Set by Valerie Yule You were asked to think of innovative ways to make use of pests - animal or vegetable

Report by Ms de Meaner

Hon menshes to Bill Greenwell and Sid Field. The winners get £20 each. D A Prince, the overall winner, also gets the Tesco vouchers.

Slugs

Never underestimate the humble slug. Having abandoned tossing them into next door's cabbages since they installed the webcam, I now use them to generate electricity. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Catching and placing them on hamster wheels attached to turbines was simple enough. Speed was the problem, which I became convinced was essentially a motivational issue. I tried everything from lady slugs to cognitive behaviour therapy, but still they only managed 0.025mph. When a friend suggested playing them Christmas Hit Singles on a continuous loop, I confess I was a little sceptical. Yet now not only do we produce enough electricity for the whole street, but we have finally found an innovative use for Noddy Holder.

David Silverman

Slugs (contd)

I modestly propose that you put a slug in your beer. It'll kill the pest, but don't worry; even Carla Lane can't sentimentalise slugs. Besides, what a way to go! More metaphor than tax, more practical demonstration than health warning, the slug in your beer will also drastically reduce consumption while creating loads of jobs in the nascent slug collection industry, in time for the next wave of eastern European migrants.

Adrian Fry

Hogweed

Sometimes you just have to do it - entertain the foodie fanatics, the nosh neophiles or "natural" food nibblers. So serve them all your Giant Hogweed Soup. Put on your Marigold gloves, head to the sticks and harvest some 6ft stems with plenty of sinister, purplish-red blotches. Give them pride of place in a tall glass vase. Gently sweat onions in butter; add haricot beans, potatoes and flavourful stock. Stir in one or two slugs of Jamaican scotch bonnet pepper sauce, handfuls of parsley, and - just before serving - most of a bottle of vodka. Hype it up . . . its tongue-loosening tendency, blistering after-kick, psychoactive potency; they must be brave! The hogweed stays in the vase.

Anne Du Croz

Houseflies

Musca domestica can be used to provide an alternative green energy source, with constant activity transformed via the National Grid or private generators. Ideally, flies are farmed - collected initially in non-toxic traps, and enclosed in glass tanks to maximise buzz-power: one buzz = one fly's-worth of energy generated per second. A 20W low-energy light bulb requires 20 buzz per minute (bpm) compared to 75bpm for standard 60W bulbs. Flies are cheap to run and, when enclosed, clean; deceased flies provide food for renewable fly-energy. One tank (approximately 1,000 prime flies) generates a million buzz - sufficient to charge eight mobile phones.

D A Prince

No 3951 Portrait of the artist

Set by Didier d'Argent

Do our sports personalities need more accomplished ghost-writers? How about Beckham or Rooney by Brontë or Austen, James Joyce's Roy Keane, Sartre's Zidane . . . ? The subject and writer are up to you.

Max 150 words by 12 October
E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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