In Competition No. 2466 you were invited to supply a poem or piece of prose ending with the phrase ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ These words, according to Eric Partridge’s definition, are ‘applied in retrospect, jocularly or ruefully, to anything done impulsively with disastrous consequences, whether or not those were foreseeable
The scissors-and-paste work involved in this, though laborious, is easy enough; what is difficult is to avoid sliding into nonsense. The trick is, in Dryden’s phrase, to ‘deviate into sense’ as often as possible. John C.H. Mounsey began promisingly: ‘I met a traveller from an antique land,/ A cricket cap was on his head./ “Hold
‘What we have to facilitate is a bottom-up approach.’ In Competition No. 2464 you were invited to provide a specimen of ministerial waffle. ‘What we have to facilitate is a bottom-up approach.’ When I heard those words come out of the mouth of Ruth Kelly (could she really have been Secretary of State for Education?),
In Competition No. 2463 you were invited to incorporate in a piece of plausible prose examples of the following terms: oxymoron, personification, simile, hyperbole, archaism, periphrasis, solecism, paronomasia, alliteration, epizeuxis. My apologies for having misspelt ‘paronomasia’ in setting the comp. At least it gave Mike Lunan the chance to launch a mocking epizeuxis combined with
In Competition No. 2462 you were given the lines, ‘A man so various that he seemed to be/ Not one prime minister but twenty-three …’ (a rejig of Dryden’s famous couplet) and asked to continue. Dryden’s Zimri, the various man who ‘in the course of one revolving moon/ Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon’, is
In Competition No. 2461 you were invited to think up Seven Deadly Virtues and to mock them in verse. Chastity and sobriety and political correctness were obvious Aunt Sallies. Michael Saxby gave a wise warning against honesty: ‘Thus “Does my bum look big in this?” will land one in a mess/ Unless one says, “Of
In Competition No. 2460 you were invited to submit a short story with the title ‘The Man Who Did Not’. This assignment gave you the opportunity to step into the shoes of the doomed young writer Konstantin in The Seagull (though, given his fate, you’d perhaps have chosen not to). Konstantin’s Uncle Sorin suggests the
In Competition No. 2458 you were invited to disprove Chesterton’s assertion that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’. I meant disprove by your own efforts, not disprove historically, but either approach was acceptable. Belloc waxed lyrical on the subject in an essay, ‘In Praise of Cheese’, and the American writer Clifton
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