Entering competitions

I have just entered three poems for a humorous verse competition. Now, as competition entrants go, I am notoriously unlucky. I can still remember my bitter disappointment when, aged 8, my picture of a horse didn't win first prize which was to go to Hollywood and meet Roy Rogers and Trigger. In those days, assessing the odds and the chances didn't come into it. My picture was the best and it HAD to win, so why hadn't it? Had it even arrived? I never knew and I cried for days.

When I was about 11, I won a prize in the RSPCA essay competition for an article about my cat. It was only a runner-up book token; I still hadn't come first. Fast-forward through many competitions, literary, poetical and artistic, to my first year at Bangor University in Wales, aged 18. I entered a limerick for the Airwick Limerick Contest. Again, it didn't come first. I didn't even know I'd won a runner-up prize until a large carton arrived bearing my name. Inside were enough air fresheners to last for, well, at least a university year, being smelly students. So how did we manage to get through them all in just one day? By spraying the room of the girl next-door, who had halitosis and BO, that's how. Without a thought to the possibilities of asthma, allergies or just plain suffocation, we broke in and sprayed and sprayed and sprayed, chortling with increasingly intoxincated mirth. Yes, the spelling mistake was intentional.

Scroll forward another four decades' worth of unlucky entries and suddenly I have won again. Once more, it was a runner-up prize in a draw that was held in the newsletter of the Greek Cats Rescue Society, of which I am a supporter. Last night I had this awful nightmare about a Greek cat... No. Not now. That's another subject. It's still on my mind and has made me feel vaguely ill and uneasy. The prize was a box of very pretty bath thingies in the shape of white flowers, which made a very nice Christmas present for someone I didn't know very well. (Hope they didn't have asthma and allergies.)

By now, I have almost given up collecting months' worth of coupons to win a London flat, a country cottage, a car (yes, I know I don't drive but I could always flog it on eBay), or a luxury holiday in the Seychelles (I hate long flights, but I could always...) So what tempted me to enter a humorous poetry comp? Perhaps it's a last-ditch attempt to prove that, despite being a loser all my life, I haven't lost my sense of the absurd. And somewhere deep inside, a little spark of hope still flickers. Maybe that's why I've bought a Lottery ticket for tonight, too!