Country music

In Competition No. 2503 you were invited to supply new words for the British national anthem, to be sung to the original tune.

Spain’s opposition leader Mariano Rajoy recently called for its anthem to be given words following complaints from athletes who were fed up with humming self-consciously or staring solemnly into the middle-distance while it was playing at major sporting events. The story prompted the Today programme to invite the poet Murray Lachlan Young to come up with new words for ‘God Save the Queen’ which would reflect our changing political society. His opening was pretty feeble: ‘On this Atlantic rock/ We do complain a lot/ And like a drink…’ And it didn’t get much better, which goes to show that this assignment was a challenging one. As veteran competitor and serial winner Basil Ransome-Davies writes, ‘Tougher than it looks…’.

There was a mammoth entry, many of which put Lachlan Young to shame.