In Competition No. 2561 you were invited to continue in verse or prose the statement ‘The gentleman in Whitehall knows better…’ Another exercise in spleen-venting, this attracted a weighty postbag. The quotation is from Douglas Jay’s The Socialist Case written in 1939. In full it reads, ‘In the case of nutrition, just as in the
In Competition No 2560 you were invited to describe a visit to Glyndebourne or Glastonbury in the style of an author of your choice. But first a memo from Doctor Johnson re. his recent Competition 2558 (Harmless drudgery) in which he let through a contribution that confused a ‘roadie’ with a ‘groupie’. To the lady
In Competition No 2559 you were invited to complete a poem starting ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on …!’ with the target of your choice. In a huge entry, Gordon Brown and his crew were by far the most popular destination for your WMDs (you may as well pack your bags now, mate). Other favourite
James Young presents the latest competition In Competition No 2558 you were invited to submit entries to Dr Johnson for inclusion in a 21st-century supplement to his dictionary. At first the Doctor feared that too many of you were confining your definitions to the five examples he gave of the sort of thing he wanted.
In Competition No. 2557 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose with each line or sentence beginning with the letters A S D F G H J K L Z X C V B N M in that order. I discovered while setting this comp that the longest word you can
In Competition No 2556 you were invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of either P.G. Wodehouse or Ian Fleming. They are two of the most popular characters in English fiction, but it’s hard to think of two more disparate ones; Bertie, the chump, always in some sort
In Competition No 2555 you were invited to write a poem, short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. The line, which I altered slightly to make versification easier, was uttered by General John Sedgwick, a Union general who was shot dead in the American civil war battle
In Competition No. 2554 you were invited to write an extract from George Orwell’s Twenty Eighty. One or two entrants queried the seemingly odd choice of year. I arrived at this by following Orwell, who chose 1984 by reversing the last two digits of 1948, the year he completed his book on the Isle of
You are invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of either P.G. Wodehouse or Ian Fleming. Maximum 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2556’ by 31 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net. In Competition No. 2553 you were invited to write a sonnet by the Mistress in reply to the author
No. 2555: Last words You are invited to write a poem or short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. Maximum 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2555’ by 24 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net. In Competition 2552 you were invited to follow Bernard Levin (who liked
In Competition No. 2551 you were invited to complete in verse or prose a letter by Noël Coward, ‘Dear 338171 (may I call you 338?)’, to Aircraftman Ross (aka T.E. Lawrence) and Lawrence’s reply. First an apology. Bill Greenwell points out that Lawrence, though originally Aircraftman Ross, was serving as Aircraftman Shaw in a second
In Competition No. 2550 you were invited to submit a children’s story or a poem written in the style of an established author who has never published in that genre. The challenge produced a lacklustre response in the main with a few top-notch exceptions. The entry was split evenly between verse and prose, and it’s
In Competition No. 2549 you were invited to find a gap in the language and plug it, explaining the etymology of your coinage. There is a word, ‘sniglet’, created by the American comedian and writer Rich Hall, which describes ‘any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary but should’. There were some fine sniglets in
In Competition No. 2548 you were invited to submit sales particulars for a property well known in literature in your best estate-agent-ese. It was a capacious entry, which benefited from unrivalled clichés and florid, tautological prose. You aped the estate agent’s way of accentuating the positive well. We all know that ‘bijou’ translates as ‘broom
In Competition No 2547 you were invited to write a poem or some prose ending with ‘The pen [or pun] is mightier than the sword’. The tag comes from a play, Richelieu, by Lord Lytton, the 19th-century politician and writer remembered today, if at all, for The Last Days of Pompeii. The idea for the
No. 2549: New word order The journalist Peter Lubin coined the word ‘sesquilingualist’ to describe people who have a smattering of a foreign language. You are invited to find a gap in the language and plug it, explaining the etymology of your coinage (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2549’ by 12 June or email
In Competition No. 2545 you were invited to submit a letter written by a well-known literary character to an insurance company making a personal accident claim. My favourite ludicrous compensation claim — which generated the classic Sun headline ‘Safeway leaflet crippled my dog’ — was made against the unfortunate supermarket chain by a couple after
In Competition No. 2544 you were invited to submit a shopping list in verse form, making the last word of every line a brand name. Although I try to vary the competitions as much as possible, this is the second list-poem assignment in a row. As this was, at least in part, an attempt to
In Competition No. 2543 you were invited to submit a poem about the things people need to live on, in which the first letter of each line spells out the first 16 letters of the alphabet. Martin Parker, self-confessed ‘crawler’, played the flattery card (he was not alone), which had no bearing whatsoever, of course,
In Competition No. 2542 you were invited to submit a ghost story entitled ‘The Face of the Horse’. I read the entries by flickering candlelight in a bid to recreate the atmosphere of the dean’s rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, where M.R. James gave Christmas Eve readings of his stories to a group of friends.