Competition | 1 November 2008

In Competition No. 2568 you were invited to submit, in verse or prose, a profile of the typical Spectator competitor.

The picture that emerges is not all together flattering: a monomaniacal oddbod, almost certainly male (even if he uses a female name) and no longer in the first flush of youth, who nurses a simmering resentment at a] the world’s failure to acknowledge his true literary genius and b] the inexplicable absence of his entry in a given week from the winning line-up. ‘A fusion of deranged conceit and volcanic anxiety verging on paranoia,’ writes Basil Ransome-Davies, and he should know. Some of you put forward the theory that there is only one competitor who enters under a variety of pseudonyms. ‘Who has ever seen David Silverman and Bill Greenwell or Basil Ransome-Davies and Alanna Blake together or at all?’ asks J. Seery. And here’s Mary Holtby spilling the beans: ‘For some were anagrammatised — we knew who fitted the Bill —/ And some would reinvent themselves and change their names at will.’