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Competition No 3843

Set by Margaret Rogers, 2 August

We asked for your idea of an intellectual.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Well done. Hon menshes to Anne Du Croz, Michael Cregan, Adrian Fry and Sid Field. The winners get £20; the funniest of the bunch (Bruce Alter) also gets the Tesco vouchers.

The public, for some reason, wishes to know how I came to possess the cognisance of "intellectual" - the fons et origo of my distinction, so to speak. The overriding rule of my life has been to disport a French degree of hauteur, as displayed by members of l'Academie Francaise. I read Le Monde while casually sipping one of the great wines of the Macon region of southern Burgundy. When I have finished my quotidian meal of French onion soup, carottes a la creme, pommes dauphines, cherry clafoutis and, of course, cafe, I retire to my chambre to read Montaigne and Pascal. I avoid TV (unless appearing on BBC4), the tabloids, public assembly areas, Google, beaches, bores, supermarkets, bank holidays, pizzas and football. I confine my interests to the classics, specifically the works of Austen, Dickens and Shakespeare. A collection of Trollope is by my bed in case of ennui. In conclusion, I despise pretension and snobbishness.

John O'Byrne

I am an intellectual. I was not born on 6 July 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut. I did not grow up in Texas. I never received a baccalaureate degree from Yale University in 1968 or served as an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. Later, I did not receive a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School or move back to Midland, Texas for a career in the energy business. I never worked on my father's 1988 presidential campaign or purchased the Texas Rangers baseball team. I never was elected governor of Texas, nor was I elected president of the United States. To the best of knowledge, I have never invaded Iraq.

Bruce W Alter

The overriding criterion for defining an intellectual is that he (a weighting towards masculinity is essential because of the non-practical nature of the role) should not only have a grasp of abstraction and the hierarchical nature of thought combined with a chess player's instinct for the killer cross-reference that so often disables an opponent, but that his understanding of the concrete in existence should be seen only in metaphorical terms, akin to the thin twitter of tits in high trees which has no application to the needs of birds that forage on the forest floor, and that this understanding, combined inevitably with his situation in a humanities department, and his necessary appearance as a broadsheet columnist ready to produce abstruse connections to deadline, will always seem tantalisingly out of reach to the reader, thereby inducing an underlying feeling of inadequacy, leading to a lack of competitive spirit in supporting his pre-eminence, but, overwhelmingly, we all recognise he is incapable of summing up anything in a mere 200 words, because that

is only the beginning of a sentence which . . .

D A Prince

To take up an intellectual standpoint in the 21st century requires first that you select a subject with which tabloid newspapers are dealing: for instance, the sexual relationships of football managers. A new intellectual will type "sex" and "football managers" into a search engine. This will provide more than 250 articles to sift through. It isn't necessary

to have any experience of sex or football (and arguably better if innocent of either). Choose a contrary view to one that can be readily understood. New intellectualism now requires you to write an outline article, using a school thesaurus, in which a third of the words get substituted. Thus fan might become "air-conditioning unit" and penetration "percipience". This will lead to sentences such as: "No air-conditioning units care about the percipience of a root vegetable with a sweet FA stenographer." Publish this as a PDF file on a website with the headline "Sex and football managers: the university view". Your place in the brainbox pantheon will soon be secure.

Bill Greenwell

Competition No 3846

Set by Geoff Horton

Occupational therapists complained when Jim's OT in Corrie ran off with his patient's wife. We want complaints from professions on their representation in soaps. "Profession" could be stretched to allow an element of gender or race.

Max 200 words by 2 September. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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