In Competition 2805 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies.

Congratulations! You obliged with a stream of analogies glorious in their overwrought, tasteless, laboured awfulness.

The first five competitors printed below get £15 each. Basil Ransome-Davies and Adrian Fry take £10 and the remaining half-dozen pocket a fiver each.

Her kisses were like wine: not plonk, either (though equally not the kind of austere vintage that stands aloof from all but connoisseurs) — more like a respectable yet reasonably priced Cabernet-Shiraz blend that would definitely have you coming back for another glug.

 

Her anger abated, but he feared she might resemble her washing machine, which, once the churning of the wash was over, lulled you with a brief silence before unleashing the wild fury of the spin cycle.

 

The councillor’s mind was as closed as his branch libraries.
George Simmers

 

She was as painfully anorexic as a Giacometti made of super-fine pipe cleaners from which the furry particles had been mercilessly stripped.

 

The dog’s tongue was as long, languorous and slithery as the silk scarf that yanked and strangled Isadora Duncan that fine but fatal night of September 14th 1927.

 

Anger welled up in him like the unwitting vomit of a vixen after eating a myxomatosis victim.
Bill Greenwell

 

He reassured her that their relationship was still as solid as a Boxing Day stool.

 

The Christmas pullover from Auntie Mabel was louder than Brian Blessed being spayed with a shovel during a nuclear war.

 

Her answer was about as coherent as a set of flat-pack furniture instructions that had been translated from their original Finnish into binary code by a cross-eyed illiterate writing with the wrong end of a leaky fountain pen filled with invisible ink.
Rob Stuart

 

The terrifying magnitude of his problems made him feel he was faced with translating the entire oeuvre of Immanuel Kant from the original German into Tibetan, underwater, while piranhas attacked his genitals.

 

Disappointment in romance struck Derek as a cruel reversal of logical expectations, as if a million Shakespeares had sat at typewriters and turned out nothing but gibberish.

 

Suddenly life seemed as pointless as a merkin on a goat.
G.M. Davis

 

Mike’s bonus was so humongous that it resembled the GDP of a small island in the Pacific that exports coconuts for sale in the food halls of exclusive department stores in Paris, London and Rome.

 

His passion for her burned inside him like the hotplate on an oil-fired, heat-storage cooker whose thermostat is on the blink.

 

Her Mona Lisa features resemble a high-quality portrait by Rembrandt without the characteristic dark tones.
John O’Byrne

 

She gave me a look you might give someone lacking personal hygiene who had broken into the house to watch your mother undressing, while eating food stolen from your fridge.

 

They were as close and intimate as two bodies interred in a common grave which, over time, had deliquesced so completely into one another that they could no longer be told apart.
Basil Ransome-Davies

 

The ball seemed to come out of nowhere, as the Beatles did to people who hadn’t heard of Liverpool.

 

The fog thickened over the bay, as if, instead of afflicting the eyes of observers with cataracts, God had chosen to mimic the symptoms meteorologically.
Adrian Fry

 

He petulantly stuck out his lower lip, like the new all-glass skywalk jutting out over the Grand Canyon.
Mae Scanlan

 

He poured me a coffee, so bitter and strong that it might have been strained through an all-in wrestler’s underwear.
Gerard Benson

 

She shimmied into the room like one of those dames in Raymond Chandler, wearing lipstick as lasciviously red as the Pope’s shoes, on a mouth that, like a Midwest tornado, looked as if it was ready to engulf anything it encountered.
Brian Allgar

 

The meal was disappointing. The sole tasted as if it had been caught in the Manchester ship canal while the limp vegetables had apparently spent their entire lives in a badly maintained dishwasher
Shirley Curran

 

He was so thirsty he felt he could drink the whole Nile, right from its source to its delta with all the wiggly streams that led to the sea and all the irrigation channels with the contents of the shadoofs, and the water stores of all the camels that walked by its side, and still feel parched.
Katie Mallett

 

The hedge sparrows clustered around the dangling bird-feeder like well-upholstered drab Romanian bargain-hunters at a charity jumble sale in Monaco.
Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead

No. 2808: the new black

We are already blessed with Tartan Noir and Nordic Noir (i.e., Scottish and Scandinavian crime fiction). You are invited to invent a new addition to the genre and supply an example (up to 150 words). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 24 July.