In Competition No. 3299, you were invited to supply a short story that takes as its title the title of a Beatles song.

Haruki Murakami used Beatles tracks from the album Rubber Soul as names for both his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood and a short story, ‘Drive My Car’. But the Japanese writer has confessed that he was never ‘a fervent fan’. In high school and college, he says, he ‘didn’t buy a single record’ by the Fab Four.

In a large and inventive entry, Ben Hale’s dystopian ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, with its echoes of the film Logan’s Run,caught my eye, and I was moved by Frank McDonald’s poignant tale of the last surviving lemming. Additional highlights were provided by Sue Pickard, Morna Clements, John O’Byrne, Paul Freeman and Mark Ambrose, who all earn an honourable mention. But the prizes this week are awarded to the entries printed below, which net their authors £30 apiece.

William Bryce removed his muddy boots and spread out the sticks, gleaned from the woods, where they could dry. He lit the tightly rationed gas ring for a cup of tea. It was hard, keeping warm without a heat pump. His 1963 Morris Traveller was, for the time being, exempt from the Mega-ULEZ restrictions, so he could at least go shopping (with, perhaps, a detour to the Last Filling Station in Town). Making ends meet was a struggle, though – the Single Storey Detached Dwelling Eco-Levy bit hard. He finished his tea and was getting out the carpet sweeper when the telephone rang. It was the activists again, cursing him for ‘butchering the ecosystem’ and threatening to ‘cancel’ him for good. William would hold out to the end, though. He still had real metaldehyde slug pellets to protect his kitchen garden and it was steak for dinner that night!

Frank Upton/‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’

He thought of her most mornings.

Lying under the double duvet, he imagined her hands as he had seen them so often: expressive fingers, emollient palms, always in motion. He sighed.

‘Penny for them,’ said Sylvia, coming in suddenly with tea. As always, she was wide awake, beaming, ready for another busy day. Jolly. She was always like this, it was quite insufferable.

‘Nothing.’ He rolled away, hearing her tap at her phone; as ever, hunting for bargains in some online plant sale. Awful. He thought again of how he had lifted her image from Soulmates, that winning smile, those hands, source of so much reverie! He had been blind to everything else. And now he was stuck with her.

‘Ah, free packets of seed!’ she cackled. He shut his eyes even more tightly.

Her fingers dibbled the keypad: come round at eleven, Josh. The bed will be open…

Bill Greenwell/‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’

Of a dog. Or of a cabbage. Or of a protractor. Mr Goacher’s every request for a written account of the daily round of some uninspiring animal, vegetable or mineral entity, though freezing into stupefaction the lumpen majority confined in his detention class, invariably brought the boy Sniggs to an industrious boil. Had the essays he produced across reams of foolscap proved the doggerel of automatic writing, Goacher would not have felt bested. But successive detentions brought forth disquisitions ever more perceptive and elegant from what, in all other respects, appeared a scrofulous imp. Goacher tried fazing the lad with arid human subjects but Sniggs’s analysis of the Foreign Secretary’s itinerary (for example) managed to be both geopolitically astute and affectingly poetic. Discreetly quizzing Sniggs’s English master, it became apparent the boy confined his literary talents exclusively to detention assignments. Avenging himself, Goacher, a games master, demanded only push-ups thereafter.

Adrian Fry/‘A Day in the Life’

Spring snow lay between the Tromsø birches. I’d been skiing for hours when I entered a clearing where a woman in Lycra was logging with a medieval bondeøks. I leant my skis against her vast woodpile. ‘You make it look easy. Can I have a go?’ Silently, she handed over the axe, coached a berserker’s swing with her hands on my hips, like a golf pro, and the blade sang into a fat log. Only then did she speak. ‘Three days ago, I walked into this glade. A schoolboy was chopping and I asked for a go. Once I’d started, he told me, as I tell you, that the axe is cursed. It cut the faggots that burned Ragnhild Endresdotter, the Vardø witch, in 1663. Whoever stops chopping will die.’ She buckled on her snow shoes, shook pole-straps onto wrists, and fiddled with her Fitbit. ‘Tusen takk!’

Nick MacKinnon/‘Norwegian Wood’

The call comes early one May morning: male, late sixties. Parish priest Father Joseph McKenzie. Violent death, face down in the transept of his church. Not pretty. Some old broad who dusts around, does the flowers, phones the station in Penny Lane, Liverpool 18. Says her name’s Rigby, Eleanor. Miss, she adds, but I’d figured that. She gets funny about giving her address. Sure you’re upset, I tell her, but this is routine. Am I a suspect, she goes. I dodge the question, remind her it was she who found the deceased. We got to catch the perp, I point out needlessly.

Turns out Miss, Ms, whatever has lived in this house of God for nigh on 40 years, cooking, cleaning for him. Replacing candles, keeping accounts; all unpaid. Why? Fear of the outside world, desperate loneliness? Or simply a love to which she could not give voice?

Mike Morrison/‘Eleanor Rigby’

No. 3302: Love me do

The poet Imtiaz Dharker has written about constructing an imaginary profile for Philip Larkin on a dating app. You are invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice (please specify). Please email entries of up to 150 words/16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 31 May.