‘Around the House in 80 Days’ and other titles for lockdown

In Competition No. 3149 you were invited to tweak an existing book or poem title for lockdown and provide an excerpt from the resulting work.

This excellent challenge, suggested by a reader, produced a vast entry and some cracking titles, including Masefield’s ‘Cabin Fever’ and Jane Austen’s Compulsion, as well as several variations on ‘Come Not into the Garden Maud’. There was more Tennyson from Sally Fiery, whose impassioned ‘Charge of the Price Hike-Brigade’ begins: Half a quid, half a quid,/ Nobody wondered,/ That was the price of soap,/ Now it’s six hundred…’ Commendations also go to Brian Allgar, Barry Baldwin, Frank Upton, Nick Syrett, G.M. Southgate and Iain Orr, whose tweaked title, Joseph Heller’s Covid-19, was an inspired one in these crazy times. The winners below pocket £25.

The hues that once were pure and bright Are yet a well-remember’d sight, When first we sank into the void Our radiant hair was unalloy’d, Yet time, unerring, doth expose The root’s deception, as it grows.