Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store

Competition No 3890

Set by George Cowley, 11 July

You were asked, following Peter Wilby's definition of mischief as consisting of "challenging established wisdom wherever possible", to send in a believable case for doing just that.

Report by Ms de Meaner

An hon mensh to G M Davis (disputing that there is no such thing as a free lunch). £20 to the rest, the best of whom (Katie Mallett) gets the Tesco vouchers. I realise that, technically, D A Prince didn't present "a believable case", and he asked questions, but, hell, it made me laugh.

It is said that it is better to give than to receive. Not so. The act of giving is supposed to give the giver a warm glow, instead of which it merely gives one a huge hole in one's bank balance. The reason for this is that those who receive have been led to believe that it is better to give, and therefore never really appreciate what they have been given. Take, for example, Christmas. Who has not been disappointed by Father-in-Law's response to the gift of socks, which is the net result of hours spent scouring the shops? A grunt accompanied by a slight smirk is the usual reward. Sometimes, it is even a scowl and "not another bloody pair of socks". The receiver thinks that the giver is already floating on Cloud Nine, and therefore no thanks are necessary. If the adage said: "It is better to receive than to give," then people would be more grateful.

Katie Mallett

Established wisdom has it that bourgeois, Tory-voting Daily Mail readers loathe economic migrants and asylum-seekers. No so. If there is one thing they know about Johnny Foreigner, be he Pole, Kosovar Albanian or whatever, it is that he doesn't mind doing a 14-hour day's work for a fair day's minimum wage and generally behaving the way British working-class people did in the 1950s. Meanwhile, indigenous white youths won't stir out of bed for less than £10 an hour and an inalienable right to "throw a sickie", should the weather turn clement. For too long its workforce has held the British economy back; let's acquire another one before it's too late.

Adrian Fry

While the bureaucratic or military or alphabetically fixated mind knows A place for everything and everything in its place is unquestionable - the only way to order the universe, from paper clips to guns - a clutch of nagging questions remains. Ask it why you should always place your pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas; why, although the hot-water bottle exists, you can't invent something better. What's so great about tunnel vision? Why weeds are wrong. Why socks get lost, and don't have pockets. Where the soul lives. Why Luton has to be there, and not in the Caribbean. What's wrong with free-floating, mind-blowing, star-gazing, brainstorming, rummaging in the myth kitty. Why sealed borders and suffering in silence are better than their opposites. Why can't we have our cake first?

D A Prince

No 3893 Set by Valerie Yule

List ten items that a museum would keep hidden away as sacred totems of modern British society (see NS, 11 July).

Max 150 words by 11 August.

E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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