Competition

In Competition No. 2581 you were invited to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it in Franglais. The challenge was inspired by Miles Kington’s masterly The Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Literary Masterpieces, and the standard was top-tiroir. You inflicted mongrel French and English on the literary classics to great

In Competition No. 2580 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘New Year Letter’, concluding with the words ‘under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state’. This couplet opens Auden’s long and oft-maligned verse epistle ‘New Year Letter’. Writing in the New Statesman in 1941, G.S. Fraser complained that he’d read

In Competition No. 2579 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of or denouncing the world wide web. In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, thorn in the side of Web 2.0, rails against the calamitous effects of user-generated web content on our culture, bemoaning the emergence of ‘digital narcissism’

In Competition No. 2578 you were invited to imagine the speech that Shakespeare, as a boy, might have delivered as he was slaughtering a calf. This challenge was inspired by John Aubrey’s portrait of the young bard in Brief Lives: ‘His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the

In Competition No. 2577 you were invited to supply definitions of five types of anything you chose. As the eagle-eyed among you will have spotted, Jaspistos set an almost identical assignment a few years ago, inspired by Sydney Smith’s six types of handshake. On that occasion, Noel Petty scooped the bonus fiver for his definition

In Competition No. 2576 you were invited to submit New Year’s resolutions of well-known figures past and present. There can be no finer example to the goal-setting constituency than Jaspistos who, in his late forties though not necessarily at New Year, resolved to do three things which he had regarded with particular dread: to attend

In Competition No. 2575 you were invited to submit a carol entitled ‘The Last Noel’. Noel for me generally goes like this: I make a brief, half-hearted stand against the evils of what now passes for Christmas and then succumb, with abandon, to avarice, gluttony and sloth. By the time I’d finished reading the entry,

In Competition No. 2574 you were invited to take a poem, or a fragment of a poem, and anagrammatise it to make a new poem. Some of you were unsure exactly what it was I was after. I was asking you to break down a poem, or part of it, into its constituent letters and

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2573 you were invited to submit the synopsis of a sequel-that-was-never-written to a well-known novel. Sequels to books and films have a poor reputation, the assumption being that, with the odd exception (The Godfather: Part II, for example), they will almost certainly fall short of the

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2572 you were invited to provide a rugby- or football-style song for another sport. After I’d set the assignment, it occurred to me that it runs counter to the spirit of football chants and rugby songs, which seem to arise spontaneously on the terraces and in

In Competition No. 2571 you were invited to submit an extract from the life story of a famous figure from history written in the style of a contemporary misery memoir. The seemingly insatiable appetite for tales of other people’s torment and degradation that keeps ‘mis lit’ at the top of the bestseller lists is as

In Competition No. 2570 you were invited to take any song by the Beatles or by Elvis Presley and rewrite it in the style of the poet of your choice. It’s a long way from Scotty Moore to Middle Scots but that didn’t stop Penelope Mackie, who submitted a fine rendition of ‘All Shook Up’

In Competition No. 2569 you were invited to describe a modern social ill of your choice in the style of Charles Dickens. Ills singled out included bellowing down mobile phones in public, elusive plumbers, and that scourge of the modern age, the potato wedge. Many entries ably demonstrate what George Orwell describes as Dickens’s ‘undisguised

In Competition No. 2568 you were invited to submit, in verse or prose, a profile of the typical Spectator competitor. The picture that emerges is not all together flattering: a monomaniacal oddbod, almost certainly male (even if he uses a female name) and no longer in the first flush of youth, who nurses a simmering

In Competition No. 2567 you were invited to submit a letter of application for a job of your choosing written by a character from a novel or poem who would appear to be a very unpromising candidate. Thank you to Michael Cregan — the idea for this comp is one of his, tweaked by me.

In Competition No. 2566 you were invited to submit a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first. Many of your entries struck a grimly topical note with key lines such as ‘Greed driven swine’ and ‘Gordon Brown is mad’. Others turned their attention to the natural

In Competition No. 2565 you were invited to submit a poem about the minor irritations of life written in heroic couplets. Things that bring out the misanthropist in me include ‘comedy’ stickers on cars (e.g., ‘my other car’s a Porsche!’), the over-enthusiastic use of exclamation marks and strangers who say ‘cheer up, love; it may

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2564 you were invited to submit a feature looking back at the Olympic Games written in the overblown style of a sportswriter with literary pretensions. High-brow followers of football are nothing new. And these days, as people flit increasingly freely between high and low culture, there is

In Competition No 2563 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose whose lines or sentences end with twelve given words in any order. This is my last week minding the Comp Shop while Lucy Vickery has been on maternity leave. It has been a pleasure and a privilege doing business

In Competition No 2562 you were invited to write a soliloquy by someone prone to malapropisms or misquotations, or a dialogue between them. The trouble with this comp, as I realised when the entries started to come in, is that the two categories overlap; a misquotation often is a malapropism. Happily this didn’t put too