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Competition No 3800

Set by Brendan O'Byrne, 22 September

You were asked to write an extract that included a well-known saying and show what led up to its being said.

Report by Ms de Meaner

I was interested by the way some of you took an actual well-known saying at face value while others mangled the quotation, which obviously needed different skills to make work, producing original versions from which our later well-known sayings evolved - as in "Take care of the ponce and the penes will take care of themselves", "One's wallow does not make a summer" and "Too many Cooks spoil the broth". The last of those three referred, as you might imagine, to the ginger-headed, extended Cook (as in Robin) family. But although the vision conjured up was quite appealing, I felt the idea of loads of Cooks milling around and getting in each other's way in the kitchen didn't stray far enough from the point of the original, ie, whether the cooks are actually named Cook or not seemed beside the point. Hon menshes to John Marriott, Lisbeth Raike, John O'Byrne and Barrie Heads. £20 to the winners. The overall winner is John Griffiths-Colby, who also gets the vouchers.

Louis XV not only lent his name to a furniture style, he took an active interest in its design. Sitting down for long periods, as his exalted role required, he soon grew hypersensitive to any discomfort. It made him irascible and hampered his policy agenda. One particular chair, grand and ornate but painfully hard on the buttocks, irked him constantly.

The king sent for Puivert, a renowned artisan but too low-born to have received court patronage hitherto. Puivert was commanded to refashion the chair so that it was no longer torture to use. It was a far harder task than he imagined. Time and again he made alterations, until the chair was outwardly a stranger to its former self. But as in the fable of the princess and the pea, the royal flesh flinched at imperfections that no one else could detect.

It was the end for Puivert, who had foolishly boasted of his new status. His pride collapsed and he took fatally to the bottle after Louis had crushed his hopes of fame and fortune with the immortal judgement: "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chaise!"

Basil Ransome-Davies

"Manuel, look who we have here - it's Juan RodrIguez . . ."

"Never heard of him."

"Hey, Luis, look who it is, your old amigo Juan . . ."

"Sorry, I don't think we've met."

"Hey, Alfonso, Xavier, Pablo - quick, come over here. Isn't it great to see good old Juan again!"

"Can't say I've had the pleasure . . ."

"Me neither."

"Nope, sorry, but nice meeting you anyway . . ."

"Hey Ramon, Miguel, Enrique and Pedro! Guess what, Juan RodrIguez has come to see us!"

"Juan Who?"

"Hey, Rosita, come quick. Down at the cantina Juan's giving free tequila with the tortillas and chilli peppers!"

"Who's Juan?"

"Ola, Juan Francisco de Rioja - do you remember Juan . . ."

"Of course I do. How could I forget him? Hi, Juan, how'ya doin'?"

"Fine, Juan, how about you?"

"Oh, well, I suppose it just goes to show: it takes Juan to know Juan."

David Silverman

In the middle of the 19th century, the Dutch were renowned for their skill in rearing offspring of significantly unpleasant appearance. This practice arose, it would seem, almost as a pre-emptive antithesis of other European genetic experiments of 100 years later in purity. At a distance of a century and a half, it is unclear why they chose to rear ugly-headed children, but this they did. It has been postulated that, as a backlash against insane economic privations wrought by tulip bulbs and the infamous quest for the epitome of botanical beauty within this monocotyledonous plant, an overzealous religious splinter group, known only as EarthQuakers, coalesced. This hardline faction determined to parody mankind's financial folly and ultimate vanity through a living statement and testimony to that effect. Single-mindedly, they sought to represent the indignity and degradation suffered by ordinary people, in the pursuit of botanical perfection by an elite few, such that those few should have to suffer visual trauma in perpetuity in their everyday lives. "The problem has reared its ugly head again" is a remarkable misconstruction, dating from this time.

It would appear, however, that experiments faltered after the third generation, when encouraging such individuals to breed with each other became overly difficult and somewhat unrealistic.

John Griffiths-Colby

No 3803 Set by George Cowley

Tessa Jowell writes (NS, 29 September): "The sense of independence and irreverence embedded in British culture is something to celebrate." We'd like irreverent profiles of a member of any august body (C of E, House of Lords, etc). The more august the person profiled the better: where's the fun in being irreverent about John Prescott?

Max 200 words by 24 October (to appear in issue dated 3 November). E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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