creativity Wiltshire: a henge too far

Wiltshire, says Nic Wright, would be "a fine county to grow the nation's spuds, because they have Devizes for Chippenham". An identical point was made by Mollie Caird.

It would save a good deal of time if the correspondents to this column took the trouble to compare notes before sending in their contributions. Chris Bell, for example, gives an excellent list of Wiltshire's potential for a novelist: as birthplace of the heroine in a newly discovered Jane Austen; site of a university in a Malcolm Bradbury clone; a computer-base which takes over the world via the Internet; or ground-zero first-strike miss aimed at Milton Keynes in a sci-fi thriller.

Martin Brown, however, presumably after being tipped off by Ms Bell, has written a full synopsis for "Wiltshire - the novel", in which Wiltshire is floated on the stock exchange, pushed out to sea and sunk before being tracked down by the hero, a handsome young broker called Brent Spar.

Meanwhile, Ms Bell recommends Wiltshire as the site for Britain's first chalk hill-figure giant gnome with fishing rod to match the Westbury horse.

Back in the Atlantic, Mr Brown's Wiltshire is rescued by Brent and Group 4 aquatic security. Then... but we don't want to spoil it by revealing the ending. Suffice it to say that Stonehenge, Scrabble tiles and motorway cones all play a part.

Chris Noel thinks that Wiltshire would make an admirable car-park for Stonehenge; which ties in neatly with a correction to last week's piece:

"Re the caption to the photograph of the filing cabinet," writes Rev David Bunney. "They do not have filing cabinets in Wiltshire: they keep everything in prehistoric ring files."

"It occurred to me," writes Geoffrey Langley, "that, were it not for its size, shape, area, population, economy, government, topography, habits, attitude to chips with mayonnaise and potential for explosions, Wiltshire is almost a duplicate of Belgium, and can therefore be patriotically used by Europhobes for whatever purposes they would rather not use Belgium." He also proposes slicing up Stonehenge to make the world's heaviest Scrabble set.

Maurice Hulks proposes turning Wiltshire anti-clockwise ("to before they learned their fiendish accent"), leaving Swindon on Peterborough and Salisbury on Ely, thus avoiding needless duplication in both cases. It would also buttress the Fens against the North Sea and create a suitable constituency for Norman Lamont.

Ann Phillips resites Wiltshire in the Severn Estuary, removing the cost of maintaining the Severn Bridge. "Alternatively," she says, "in view of the obvious state of arousal in Wiltshire, all English monasteries and nunneries could be relocated there to lower the temperature of bathrooms."

Elizabeth Fox sees Wiltshire as a "goodly sized area for a naturist camp". F and J Earle have the same idea, but apparently only because of the presence of so many army firing ranges.

Excluding all who used the phrase "left to their own Devizes", prizes go to Ann Phillips, Chris Bell and Martin Brown.

Next week, the Brent Spar oil platform. Meanwhile, following recommendations that Government pamphlets should be written in tabloid-ese, we seek short samples of such prose. Chambers Dictionary prizes will be awarded to help the winners back to English. Ideas, by 20 July, to: Creativity, the Independent, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL.