Hurry! You could win a Peter Kay book.

The Tesco book blog are running another competition - 3 copies of Peter Kay's new book, 'The Book That's More Than Just a Book Book', to give away, which will come with official Peter Kay tea towels. To enter the competition you just have to tell them your favourite joke - by tweet (mention @TescoBooks) or as a comment on their post (NOT this post - follow the link below!) - and they'll pick the three that made them laugh the most.

There's an extract from the book on the blog post so you can see how funny the book is.

http://booksblog.tesco.com/2011/09/weve-got-an-extract-from-peter-kays-new-book/

The competition ends Friday 23rd September.

When a prize works out perfectly!

A few weeks ago, Polartec ran a competiton on their Facebook page. There was a quiz with several questions to answer,  and the first prize was a weekend in Chamonix to see the Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc, a gruelling race run over the August bank holiday weekend, where thousands of runners run over a 166km course of mountain trails, with just 46 hours in which to complete the race. There were also 500 runners up prizes of sweatshirts.

When I looked at the page a few days after the competition closed, I saw lots of "Thank you for my sweatshirt" messages and felt a little disappointed, so imagine my surprise when a couple of days later I got an email to say I had won first prize!

The prize included flights to Geneva, transfers to Chamonix, a stay in a hotel and visits to several of the stopping points along the race as well as a cocktail party, meals and lots of extras.

Now. much as I love attending prize events, as  many of you know my daughter  Fiona is a very keen runner - she ran the Paris marathon this year. Here is a photo of her in a night race earlier this week (she is the one in green...... she is always  the one in green)

And Fiona and her husband live in a village called Ferney Voltaire, just outside Geneva. I knew that she would  get far more out of watching the race than I would, and also felt that she needed a treat - due to a dose of pneumonia, she'd not been able to run for several weeks. An event like this would help to get her back into the mood - and the mountain air would be good for her lungs too.

So I asked the promoter if it would  be at all possible for me and my husband to take the flights to Geneva, then stay in Fiona's flat andcat-sit while she and her husband had the remainder of the prize. They couldn't have been more helpful or obliging and we were soon heading off to Geneva.

Fiona and Juan had a wonderful time in Chamonix and Fiona's enthusiasm was really fired by the race - she's even talking about doing it herself one day. It was made extra interesting for her by the fact that one of  her old school friends was taking part in the race, and she met representatives from some of her favourite brands of running gear. They were extremely well looked after, stayed in a beautiful hotel, were plied with food and drink all weekend, given geneerous goody bags and were even given spending money, although as  everything was provided they treated themselves to some new trail shoes with it.

Meanwhile Mark and I relaxed in Ferney, shopped on the local market and made sure there was a huge meal ready for them when they got home, starving from all that mountain  air.

Two photos could win you £1,000

This is one of the more unusual photography competitions! The Memorial Awareness Board are running a competition called "Dead Art? Then and Now" which is open to people of all levels of photographic skill and experience. The task is to submit two photos....... of stone memorials. Yes, photos of graves, tombs and headstones! One should be from the past and one from the current day, to illustrate the "Then and Now" theme.

You can find  full details of the competition here and the closing date is 30 Sep.

A walk round a cemetery or churchyard will produce some very beautiful and moving subjects for your entry. My own favourite memorials are the simple paving stones in the Wordsworth Daffodil Garden in Grasmere, where there are stones laid in memory of my father, Edward France, and my friend Adrian Gothard.

A £5,000 prize for one lucky budding writer!

Do you know a final year undergraduate? Are you, perhaps, one yourself? With the cost of studying spiralling at the moment, would £5,000 help out a bit? I'm sure it would - and that is the prize on offer in the new competition from The London Library and The Times.

First prize is £5,000 cash, your work published and subscriptions to The Times and London Library
Three runners up prizes are £1,000 cash and  the same subscriptions.
Plus winners and runners up get an internship at The Times - that could be the start of a great career.
The brief is to write no more than 800 words on "The future of Britain lies with the right-hand side of the brain".
You can find more details here - http://www.londonlibrarystudentprize.com

Full details are on the website - entries need to be in by January 12th

Lots of lovely prizes to be won with Renault

I drive a Renault Clio. My last car was a Clio too - in all, I've been driving Clios for around 14 years and unless I win a car before I'm next due to change, my next car will probably be a Clio too. It's unusual to find  a small car that is comfortable for a tall person to drive, it has an amazingly large luggage capacity for its size - handy for lugging home all the bags of competition packs, in-store magazines and entry forms I collect - and it is very economical on fuel - again, very useful when I have to make a lot of trips to look for competitions.

If you take a test drive of a Clio at a participating Renault Dealer before 19 Sep and pick up a scratchcard, you can check online at www.rewardsfromrenault.co.uk to see if you have won one of 2,000 prizes  - 88 pairs of standard concert tickets and 8 pairs of best seats in the house concert tickets to the Rihanna Loud Tour 2011 at one of 10 UK venues. 1,704 items of Rihanna merchandise, 200 'Loud' CD's. If you win tickets and live more than 80 miles from the nearest venue, you will also get £100 towards travel.

Everyone who takes part in the instant win will also be entered into a draw to win one of four pairs of "Meet and Greet" tickets to see Rihanna in concert or 12 pairs of tickets to her concert in Dublin with transport and a night's  accommodation. Any unclaimed instant prizes will also be included in this draw.

If you don't want to take a test drive, you can enter a separate draw at www.vavavoom.co.uk where there are 10 pairs of tickets to Rihanna's concert at the O2 on 22Dec, including £100 towards transport if you live more than 80 miles  away. This draw closes 30 Nov.

Win a cooking class - in Hong Kong

I really don't know why I'm sharing this with you as I would love so much to win it myself! As many of you already know, I lived in Hong Kong for around 7 years in the 1970s and 1980s. That is where I developed my love of not only Chinese food, but also Indonesian, Malaysian and Nepalese. I arrived there never having even seen a wok in real life, and by the time I left, was teaching evening classes in Chinese cookery to forces wives. I would love to go back and see how much Hong Kong has changed since we left 25 years ago, and to brush up on my skills and maybe learn some new ones.

So this combines my loves of travel, cooking and competitions - all we need to do is work in some papercrafting and my life is complete. How about some Chinese themed cards that I made?

Right, now all my boxes are ticked, what about the competition?

Cathay Pacific is running the competition through an app on their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/cathaypacificUK?sk=app_207440762645809 

Here  is what they say about it:

Offering a real taste of the Orient, visitors to Cathay Pacific’s competition app on its Facebook page will be in with a chance of flying off with one economy return flight from the UK to a different destination in Asia each week over an eight week period, starting from 1 September.  Exotic destinations include Vietnam, Sichuan, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Korea.

All entrants from the previous eight weeks will then be automatically entered into a grand prize draw to win the star prize - a return pair of business flights to Hong Kong, with a three-night stay and a cooking master class for two at The Peninsula Hotel.

Accessible via Cathay Pacific’s UK Facebook page, people visiting the app will not only be able to join Cathay Pacific on board by winning flights to Hong Kong and beyond, but they will also be able to download and try featured recipes, learn new cooking skills and savour the delights that the Orient has to share.

To enter, visitors simply have to submit a culinary tip in response to a question posted on the app each week for a chance to win a flight to a different destination.  Visitors can then view and share other people’s cooking tips which are also uploaded.

Cathay Pacific operates four daily flights from London Heathrow to HongDragonair.

The first week's competition is now open, with a prize of flights to Hanoi. I've recently enjoyed watching Luke Nguyen's programme on the Good Food Channel about Vietnamese food, and would love to sample it "in situ" so I'll definitely be entering this week! The other destinations are 

week 1 (1/Sep) Hanoi, Vietnam

week 2 (8/Sep): Chengdu, China

week 3 (15/Sep): Hong Kong

week 4 (22/Sep): Tokyo, Japan

week 5 (29/Sep): Cebu, The Philippines

week 6 (6/Oct): Phuket, Thailand

week 7 (13/Oct): Taipei, Taiwan

week 8 (20/Oct): Seoul, Korea

week 9 (27/Oct): Grand Prize Draw

This banquet was cooked for us by my Chinese amah and her friend to welcome my parents when they visited Hong Kong - you too could learn to cook like this!

Whiskas Winners

Thank you to all of you who entered the Whiskas competition. There were one or two of you who tweeted but didn't leave a comment with your Twitter name - I'm afraid you didn't go into the hat as the instructions said that you had to leave a comment as well as tweeting as  tweets alone can so easily fail to show up in Twitter search!

The winners were  drawn with the help of http://www.randomnumbergenerator.com/ and are:

First two prizes
@annaojbee
@cleggy23

Thirteeen runners up
@lackro
@emilyh13
@7hippopotamus
@tazamuffin
@Busylizzie123
@spritneybeers
@IreneH2
@WISHGIRL123
@tinselgirl
@Nicky781
@capodemonte
@halkerstone
@judithsbooks

You should all have received a Direct Message on Twitter asking for your address. Well done everyone and thank you for entering.