Report by Ms de Meaner
Hmm. A good postbag, but I wasn't that impressed by many of the facts on offer. John Griffiths-Colby's "Budget, the Little Helicopter" began stompingly: "Budget is the bravest, nippiest, cheekiest, most underused form of transport Helmand airfield has ever known . . ." - but then tailed off. Nevertheless, that opener certainly gets him an hon mensh. The three winners can have £20 each, the Tesco vouchers going in addition to G M Davis.

Pooh and Piglet ambled along without a care in the world, except that Pooh was troubled that this year's honey crop was threatened by the invasive parasite Nosema ceranae that kills honeybees. Pooh was composing one of his hums.

There's sorrow
Tomorrow
If all Rabbit's money
Can't buy any honey.

“You should be poet lorgnette!" said Piglet admiringly but the idea didn't tempt Pooh, because the reward for composing poetry for state occasions is a butt of sack, not a brimful tub of honey.

A big bang interrupted them; not the hypothetical Big Bang that is believed to have been the origin of the universe, but a more Eeyorish bang as Eeyore tumbled from an overhanging branch and landed upside-down on the track.
Shirley Curran

As Gordon popped the cork, his fingers probed the yellow "punt" that strengthened the bottle. He needed all his strength now. Prudence was looking at him with intense, loving expectation, employing her delicate philtrum that allowed human faces a range of complex emotions.
He filled the lovely crystal flutes. It didn't matter that "crystal" was a misnomer, since glass lacked a crystalline structure. What were words compared to feelings? One word resounded in his head: Prudence, Prudence, Prudence. Grammarians might call it an epizeuxis, but to Gordon it had the power of a sacred mantra. When they touched glasses and sipped their wine he felt he would swoon with ecstasy . . .
G M Davis

Raymond gazed up at the moon, reflecting that the same soft light shining down on him, and which travelled more slowly through a dense medium such as water than it did through a vacuum, also shone down on his beloved.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door, and his heart leapt.

It was Janet, it had to be!

He turned off the television, which was receiving its signals from a satellite in geostationary orbit 36,000km above the earth's equator, the only point where velocity and gravity cancel each other out, and hastened across the room.

He threw open the door.

“Hello, my darling," Janet said.

“There are 32 bones in the human arm," he breathed. "I want to throw all of mine around you . . ."
Michael Cregan

No 4093 Going through the change
Set by J Seery
“Books that changed my life"-type reviews frequently contain such lines as: "a life-enhancing novel", "a cry for truly human values!"
or even, in the NS of 10 August, “a tremendous liberation from a commonsensical view of just about anything". We want ten phrases and their true meanings, eg, a life-enhancing novel = a totally improbable happy ending.

Max ten goes by 10 September
Email: comp@newstatesman.co.uk