Competition

In competition No. 2457 you were invited to offer a poem entitled ‘The Picnic’. The picnics of my youth in Surrey were enjoyable but slightly suburban — Newlands Corner, Chobham Common and so on — but never as suburban as Tony Goldman’s Betjeman-inspired picnic, which ended up with him ‘silent upon a peak in Godalming’.

In Competition No. 2456 you were invited to supply a poem lamenting the degeneration of the traditional English pub.The ideal pub in literature is surely the Potwell Inn, that Kentish riverside paradise where H.G. Wells’s Mr Polly found contentment at last with his pint and his punt and his plump landlady. I used to like

In Competition No. 2455 you were invited to incorporate a dozen given words, all beginning with b, into a plausible piece of prose. The given words were on the surface less testing than usual, but that was only to lure you into the trap of the too obvious. Cleverclogs, like Jeremy Chilcott and L.E. Betts,

In competition No. 2453 you were given beginning and ending words and invited to supply a short story within them. The given words were the opening and closing sentences of a story by V. S. Pritchett entitled ‘The Evils of Spain’, with one small difference: owing to a misprint, Pritchett’s ‘Angel’, a male, became our

In Competition No. 2452 you were invited to write an elegy on the death, in Queensland, Australia, of a 176-year-old tortoise called Harriet, who had met Darwin in the Galapagos Islands and was for most of her life wrongly thought to be male. D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore and Ogden Nash have all written lyrically about

In Competition No. 2451 you were asked to imagine that two strangers have met through our column ‘The Love Bug’ and that both have simultaneously posted letters indicating that further meetings are not on. You were invited to provide both letters. Only once have I responded to a sex advertisement. As a result I found

In Competition No. 2450 you were invited to offer a poem, on any subject, in which the first letters of each line spell out MIDSUMMER NIGHT. It’s surprising how many people think that Midsummer’s Day is on 21 June. That is calendrically the longest day. The 24th, the feast day of St John the Baptist

In Competition No. 2449 you were invited to provide an Alice in Wonderland-style conversation between two chess pieces, either in prose or in verse. Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de piqueCausent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.It was this wonderful image of Baudelaire’s that suggested to me the notion of a conversation between

In Competition No. 2448 you were invited to write a poem entitled ‘A Description of a City Shower’. The poet of rain is undoubtedly Hardy. His titles fairly drip with it — ‘A Wet August’, ‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’, ‘Rain on a Grave’ and, more to the point, ‘A Thunderstorm in Town’, which charmingly features

In Competition No. 2447 you were invited to supply an imaginary extract from one of three real book titles: The Philosophy of Beards, Five Years of Hell in a Country Parish, Unmentionable Cuisine. The first title, by Thomas S. Gowing, was published in Ipswich by J. Haddock c. 1850; the second, by the Revd Edward

In Competition No. 2446 you were invited to provide a poem with the title of ‘The Danger of Queer Hats’. There are one or two queer hats in literature, like the one worn by Lear’s Old Man in the Kingdom of Tess, which was ‘a loaf of brown bread, in the middle of which he

In Competition No. 2445 you were given a dozen words and invited to incorporate them, in any order, in a plausible piece of prose, using them in a non-snooker sense. Despite the fact that occasionally someone writes to complain that this is a boring type of comp, this week’s entry was the largest ever, nigh

In Competition No. 2444 you were invited to offer two stanzas in the metre and rhyme-scheme of Byron’s ‘Don Juan’, making fun of one or more of the Labour party’s present embarrassments. ‘Never,’ said Charles Seaton, my predecessor, when he passed on the sacred baton, ‘give them a political subject. They get too hot under

In Competition No. 2441 (wrongly numbered 2443) you were invited to choose a title of a well-known work of fiction and write an amusing poem with the same title. This gave rise to much comic lateral thinking. Esther Waters featured the hosepipe ban, Scoop followed a dog on a walk, Orwell’s title was transmuted into

In Competition No. 2443 you were invited to supply a letter from someone on holiday pretending they are having a good time when in fact they are not. This was tricky because some of the incidents described were beyond the pretence of enjoyment. Simon Massey, for instance, led off with: ‘See Naples and die, they

Bouts rimés In Competition No. 2442 you were asked for a poem with certain rhyme words to be used in a given order.The rhymes were taken from a poem by J.B. Morton (

In Competition No. 2439 you were invited to write a poem in praise of a friend. The only time I wrote a poem in praise of a friend, he shortly afterwards committed murder, followed by suicide. There are, though, much happier examples. Pope’s ‘On a Certain Lady at Court’ ends:‘Has she no faults then,’ Envy

In Competition No. 2438 you were invited to write, in the spirit of Aesop or La Fontaine, a rhymed fable involving animals. Last week I doubted my qualifications to be a judge, but this week my credentials are copper-bottomed, since I have translated selections of the fables of both Aesop and La Fontaine: a sympathetic

In Competition No. 2437 you were invited to supply an incident from a children’s adventure story featuring a mythical beast and a magic device. Perhaps someone who doesn’t dig Robinson Crusoe, Swallows and Amazons or The Hobbit and feels no inclination to read a Harry Potter book isn’t the ideal judge for this competition, but