglican curate, and he himself has become a Christian. I can't fault his education, and he has a good natural sciences degree, so I feel that, in espousing an irrational creed, he has chosen to cut himself off from us. I was delighted when our daughter, Moonbeam, married Yusuf, a Somali camelherd. However, after she gave up her career as an Oxfam water engineer to become what she calls a home-maker, in Purley, I no longer felt inclined to maintain contact. Naturally, I might feel differently if she gave me a grandchild.

Anne Du Croz

Let's face it, refugees are not popular in this country.Why? There are complaints that they take what belongs to the indigenous population, but what is that indigenous population? Maynard Keynes said that we are all, in the end, dead, but we are also all, in the end, immigrants, or pretty much so. Our ancestors were Vikings or Normans or Jutes or Angles - "wogs", as the far right might call them. That is what, if truth be known, this is all about. Prejudice.

The refugees who come here are energetic, entrepreneurial people: they don't sit at home complaining about the lack of this or that, they go out in search of it. The people opposing these worthy immigrants are the feckless working classes, or as I call them, the couldn't fecking care less working classes. They sit in their housing estates with nothing better to do than protest as soon as decent people arrive from abroad with the prospect of contributing something.

Geoff Horton

Look, it's a free country. People should be allowed to eat what they like. If they choose to poison themselves with sugar, fat and additives, that is their informed decision. If they are intent on aiding and abetting the criminal exploitation of poor subsistence farmers in the third world, rendered dependent on cash crops by the greed of industrialised capitalism, that is between them and their conscience. I love to see young people enjoying themselves and would not wish to be a party-pooper, even if they insist on being culturally impoverished by a terminally decadent transatlantic imperialism. What I do object to is people crunching their popcorn and slurping their far from diet Cokes throughout the entire showing of Pedro Almodovar's Hable con ella. Let them get obese with their Clueless-like Britney videos from Blockbuster in the privacy of their own homes.

David Silverman

No 3793 Set by George Cowley

In this tiny space, it's time we had some more limericks. Let's do . . . Tony Blair.

As many goes as you like by 15 August (to appear the issue dated 25 August). E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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