James Hannah

One final thing occurs to me to tell you about our acqui­si­tion of the Princess Nova caravan.

The judg­ing of the limerick/song/rap com­pe­ti­tion to win the Princess was, appar­ently, very involv­ing. White Stuff’s Georgie and one col­league trawled through all 3,500 entries one by one.

They divided the entries up into ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Maybe’ piles. Then they realised that the ‘Maybe’ pile might as well be the ‘No’ pile too, if there were any ‘Yes’s.

The ‘Yes’ pile was then whit­tled down into a Top 10, which was wrapped up and deliv­ered with a rev­er­en­tial hush to the CEO of White Stuff.

A win­ner and a runner-up were duly chosen.

And get this: this deci­sion was reached on words alone. Only after they had decided on the win­ner did they lis­ten to my mas­terly record­ing of the rap. This rev­e­la­tion was cat­nip to Chris­tine, whose work most of the words were.

What I find most bril­liant about the whole process is that, when the win­ner was announced on the White Stuff web­site, they received com­plaints.

Appar­ently, peo­ple wrote in to White Stuff say­ing that, had they known that it was not just lim­er­icks, but poems, songs or raps that were allowed, they would have tried harder. The beauty of this to me is that, it was made per­fectly clear all the way along.

But that sad­sacky brand of huffy shoulda-woulda-coulda is just so bril­liant when you’re on the win­ning team.

This is one in the eye for all those cus­tomers who came up to me when I was work­ing at MVC and told me it was “against the law” to adver­tise a sale as being “From” £4.99.

But fear not, losers. I shall not crow. After all, Jols and I spent hours and hours com­ing up with a win­ning phrase to score some­thing inane from Fen­ti­mans soft drinks com­pany a few years back. Our best effort? “Fen­ti­mans? Fermentimans!”

I still think we should have won that. You wouldn’t belieeeve the one that did.

Well, that’s about all.

jx