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
In Competition No. 2662 you were invited to submit a poem composed in the midst of a travel hold-up. The entry, a magnificent collective letting-off-of-steam, was peppered with exasperated references to apoplectic rage, bursting bladders and bickering children but these were tempered by those who acknowledged that there are benefits in being forced to take
In Competition No. 2661 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The Day of Doom’. As Google will tell you in a trice, the title is that of an epic poem about Judgment Day by the 17-century New England minister Michael Wigglesworth. Puritans lapped up its florid account of a wrathful God meting
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2660 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of a bodily part that has been overlooked by poets. You turned out in force to celebrate the unsung heroes of our anatomy. Sonnets to the spleen rubbed shoulders with paeans to the pancreas and odes
In Competition No. 2659 you were invited to take the title of a well-known novel and write an amusing poem with the same title. There are some long lines this week, which leaves space only to mention unlucky losers Mae Scanlan and Max Ross. The winning six get £25 each; Frank McDonald nabs £30. Anna
In Competition No. 2658 you were invited to submit a bedroom scene written by a novelist who would not normally venture into such territory. A wise choice, it seems: even literary giants come a cropper when writing about sex. John Updike was shortlisted four times for one of Britain’s least coveted literary prizes, the Literary
In Competition No. 2657 you were invited to imagine what merry band Chaucer might bring together if he were writing today. It was another bumper entry this week, and you fell into two camps. There were those who reasoned that were Chaucer writing today he’d probably use modern English. Others, though, couldn’t resist the lure
In Competition No. 2656 you were invited to submit a dialogue between two well-known figures from different centuries, each using the argot of the time. You responded to this challenge with your usual verve and skill, and I especially liked Frank McDonald’s conversation between Julius Caesar and Churchill (Templumcollis) on the trials of wartime leadership.