Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2668 you were invited to submit a poem that contains advice from young to old.
Several of you took as your starting point Robert Southey’s po-faced ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and how he gained them’ — or Lewis Carroll’s much more enjoyable parody of it as recited by Alice in chapter five of her Adventures In Wonderland.
Michael Birt, Tim Raikes, Katie Mallett and Josephine Boyle impressed but were squeezed out by the winners, printed below, who earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch bags the bonus fiver.
You are old, Father William, though threescore
and ten
Is not the top whack any more,
And everyone tells me (though heaven forfend!)
You might live to a hundred and four.
And so my advice is: remember your age,
There’s plenty you needn’t now do,
Like spending your savings (that’s my heritage,
And that of the grandchildren too!)
So don’t squander your pension and fritter the lot
On world cruises promoted by Saga.
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