In Competition No. 3125 you were invited to compose a comically appalling first or final paragraph of the memoir of a well-known figure, living or dead.
 
This was one of those challenges that raises a glass in memory of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Victorian novelist and patron saint of purple prose. The oft-cited example of his florid style is the opening to the 1830 novel Paul Clifford — ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ — which was used by Charles Schulz as the first line of Snoopy’s novel, and by Brian Murdoch in his winning entry below.