Prize Draw Fishermen And A Month's Worth Of Cheese

Strange couple of competitions in our local paper, The Wiltshire Times, the other day…

The first offered some lucky reader the fantastic prize of “a year’s worth of Fisherman’s Friends”. I assume they meant the unpleasant menthol lozenges rather than actual sea-faring individuals, as the prospect of having a succession of Sou’wester-clad nautical folk with ruddy cheeks and aggressive facial hair turning up at your front door every day for a year would be unlikely to appeal to many entrants.

The oddness of the giveaway aside (I don’t think there’s a person alive who could benefit from that many medicinal pastilles), it immediately reminded me of something that’s always puzzled me in competition rhetoric: the actual definition of “a year’s worth”. How many packets of Fisherman’s Friends can the lucky winner expect to receive, and who decides?

I like Fisherman’s Friends as much as the next man (ie. not an awful lot), and the thought of lorry-loads turning up at our front door is the stuff of nightmares. However, I suppose to a complete Fisherman’s Friends junkie (and no doubt proud owner of the clearest sinuses in all England) who crunched them morning, noon and night, it would be menthol manna from heaven. But if so, who’s to say that his notion of “a year’s worth” matches the competition people’s? In these days of legal exactness, it seems uncharacteristically vague.

Personally, I found the second competition far more appealing, offering as it did, the opportunity to “Win a month’s supply of cheese!” Now that’s more like it. Though with the quantity I’d be likely to eat if I won, I’d also need to win the first competition in order to subdue my rancid breath.