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.
In Competition No. 2541 you were invited to submit a revealing fragment from an index which is all that remains of the autobiography of someone who has privileged access to the great and good. It might have been a member of the royal household or, as in W.J. Webster’s entry, a hairdresser to the rich,
In Competition No. 2540 you were invited to take a historical event and submit a newspaper leader on it in the style of either the Guardian, the Daily Mail or the Sun. There are some richly comic examples of the art of red-top headline writing in John Perry’s and Neil Roberts’s Hold Ye Front Page,
In Competition No. 2538 you were invited to submit an extract from one of the following books: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself; Nuclear War: What’s in it For You; The Joys of Cataloguing. These are all genuine titles taken from the hugely entertaining Bizarre Books by Russell Ash and Brian Lake. I’m
In Competition No. 2537 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘The Song of the Chartered Accountant’. You were allowed to substitute an alternative profession. I interpreted the word ‘profession’ loosely and was tempted by Mike Morrison’s personal shopper and touched by Martin Parker’s sexually frustrated retired flea-circus trainer, though they didn’t make the
In Competition No. 2536 you were invited to take an apparently unpromising holiday location, or a superficially unappealing activity holiday, and give it the hard sell in prose or verse form. One of my favourite spots is Dungeness in Kent. A nuclear power station might not be everyone’s cup of tea but its brooding presence
In Competition No. 2535 you were invited to submit a version of a Bible story recast for the atheist/agnostic market. This assignment, inspired by initiatives such as the Manga comic Bible and the Australian Bible Society’s text-message version of the Good Book, takes efforts to improve the accessibility of the Christian message to an absurd
In Competition No. 2534 you were invited to submit an extract from a speech given by the presenter of a Lifetime Achievement award at the Oscars in which the discerning listener can detect that the speaker is not as ‘delighted’ for the recipient as they purport to be. The film industry is clearly a cut-throat
In Competition No. 2533 you were invited to submit an obituary of a well-known fictional character, which gave you the opportunity to try your hand at what is an often underrated art. The only fictional character that I am aware of who has been honoured with an obituary in the real world is Hercule Poirot,
In Competition No. 2532 you were invited to take a recent news item and compress it into 25 words. I am grateful to Eric Smith in the West Indies who suggested the idea and drew my attention to the shadowy figure of Félix Fénéon, art critic and anarchist, among other things. His fait divers, or
A couple of years ago there was a programme on the BBC in which well-known public figures gamely revealed the contents of their school reports. We learnt that Margaret Thatcher was a ray of sunshine in the classroom: ‘Her cheeriness makes her a very pleasant member of her form’. And if David Beckham (‘makes good
In Competition No. 2529 you were invited to submit a poem describing what women are like. It was Wendy Cope’s funny and poignant poem ‘Bloody Men’ that prompted the comp. There was no obligation to mimic her style, though several did. A disturbing if familiar image emerged from some, though by no means all, of
Lucy Vickery presents the winners of Competition No. 2528 In Competition No. 2528 you were invited to submit an extract from an imaginary story in the Famous Five series written in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction. So it’s Blyton meets Hammett; the upper-middle-class crime-busting quintet, whose adventures are played out in a 1950s rural idyll