Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store

Competition No 3809

Set by Brendan O'Byrne, 24 November

You were asked for a "scam letter" ghost-written by a famous author of your choice.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Well done, and a Happy Christmas to all my darlings out there, who have lightened my week during the past year. Soon we will be publishing the yearly totals and wondering if this will be the year when Dear Bill is toppled. This week, hon menshes to Keith Norman (Samuel Beckett), John O'Byrne (George W Bush: "They've got weapons of mass destruction"), Katie Mallett (Shakespeare) and R J Pickles (Smollett). The winners get £20; the fairy on the top of the tree is Ian Birchall, who also gets the Tesco vouchers.

Hey, Daddy-O! How you doing? Are you depressed, low, in one of those bad night blues where it's dark and raining and everyone walks round with their heads bowed, staring at the ground?

Yeah? And is it because you just don't have enough money? Enough to buy those things you want, like a brand new Cadillac so you and your chick can take off and go, go, go, man?

Then the El Dorado Mining Company is the answer to all your problems.

Equipped with a genuine treasure map from an old Zen prospector who spent 20 years panning in the mountains of Bolivia, the El Dorado Mining Company will be locating the richest lodes of gold and silver anywhere in this whole Beat world!

To get your shares, all you have to do is send $10,000 immediately to:

J Kerouac

The Lonesome Fire Watcher's Cabin

The Allegheny Mountains

Act now, and, like, you can quit that job and hit the road like some crazy Buddhist pilgrim who knows all life is holy and goes on looking for the truth because he knows it's out there somewhere just waiting for him, man! . . .

Michael Cregan (Jack Kerouac)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young person in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an investment opportunity.

However small, a good fortune may be persuaded to grow, thereby increasing a small superfluity to a substantial one, subject to proper consideration of the markets. So Austen Holdings deems it appropriate to offer you our Darcy Bond, an investment of taste and refinement which may well mature into the completion of all you desire for yourself. Should you choose to place your substance in our hands, we shall endeavour to ensure a profitable outcome to enhance your standing in society. As it is likely that many hopeful subscribers will face bitter disappointment, we invite you to forward your wherewithal in haste, without undue reflection or the delay of perusing our smaller print.

He or she who hesitates will be left to rue his misguided caution. The Darcy will be distributed on a first come, first served basis, and it is likely that it will give continued interest and prolonged satisfaction to the discerning client.

D A Prince (Jane Austen)

Dear Other,

Do you suffer from nausea, from existential anguish? Do you feel that life is absurd, that humankind is a useless passion? Do you think that hell is other people when you stand in a bus queue?

If so, you need to improve your earning power by getting better qualified.

I know. I started out with nothing - or to be absolutely accurate - with nothingness. But armed with a degree in philosophy, I moved rapidly upwards - phenomenology made me a phenomenon.

The philosophy of existentialism shows we are nothing but the sum total of our past choices. So why not have a qualification just for the fact of having chosen? This unrepeatable offer means:

* No lectures or seminars

* No tuition fees

Just send a cheque for 5,000 euros to the above address; by return you will receive a framed degree diploma certificate from the world-famous Ecole Normale Inferieure. With this, your freedom will be absolute and boundless. You, too, could refuse the Nobel Prize. Commit yourself by writing today.

Ian Birchall ( Jean-Paul Sartre)

You will say oh what is this it must go in the bin and that would not be wrong, it will in the end sooner or later, have to go in the bin, so why not now? Having screwed it up into a ball and hurled it at the bin, which is not a bin, it is more a basket of some kind, you will become remorseful. Oh I do not say that you will weep bitter tears, I do not say you will be as happy as that, no, but we allow for the possibility at least that you may pick it out of the basket or bin or container or whatever it is and begin to uncrumple it smoothing it flat with your hand and cursing it, cursing because its appearance now is displeasing to you, so that you cry, my paper! In compensation, if such a thing can be compensated for, you write eight more letters or even ten or twenty to friends if they can be called that and if you have any, then for reasons you do not understand you wait. It's not clear what happens next, it is never clear, it cannot ever be clear.

John Ekroy (Sam Beckett)

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