Spectator competition winners: it started with a tweet…

For the latest challenge you were asked to submit a poem or a short story that begins ‘It started with a tweet…’. Hats off to Philip Machin for an appropriately pithy submission:

It started with a tweet — There’s nothing wrong in that — But, sadly, indiscreet: It ended with a cat.

Elsewhere, in a varied and engaging entry, there were echoes of Shelley’s skylark, Lear’s owl and Hitchcock’s Birds. The winners below are rewarded with £25 each.

W.J. Webster It started with a tweet, a joke at his expense, okay, but just a quip intended to provoke a smile or some quick counter-thrust: instead he opted to deplore its tone, which others duly liked not to approve of more and more until the growing numbers spiked much hope of coming to a truce as we were hit on either side by covert forces now let loose that could, it seemed, not be denied the chance to give or take offence at total strangers’ tweeted words and make bewildered victims sense the swooping screeching of The Birds.

D.A.