sumitsays

Yeah. It’s been a while.

A few months ago I heard that the Grant Museum – the tiny, deeply fabulous zoological wunderkammer embedded deep in the throbbing heart of UCL’s Bloomsbury campus – was running a short story competition. The Grant is a delightful place, packed – and I do mean packed – with its curiosities. A three-legged quagga! Glass slugs! A walrus’ penis bone! A jar of moles! And that’s not even the beginning of an introduction to it.

The focus of the competition was none of these wonders, but rather an art installation by Amanda Schiff. Pandora’s Box: Curiosity and the Dangerous Pursuit of Knowledge comprised a succession of boxes containing evocative found objects; the competition was for the best story inspired by the artwork – a challenge I found irresistible. (Mind you, Monkeys will know that I find pretty much any challenge irresistible.)

But then I went off on an unexpectedly hectic holiday to the Hay Festival. Educating myself at author talks, rummaging around in cavernous bookshops and repressing bilious outbursts at the middlebrow excesses of my fellow attendees left me with little time to write anything. Upon my return, there was the usual house remediation to take care of – and so by the time I sat down to write it was 10pm on Sunday 6 June.

Entries, the rules said sternly, had to be in by the end of the day.

Oh well. Just made it that bit more exciting. Thirty minutes of research and one hour twenty-five minutes of frantic typing later, I had produced

Memories of Hope

Despite the haste with which I’d thrown it together, I was – and still am pretty pleased with the result. It’s not the most original of premises, but I flatter myself that the end result is quite thematically complex and genuinely derivative of the particular artwork I’d chosen. (More on that in the notes to the story, for those who care.) Not so much of the Grant Museum, however, which was a bit of a #fail on my part; after all, it was the setting that had attracted me to the competition in the first place.

Nonetheless, a few weeks later I got an email telling me that I’d won. Which is obviously very gratifying, though I do feel as though I should have worked a bit harder for it. (Those who’ve followed my fitful career as a writer of fiction may remember that I have previous form for winning competitions with a hastily submitted and somewhat off-topic entry.) But hell, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from accepting the prize, which includes some book tokens and publication on the museum’s website.

The best bit, however, is that I’m now an honorary Friend of the Museum – or rather, I will be once it re-opens, since it’s currently moving to new, less cramped premises. I’m quietly hoping they’re not too spacious; the density of exhibits was a large part of the Grant’s charm. But then, I don’t have to look after it; I suspect that it will end up in more modern surroundings that will both show off the collection to better advantage and allow the curators to take much better care of it. I’m sure it’ll still be be brilliant either way. Go visit when it reopens.

One thing you won’t see, though, is Pandora’s Box, which doesn’t seem to have been publicly documented anywhere, either. So it will have to live on – aptly enough – in the memories of those who saw it. ##