Competition | 16 August 2008

In Competition No. 2557 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose with each line or sentence beginning with the letters A S D F G H J K L Z X C V B N M in that order.

I discovered while setting this comp that the longest word you can type using just the QWERTY row of letters on a typewriter is … ‘typewriter’. No doubt one or two of you will prove me wrong; indeed, there is an even longer word if you allow ‘tripewriter’….  Anyway, where was I? The less tripe I write, the more space there is to showcase your wit and wisdom. In a big and varied entry, commendations go to Adrian Fry for his Laurie Lee, anti-gardening Alan Millard and Basil Ransome-Davies’s Rimbaud. I especially liked the brace of Coleridges; they and the others printed below win £25 while the extra fiver is W.J.