Thanks for coming out and sharing your stories with us. If you missed either entry, go read it here. Finished? Great! Here's what the judge had to say:
Special Challenge Champion:
Festive Spirit
by Geoff Holme
A very bad pun to end with, but I will allow ‘Walking in the
Ayr’. I think this story should also get
a special award for introducing our friends across the pond to Leyton
Orient. As a child of the Midlands
originally, even mentioning this name takes me back to Saturday afternoons when
the Football Results were read out. This
writer really took the special challenge seriously and cleverly paved the way
for incorporating them by using coincidences to generate “And to top it all, We
Three Kings Of Orient Are all Driving Home For Christmas!” There were a few other spooky coincidences
for me – my Dad’s name is Alan, and his parents lived in Coventry for many,
many years so again I took a slight nostalgia hit. All I needed was for the story to be written
in Black Country dialect! (Yes, I know Coventry is down a bit from Birmingham
but it’s all pretty much a variation on the accent, I lived on the edge of the
West Midlands in Shropshire and that could be just as bad!).
So for bad jokes – “You looked out and the pavement was
covered in Black Forest gateaux and the road in sherry trifle… The street was
desserted!”, corny lines incorporating Christmas songs, nostalgia and for
seriously getting into the Festive Spirit, this story truly deserves the
Special Challenge award.
Grand Champion:
Hearing Things
by Audrey Weinberg
A story of two halves.
Starting off with a woman, apparently being ignored by her partner and
thinking she is hearing things but needs to find out if she is crazy or
not. Taking the advice of neurologist
Oliver Sacks she goes for a run, testing her voice, testing her hearing. All is normal. Until she gets home and then we realise, as
she enters the cold, dark and empty house that the Joe she mentioned at the
start of the story does not exist, is not there. But is she mad? Pulling out a missed envelope
she reads the lines that tell us why her house is in its mournful state, why
Joe isn’t there - a ‘tragedy’ befell her on Christmas Day; it goes some way to
explaining her mental state. Using the
sound of breaking glass to symbolise her shattered life was a nice touch and
the beautiful finishing lines effectively underlined the tragedy she had
experienced.
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