Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition. In Competition No. 2682 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of a Shakespearean character who has woken up to find him or herself transported to the present day. John O’Byrne, Frank Osen, Gillian Ewing and Josephine Boyle impressed this week but top honours go to
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2681 you were invited to submit a treble clerihew about a public figure who was prominent in 2009 or 2010. Jaspistos, who ran a similar competition some years ago, noted that it was E.C. Bentley’s son, the author and illustrator Nicolas Bentley, who invented the double
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2680 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem of which the first letter of each line spells out the words Happy New Year. This challenge elicited a whopping entry, and there were plenty of unfamiliar names among the regulars, which is always pleasing. You were
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2679 you were invited to usher in the New Year with a teetotallers’ drinking song. As usual with this sort of challenge, many that read well on the page didn’t lend themselves to being sung aloud. But an impressive entry yielded some rousing and not unpersuasive
In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. It was a smallish and somewhat lacklustre entry, possibly owing to the earlier-than-usual deadline. But I warmed to D.A. Prince’s Lord
Lucy Vickery resents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas. The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2676 you were invited to submit a reply to the poet from Wordsworth’s cuckoo or Keats’s nightingale. A huge entry yielded an entertaining parade of stroppy birds with a fine line in put-downs. While Wordsworth took the greatest punishment (deservedly, some might say) in terms of
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2675 you were invited to submit a book-jacket blurb for a well-known work of fiction that is designed to be as off-putting as possible. You were on sparkling form all round this week, especially Marion Shore, Robert Schechter and John O’Byrne. The winners, printed below, earn
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2674 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of Paul the Octopus, who died peacefully in his tank last month aged a respectable two-and-a-half. Paul was catapulted from the obscurity of an aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany to international celebrity when he accurately predicted
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2673 you were invited to submit a pompous leader on a trivial subject. Among the topics that unleashed your inner Thunderer were the abuse of the ‘eight items or less’ lane in supermarkets (to say nothing of the lamentable confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’) and the
In Competition No. 2672 you were invited to disprove G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. In his essay ‘The Poet and the Cheese’ Chesterton himself takes steps to put this right, penning a sonnet to a Stilton cheese, which, as he acknowledges, contains ‘echoes’ of another
In Competition No. 2671 you were invited to submit a poem in which the rhymed ending of each line is a truncated word. This challenge invites you to follow in the footsteps of that master of light verse and lover of word-play Harry Graham, who, in his poem ‘Poetical Economy’, ‘found a simple plan/ Which
In Competition No. 2670 you were invited to catapult Mr Jingle into the 21st century and have him deliver an anecdote. Alfred Jingle, the lean, green-coated stranger, makes his first appearance in Chapter Two of The Pickwick Papers and immediately steals the show with his ‘lengthened string of …broken sentences, delivered with extraordinary volubility…’ You
In Competition No. 2669 you were invited to take one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies and recast it in the style of the author of your choice. This was an exceptionally strong field, with winners enough to fill several columns. Honourable mentions to G.M. Davis, Mary Holtby, Laura Garratt and Margaret Howell, and £30 each to those
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
In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. You split into two camps: some infused with the bleak spirit of Billie Holiday’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (‘Gloomy is Sunday with shadows I spend
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2666 you were invited to supply an example of pretentious tosh in the shape of a review of a TV or radio soap opera or any other piece of entertainment aimed at the mass market. It is tempting with this type of comp to go over
In Competition No. 2665 you were invited to submit a lullaby suitable for the modern child. ‘But do lullabies lull?’ writes competitor W.J. Webster, who puts an adult fear of heights (not to mention a horror of half-rhymes) down to repeated exposure as a little’un to the strains of ‘Rock-a-bye baby’. Among the more nightmare-inducing
In Competition 2664 you were invited to submit a dialogue, in verse or prose, between two parts of yourself at odds with one another. As usual, verse entries vastly outnumbered prose ones. In an excellent field, Brian Murdoch, Adrian Fry, Bill Greenwell and Fergus Pickering stood out. Basil Ransome-Davies scoops the bonus fiver for a
In Competition No. 2663 you were invited to submit a politically correct version of a well-known fairy tale. The inspiration for this challenge was Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times by James Finn Garner, who recasts favourite yarns to take account of modern political sensibilities. In Garner’s PC world, witches