9 Sep 2010
Competition Results Time!! No, you cannot stick wallpaper with cows’ mucus…
It is time to announce the results of the fiendishly puzzling ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ competition. Oh dear people, it turned out to be the competition which generated the lowest correct answers to number of entries ratio of any competition I have ever run. The correct answers, the two local building materials/techniques which I had made up, were ‘rumpletumping’ (which is not a term from the Midlands used to describe picking through building stones), and ‘grot-stock’ (which is not the application of bovine snot to wallpaper application, described by entrant Andy Brewin as “a truly horrid thought”). A few astute readers questioned exactly how one would actually harvest cows’ snot, a fair question probably best not dwelt on for too long. Rex Brangwyn accused me of running a trick competition, in which all the responses were actually real, and Angie Corbet wrote ” ‘rumpletumping’ sounds just a bit too much like what small boys get up to just before bedtime, and my mother, a Kentish Maid born & bred many years ago, has never heard of “Grot-stock” so I’ll hazard a guess at those two!” Unfortunately however, such elegant prose failed to mean she ended up among the winners…those 5 noble souls were: Marcus Perrin, Michelle Bastain, Rachel Roddam, Amanda and Charlie Stephenson. Well done all. The other 8 terms are all real. Isn’t English a beautiful language? It is positively frightening just how much you can learn here at Transition Culture.