San Francisco - Wry and sensitive it is not, but the sentence crafted by a British civil servant, Mr David Chuter, has won him first prize in a contest for bad prose.
The competition organiser, Prof Scott Rice, of California's San Jose State University, said Mr Chuter (47) took top honours with the following:
"Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracking paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life."
The university offers an unspecified "modest cash prize" every year for the worst possible opening sentence for an imaginary novel. Two other efforts commended by the judges were:
"Her breasts were like ripe strawberries, but much bigger, a completely different colour, not as bumpy, and without the little green things on top."
"George stared intently across the table which supported the golden-brown fresh-baked cornbread with butter and sizzling cholesterol-laden bacon which could finish blocking his previously hardened arteries at any time, into Margerie's clear-blue eyes and realised that she knew what he knew, and she knew that he knew what she knew, and he must practise carpe diem before angina seized the day."