In Competition No. 2436 you were invited to supply a very rude letter in which the writer terminates the services of an employee, tradesman or professional person. The most successfully rude letter ever written is surely Dr Johnson’s to Lord Chesterfield with its superb combination of sarcasm and sorrow: ‘Is not a patron, my lord,
‘To the Royal Society of Needlework — and drive like the wind!’ Sherlock is speaking, Watson narrating. In Competition No. 2435 you were invited to continue from here. ‘Not …’ I gasped as we careered on to the Edgware Road.‘Exactly, Watson, our old adversary. Did you ever wonder in what subject the Professor gained his
In Competition No. 2434 you were invited to write a poem in the metre of Hiawatha entitled ‘Breakfast’. Trochaics have rarely been more amusingly used than in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’, in which H. is exasperatedly trying to take portraits of a very tiresome and camera-conscious Victorian family. Mama is Dressed in jewels and in
In Competition No. 2433 you were asked for a poem in which each line’s rhymed ending is a truncated word. When I’ve a syllable de trop,I cut it off without apol:This verbal sacrifice, I know,May irritate the schol;But all must praise my devilish cunnWho realise that Time is Mon. This verse from ‘Poetical Economy’ suggests
In Competition No. 2432 you were asked for double or treble clerihews. It was E.C. Bentley’s son Nicholas who invented the double clerihew, and treble ones have been recorded. You were in pioneer country. A clerihew, as I see it, deals with one person, and so accordingly should a double or treble. I was prepared
In Competition No. 2431 you were invited to write a poem commemorating the recent death of the whale in the Thames. Verse marking a special occasion can be serious (Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’) or light (Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of
In Competition No. 2430 you were invited to suggest some items in a government programme of ‘events’ designed to improve our sense of national identity. How British am I? I sometimes wonder. I am sorry for our troops in Iraq but I don’t support them. I am a republican who dislikes pubs, is bored by
In Competition No. 2429 you were invited to write a poem in praise of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. It was the Reverend Sydney Smith who, as Keith Norman appropriately reminded me, came down to breakfast smiling and announced that he had had a beautiful dream: that there were seven Articles and 39 Deadly
In Competition No. 2428 you were asked for a piece of prose incorporating, in any order, 12 given words, using them in a non-alcoholic sense. Despite the fact that some of you occasionally groan at this type of comp, it always pulls in a big number of punters. The combination of sidecar and bishop generated
In Competition No. 2427 you were invited to supply a poem or a piece of prose beginning ‘It began as a — but it turned out a —’, filling in the blanks as you pleased. It was that forgettable and forgotten poet Austin Dobson who wrote a triolet beginning, ‘It began as an ode/ But
In Competition No. 2426 you were invited to supply a poetic invitation from one friend to another to come and stay in the country and enjoy its pleasures. The title was meant to suggest that I was looking for a charming, straight-faced piece such as Horace or our 17th-century poets might have written, but most
In Competition No. 2425 you were invited to do as Ovid did: give poetic advice as to how to pick up, seduce and keep a lover of either sex. Here’s one of Ovid’s shrewd pieces of advice to girls (my translation, The Modern Library, New York, rush out and buy it): Steer clear of the
In Competition No. 2424 you were invited to write a poem naming in each line a startling event which will occur during each month this year, ending with a four-line glimpse of the more distant future. ‘Fasten your seatbelts’ was the consensus. I shall gag myself to make space for the winners, pausing only to
In Competition No. 2423 you were invited to write a poem in the voice of a fed-up soldier, of any country or date, far from home. I was apprehensive that most of you would use this invitation to vent your feelings about the unhappy war in Iraq, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety
In Competition No. 2422 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose entitled ‘Dinner with the Devil’. ‘My meal consisted of an omelette made from eggs seven years past their sell-by date and stuffed with the minced brains of lunatics who never attended church on Sunday’ — Adam Campbell’s menu, reminiscent
In Competition No. 2421 you were given an opening couplet of a poem, ‘I knew a girl who was so pure/ She couldn’t say the word manure’ and invited to continue for a further 16 lines. The couplet comes from ‘A Perfect Lady’, a poem by Reginald Arkell (who he?) in The Everyman Book of
In Competition No. 2420 you were invited to invent words describing something familiar which fill a need in the English language. The germ of this competition was a book called The Meaning of Tingo which assembles ‘extraordinary words from around the world’, from which I learnt that the Japanese have a single word to describe
In Competition No. 2419 you were invited to supply a poem in free verse beginning ‘I think continually of …’ ‘…those who were truly great’ completes the first line of a much anthologised poem by Stephen Spender. Free verse has a tendency to slip into something like very rough blank verse, and some of you
In Competition No. 2418 you were given certain rhyme-words in a certain order and invited to write a poem accordingly. The rhymes came from Masefield’s ‘Where They Took Train’ which has a rather unexpected first line, ‘Gomorrah paid so for its holiday’. I hope the old Poet Laureate would be happy rather than horrified at
In Competition No. 2417 you were given the opening: ‘He was twenty-three and oh! so agonisingly conscious of the fact. The train came bumpingly to a halt …’ and invited to add 150 or fewer words launching a sensitive and inadequate anti-hero on his fictional adventures. Denis Stone, Huxley’s passenger in Crome Yellow, was the