Creativity

Signing themselves off "Yours in oceans of warmth", Paul and Steph say that El Nino "might go some way towards fuelling the weeping required for Lord Spencer following his unfortunate loss of pounds 2m in his recent divorce case." In their own house, they say, they just don't have enough tears unaided.

Duncan Bull recommends "swooshing it through the Commons where the blasts of hot air would instantly vaporise it". Steam-turbines could then generate enough electricity to satisfy the world's energy needs. Kenneth A Moore warns of an impending fish war caused by competition for all the tropical fish that El Nino will attract. He points out that "warm salt water" is an anagram of "at arms we trawl".

Maguy Higgs, who suffers from a rare condition that obliges her to compose one poem every day, writes:

"The water's only tepid,

one need not be intrepid

When cogitating uses

for these warm saline juices.

Mike Gifford says: "A boatload of London theatre critics would pour enough cold water on it to solve global warming." Judith Holmes wants to "bottle up the warm water and sell it globally to bathe infants". Lindsay Warden wants to fill El Nino "with a shoal of flatulent fish to make a very large jacuzzi." Or, she suggests, you could use it to fill a very large water bed for "millennium proportion cavorting".

For porpoises and tortoises

Warm waves encourage snore-noises

As they take naps; this use perhaps

beats all the rest, passes the test

Maguy Higgs intrepidly continues.

"The warm waters of El Nino?" asks Margaret Woods rhetorically: "Give them to some old geyser." Nicholas E Gough suggests killing two environment birds with one stone by taking El Nino to the poles and freezing it, thereby counteracting global warming and reducing sea-levels. Phil Worth likes the idea of giving a romantic name to a stretch of water. he suggests re-christening some British waters: "El Lavado" for The Wash, "El Bahia Sueter" for Cardigan Bay, and "El Abra Concuarto", the Firth of Fo(u)rth."

RJ Pickles wants to fence it off and use it as a holiday resort for polar bears, walruses and penguins. Richard Joyner and Lizzie say: "the obvious use of the warm water of El Nino is for washing tectonic plates." Norman Foster wants to fill an inverted Millennium Dome with El Nino waters to create the world's largest year-round swimming-pool.

Maria O Treadwell has stepped into, or perhaps out of, Sian Cole's shoes and sent us a "pretty postcard of me flashing my tits and bum in El Nino." Actually it's a very tasteful underwater silhouette. "Can anyone do better?" asks Ms Treadwell. "I think not." Well, Sian Cole attempts to do so, with a plan to remake the film The Blue Lagoon with herself as Brooke Shields: "the first totally explicit au naturel underwater extravaganza".

Bruce Birchall thinks it perfect for brewing warm beer, or teaching nannies how to test bath water with their elbows, or putting out bush fires in Australia, or testing Messiahs for their walking-on-water ability, or for making Chile less so, or staging a Wet Wet Wet concert.

Susan Tomes points out that you can make icing by adding a few drops of warm water to icing-sugar. So with the warm waters of El Nino, you can make enough icing "to fashion a replica of the Polar Ice Cap, so that when the real one melts, owing to global warming, we can quickly tow the Polar Icing Cap to take its place and prevent the world from overbalancing".

Without its tilde, `nino'

Would be pronounced like `vino'

Maguy Higgs laments.

Finally, Jack and Renee Dolan think that the environmental police could use sirens that scream "Nino-Nino-Nino-Ni ..."

Chambers Dictionary prizes to Lindsay Warden, Richard and Lizzie, and Bruce Birchall. Next week, what do with the detritus of Christmas. Then we'll be looking for things to do with 1998. Ideas to: Creativity, The Independent, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL.