Spectator competition: An update on Belloc’s kiddie delinquents (plus: write a poem celebrating a modern-day blot on the landscape)

The call for an update on one of the children in Cautionary Tales who lived to tell the tale attracted a large and excellent entry. Belloc’s gallery of kiddie delinquents suffered particularly unpleasant comeuppances — being eaten, feet upwards, by a lion, and so on. Of those who did escape with their lives, weepy Lord Lundy and Algernon (who narrowly missed killing his sister with a loaded gun) were the most popular subjects in this comp. Max Ross’s submission, in which Algernon grows up to be a jihadi, had a chilling topical twist: ‘Thus, in the best religious fashion,/ Al-gee indulged his boyhood passion’. Both Mae Scanlan and Chris O’Carroll saw a glittering future for Franklin Hyde, digger of dirt, as a member of the press. And Mark Lemmon thought that Godolphin Horne (‘He held the Human race in Scorn’) might make an excellent Newsnight presenter. Elissa Macgregor and David Duncan Jones were unlucky losers.