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Competition No 3929
Set by Valerie Yule, 1 May
Children of celebrities are often given "unique" names. We asked for a profile/obituary/interview of just such a person in later life whose career choices have differed markedly from their parents'.
The number of Brooklyn Beckhams! On the whole, I thought those who sent in babies born after 2006 had an easier time, as the sky was the limit on the name
front. £20 to the winners, the best of whom (Patrick O'Byrne) also gets the Tesco vouchers. An hon mensh to Ian Birchall for Orwell Preston, son of Sam Preston and Chantelle of Big Brother fame.
Wisely, Sage Moonblood Stallone finally decided on not following his father into films. He was instead blessed with an astonishing talent for acting, which he used
to great effect as a cleric, delivering sermons
to no-longer-working horsemen in retirement homes across the Far East. He was known for the breadth and eclecticism of his vocabulary and, at 50, became Professor of Elocution at the University of Ho Chi Minh City, helping out-of-breath gallopers to enunciate their syllables.
A thin, wiry individual, Sage helped former equestrians to find their feminine side, and to cultivate this by participating in non-competitive activities such as origami, tea-dancing and reciting the works of Rimbaud. His many books on the subject - Waxing When Waning, Fold - Don't Fold Up, King Arthur and Sipping the Light Fantastic, for instance - were not bestsellers, but were highly regarded by readers and reviewers alike. On his death, a side effect of over-indulgence in giant mussels and other shellfish, his books were re-released as Jockey I, Jockey II, Jockey III and Jockey IV.
Bill Greenwell
Guadalajara Jolie-Pitt 2007-2095.
Born in Mexico in 2007, Guadalajara Jolie-Pitt spent his early years in Bel Air living the highly charged life of the celeb child. He was a page-boy, along with Banana Beckham and Crete Cruise, at his parents' wedding in Connemara in 2010. When Brad and Angelina divorced in 2011, after the former eloped with the Hon Gunnera Guinness, Guadalajara moved with his mother and siblings to Dublin. His contemporaries recall a quiet, bespectacled and rotund boy who arrived at school every morning at 8.59 precisely. When his mother married Sir Leo Blair in 2023, the family moved to Teddington.
He qualified as a chartered accountant in 2031, and in the same year married his colleague Mary Bull. The couple (who remained happily married until Mary's death in 2094) set up practice together in Ludlow, and soon Jolie Pitt Bull & Co, Auditors acquired a respectable clientele. When he wasn't "ticking and totting", he was toiling in his garden. He died suddenly while playing golf. He had no children.
Patrick O'Byrne
Brooklyn Beckham's unkempt hair and haggard looks are not the only features that put one in mind of the great Albert Einstein. Beckham's razor-sharp intellect and brilliant contribution to modern science are matched only by his hauntingly beautiful singing voice - a delight few will have heard, as Beckham has spent most of his adult life as a recluse.
Due both to a phobia of camera lenses and an extreme shyness regarding his clumsiness and poor co-ordination, Beckham has not been seen in public since he graduated from King's College, Cambridge with a double First in philosophy. All we have to treasure are recordings of his crystal-clear rendition of "O Little Town of Bethlehem", with the college choir, and his treatise on the neurological synergies between infant dyspraxia and high intelligence.
As neither Beckham nor his wife Muriel is willing to appear in public, it is left to his children, John and Peter, to collect this Nobel Prize on his behalf.
David Silverman
No 3932 Set by Didier d'Argent What happened to the missing verses from all those nursery rhymes and nonsense verses? Let us have the hitherto undiscovered and much darker sequel verses to "Jack and Jill", "The Grand Old Duke of York", "Humpty-Dumpty", et cetera.
At least three verses by 1 June. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
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