In Competition No. 2735 you were invited to take as your first line ‘My love is like a [fill in blank]’, and continue, in light verse. Amid the ailments — ‘a drippy nose’, ‘a whooping cough’; the animals — ‘a three-toed sloth’, ‘a sea urchin’; and foodstuffs galore: ‘ripe Gorgonzola’, ‘ a tub of lard’,
In Competition No. 2734 you were invited to provide anagrams of lines from Shakespearean sonnets. These assignments are not the most popular but every so often the urge to send you to anagram hell gets the better of me. ‘I found this competition exasperatingly difficult,’ wrote Josephine Boyle. Equally exasperated, it seems, was Basil Ransome-Davies,
In Competition No. 2733 you were invited to condense the plot of a Dickens novel into a triple limerick. In case you hadn’t noticed, it would have been Dickens’s 200th birthday this week, and this assignment is a modest contribution to the avalanche of Dickens-related events unleashed across the globe by the bicentenary. (Even estate
In Competition No. 2732 you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. This challenge is a twist on the magnificent annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which salutes the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ Entrants
In Competition No. 2731 you were invited to supply a poem in praise of punctuation. An excellent entry, this. Space is tight and I very much regretted not having room for Alan Millard, David Duncan Jones and Frank Osen in addition to the worthy winners below. The bonus fiver belongs to Basil Ransome-Davies. The rest
In Competition No. 2730 you were invited to supply a refutation in verse of Philip Larkin’s assertion ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. ‘This Be The Verse’ may not be Larkin’s finest poem but it is certainly his best-known and most oft-quoted (he himself wryly commented that he fully expected to hear it
In Competition No. 2729 you were invited to recast a well-known nursery rhyme, filtering it through the lens of a recent news story. Josh Ekroy was on fine form: ‘Liam had a little friend/ his suit was white as snow/ and everywhere that Liam went/ his friend was sure to go.’ In a strong entry,
In Competition No. 2728 you were asked to provide a parody, with a Christmas connection, of a living British writer with an international reputation. The assignment invited you to follow in the mighty footsteps of Max Beerbohm, whose talent for parody few have matched. His A Christmas Garland, whose centenary falls this year, is considered
In Competition No. 2727 you were asked for a short story entitled ‘An unwelcome bequest’. The Guardian recently invited its readers to share their experiences of unwished-for bequeathals. The request elicited a crop of hugely funny and touching stories featuring, among other things, ‘a hideous pink pig in a hat and a pinny drinking a
In Competition No. 2726 you were asked for a modern version of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ taking as your first line ‘On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me…’ and continuing for a further twelve. Perhaps inevitably there was a fair amount of repetition in the entry: plenty of leakers
In Competition No. 2725 you were invited to supply the sales particulars for planet Earth. ‘Need a home where you can really spread yourself?’ asks George Simmers. ‘It’s the ideal residence for the adventurous virus with an urge to propagate. There’s a comfily warm and humid climate in most parts of the planet (And it’s
In Competition No. 2724 you were invited to supply a poem in which the initial letters of each line read down the page reproduce the last line. Though some of you clearly relish competitions of this kind (check out Frank McDonald’s double-paracrostic in the winning line-up), there was the inevitable rumble of protest in the
In Competition No. 2723 you were invited to supply an updated version of Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’. A reading of the sonnet on Westminster Bridge in September 2002, to commemorate its 200th anniversary, was all but drowned out by the roar of the rush hour. A far cry, then, from Wordsworth’s view of a slumbering
In Competition No. 2722 you were invited to supply an all-purpose poem for state occasions. ‘What a strange competition,’ writes Elizabeth Llewellyn-Smith, ‘when the prize must inevitably go to Wendy Cope for her existing poem under the same title! Who is going to beat that one?’ Good point, Miss Llewellyn-Smith; Wendy Cope’s wry and witty
In Competition No. 2721 you were invited to supply a short story incorporating the following: ‘rebarbative’, ‘solipsistic’, ‘lapidary’, ‘consequential’, ‘plangent’, ‘gibbous’. It was an impressive postbag with only the occasional stilted moment — you displayed considerable ingenuity in weaving the given words into a plausible and entertaining narrative. I was sorry to have to disqualify
In Competition No. 2720 you were invited to supply a piece of prose written by a well-known author working in an unlikely context. Thanks to Brian Moore for drawing my attention to Samuel Beckett’s flirtation with a career in grocery trade journalism, as revealed in the great man’s recently published volume of letters: ‘I see
In Competition No. 2719 you were invited to imagine that a well-known literary character of your choice had spilled the beans to a tabloid and to supply the resulting front-page story, including headline. I liked Virginia Price Evans’s paternity shocker: ‘I was Scrooge’s love child’, says Tiny Tim. Una McMorran, John Samson and Mike Morrison
In Competition No. 2718 you were invited to submit an account, in verse, of a medical procedure undergone. The inspiration for this assignment, was James Michie’s characteristically witty and well-made ‘On Being Fitted with a Pace-Maker’: ‘What with sex and fags and liquor,/ Silly old mulish heart,/ Dear unregenerate ticker,/ You needed a kick start’.
In Competition No. 2717 you were invited to supply a poem expressing distaste for something or someone widely considered to be beautiful. You poured scorn on Paris, daffodils, Michelangelo and Alan Bennett’s plays. Newborns were also a popular target. Here is Melissa Balmain giving it both barrels: ‘You can dress it in taffeta, ribbon and
In Competition No. 2716 you were invited to supply the gripping final 150 words of the first instalment of a serial thriller. Charles Reade, now mostly forgotten but ranked with Dickens in his day, summed up the art of the cliffhanger thus: ‘Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait — exactly in that