Princess: Judgement Day Revelations

Dear J

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