In Competition No. 3274, you were invited to supply toe-curling analogies.

Bad writing has attracted some high-brow fans. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis revelled in the overwrought prose of the ‘uniquely dreadful’ Amanda Kittrick Ros, and used to take it in turns to read aloud from her work to see which of them could last longer without laughing. Some competitors accompanied their entries with apologetic notes, commiserating with me for having to judge this challenge, but it was a hoot.

The winners earn a fiver per analogy.

His hand slid up her thigh like a string of partly defrosted sausages that had been imbued with lascivious intent, inexpertly animated, but then denied any sense of decorum.
They skipped together through the park, accumulating on their bare feet a mixture of dog faeces and sweet wrappers that formed a pungent metaphor of the human condition.
A.H. Harker

As Gerald read his fiancée’s Dear John, he felt the catastrophic end of their relationship as the swamping of a primordial land bridge, leaving a drowned, irrecoverable Doggerland of separation.
Five minutes of soul-crushing suspense at a lonely bus stop generated the anxious intensity of a hushed nation awaiting news of Waterloo.
The scornful, humiliating glance she gave him etched a dotted line across his neck and tore his head off at the perforation.
Haaland’s scoring record suggests that Nietzsche‘s postulation of an eternal recurrence is fighting a grudge match against Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty in a Promethean bid to counter the entropic winding-down of the Premiership.  
Basil Ransome-Davies

Her intervention was as timely and useful as a man running along the steeply sloping deck of the Titanic, shouting ‘I’ve found the binoculars!’
It was as gorgeously satisfying as thrusting rancid custard pies into the faces of all the TV pundits on Earth, in alphabetical order.
Frank Upton

She was as quiet as a timid, tongueless and Trappist moth in fur slippers tiptoeing stealthily along the edge of an angora sweater fresh from its stint in a freezer.
Bill Greenwell

George looked forward to Mrs Mapplethorpe’s steak pies, which were as wholesomely meaty as a rugger team of muscular Christians would be if fed exclusively on Mrs Mapplethorpe’s steak pies.
To look at, the new minister was forgettably bland, like those figures placed in architectural drawings of how a proposed town centre regeneration might look, only with facial features.
Adrian Fry

Her ‘Iron Lady’ act was rusty as the cardplayer’s arm in that Leonard Cohen song I can never remember the name of.
Chris O’Carroll

The promised hot date proved a disappointment, being in the event about as exciting as a fact-finding meeting with a Liberal Democrat councillor at the service station on the A57 near Worksop.
George Simmers

Our strawberry cheesecake ice cream is like viagra for the soul.
David Silverman

Rashford rose to net, Moby Dick-like, at what has become known as the back-stick, and around the ground it was as if there was a prevailing sense that the spirit of Melville himself, the parent of the purely fictional beast, was yelling halloos a-plenty, exultant with an everlasting pride for things so adventitious.
Richard Spencer

Her acting was as wooden as a five-foot thick mahogany table built by Pinocchio amongst 1,000-year-old redwood forests, marked on maps by lumberjacks as ‘a woodpecker’s worst nightmare’
It was an extreme sports-fest of gastric flu, bungee-jumping into his stomach acid, deep-diving into his lower intestines, and erupting from his bowels like screaming tourists on a white-water rapids raft ride.
Fabio’s dark eyes flashed like a polished coffin, the fancy kind, not a cheap pine number from Coffins R Us.
Their love was like Heathcliff and Cathy’s, if Heathcliff and Cathy had moved on and suffered awkward reunions at cocktail parties.
Janine Beacham

The scouting finger explored the mushroomy cleft, cleared the drifted leaves of dead skin, and dug a bloody salient in the itchy no-man’s-land of my athlete’s foot.
Nick MacKinnon

The sun was slowly sinking in the west with all the poignant majesty of Roger Federer’s last competitive backhand drop-shot.
David Shields

Gianfranco Sartori’s Second Theremin Concerto was so poorly received that one reviewer opined: ‘a fraudulent, irrelevant cacophony performed by one unfamiliar with the inherent majesty of the cacophone’.
Mike Morrison

Her bouffant hairdo was like a beautiful hornet’s nest without all that nasty stinginess.
John O’Byrne

No. 3277: grave thoughts

You are invited to submit a sonnet marking the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 23 November.

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