Ping 661-Pete

[Haitch]

On Radio 4 now and later on Iplayer:

Ian Peacock reveals the dark and gothic life of the Victorian writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who coined the archetypally gothic opening line, 'It was a dark and stormy night'.

 

[661-Pete]

Aha! First time I've been 'pinged' I think ('pung'?). Thanks for the heads-up, probably of more interest to Mrs P, she's the literary buff of the family.

Almost forgotten I still had that sig.-line (got sig-lines 'turned off' you see). Presumably some of you folks have heard of the annual contest which has been going some years now - read some of the winning (and runner-up) entries: they're . Mrs P was thinking of setting up a rival contest, UK-based rather than USA, on the BBC website but so far not enough interest.

I once tried my own hand at a possible entry for the B-L contest, in the SF genre: but I never sent it in. This is my effort:

Leading Spacecraftman Godfrey lay impassively in his bunk, in the aft starboard quarters of the Parnassus, gazing dejectedly through his porthole at the inky void without – a void soon to be replaced, he knew, by a vista of the grey, pock-marked, dusty wilderness that was the goal of their voyage: the planet that, he knew – for all Captain Lorenzo’s unflappable enthusiasm (“we SHALL discover water, and maybe life, there, boys!”) – would inevitably turn out to be as hostile and unforgiving as the Mars that Godfrey had been one of the last men to quit (having almost run out of oxygen in the barren Martian desert – not once, but three times!), when NASA had finally yielded to pressure from public and politician alike and abruptly abandoned the colony to the Martian dust-storms forever....

I'm sure some on here can do a lot better than that!