Competition

In Competition No. 2385 you were invited to incorporate 13 given words into a plausible piece of prose, using them in a non-card sense. Searching for Tolstoy’s ‘happy families’ quotation in my Bartlett’s, what did I find bang next to it? This from War and Peace: ‘The old man used to say that a nap

In Competition No. 2384 you were asked to supply an extract from an imaginary translated novel which unwittingly conveys the utter boredom of simple agricultural life. The great boring British novel in this genre is Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, recommended to the nation by the prime minister Stanley Baldwin and parodied soon after its publication

In Competition No. 2383 you were asked to supply a poem (preferably with rhymes) in which each line contains an anagram (more than one word can be involved). I intended this comp to be torture, I hoped that my postbag would consequently be light this week, I even tackled my own task but didn’t get

Last year there was one Classics Cup on offer. This year there are no fewer than three: one for the Open competition (any 200-word piece from The Spectator in Latin or Greek prose or verse); one for undergraduates (200 words in Latin or Greek on the theme ‘Tony and Gordon’); and one for school pupils

In Competition No. 2381 you were invited to supply a poem using a given rhyme-scheme and rhyme-words. The rhymes were taken from Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, that splendid narrative poem which uses Pushkin’s tricky Onegin metre with seemingly effortless skill. This was a testing challenge, the regulars and irregulars were out in force, but

In Competition No. 2380 you were invited to provide a school report by a pupil assessing the qualities of a teacher. The comp title refers to Anstey’s once widely read fantasy (1882) in which a schoolboy magically changes places with his father, Mr Bultitude, and from then on the boot is on the other foot.

In Competition No. 2379 you were invited to describe in rhymed verse one of three modern types: the Boaster, the Grumbler or the Superstitious Person. ‘If he’s renting a house he’ll say it’s the family mansion, but that he intends to sell it as he finds it too small for entertaining.’ ‘When he has won

In Competition No. 2378 you were invited to supply an extract from a book entitled either How to Fire an Employee or How to Fill Mental Cavities. How not to fire an employee was once demonstrated by my friend H, a timid, kindly American publisher who was determined to get rid of a rebarbative member

In Competition No. 2377 you were invited to supply a poem describing your regrettable failure to keep a recent New Year’s resolution. ‘Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before/ I swore — but was I sober when I swore?’ asks FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, or as old Ovid put it, ‘Video meliora, proboque; deteriora sequor.’ Among your mainly banal

In Competition No. 2376 you were invited to describe autobiographically or quasi-autobiographically a memorable ‘first’ in your life.My first operation, fox-hunt, lie, wedding, arrest, peach, oyster or, in several cases, car…. I was offered a wide range of initiatory experiences, and of course had no idea whether they were true or invented. One with the

In Competition No. 2375 you were asked for an appropriate acrostic poem in which the first letters of each line spell out THERE IS NO JUSTICE. The key phrase occurred to me because I remembered that in an Australian novel I once published (author Michael Noonan) there was a character, a stationmaster, who had the

In Competition No. 2374 you were invited to supply ten pieces of useless information to clutter our minds. For those with an appetite for loony facts Noel Botham’s The World’s Greatest Book of Useless Information (John Blake) can be prescribed in small doses. Your efforts amused me vastly, but presented me with a judging problem.

In Competition No. 2373 you were given Gilbert’s line ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one’, and asked for a poem beginning the same way but with some other worker replacing ‘policeman’ and (if you like) using ‘lot’ again for ‘one’. Unhappy is the lot of the comper and competition-setter, of course, but I

In Competition No. 2372 you were given 12 Christmassy words and invited to incorporate them, in any order, into a piece of prose that has nothing to do with Christmas. I take my judge’s wig off to you all for the variety of scenarios you managed to conjure up, fisticuffs being the only recurrent one.

In Competition 2371 you were asked to provide rhyming couplets describing imaginary animals, involving eight consecutive letters of the alphabet. ‘The progress of the Unipod,/ As you’d surmise, is rather odd.’ This perhaps unillustratable couplet by Jeremy Lawrence is one of many splendid offerings among the runners-up. Hugh King made me smile with ‘The Umpzov,

In Competition No. 2370 you were asked for a poem expressing either approval or disapproval of the habit of smoking. About smoking, as about many things, I am in two minds. On the one hand I smoke three small cigars a day after meals and would never go to dinner with hosts who didn’t offer

In Competition No. 2369 you were invited to submit extracts from an imaginary diary during a period of civil convulsion and anarchy in this country. Though I was thinking of future disturbances, I was quite willing to accept historic diaries and was pleased to get reports of unrest in the days of Boudicca, in King

In Competition No. 2368 you were asked for a poem entitled ‘At a cocktail party’. This sprung from my rereading of Auden’s delightful but rarely anthologised poem ‘At the Party’. Interestingly, not one of you described an occasion that was obviously enjoyable. Among the prizewinners (who get £25 each) Tim Raikes is the only guest

In Competition No. 2367 you were invited to supply an imaginary extract from the libretto of the flop musical Oscar Wilde. ‘I am going to stand my ground and fight,/ The things you two do just can’t be right,’ sang the Marquess to Bosie in that ill-starred production. Criticised for his lyrics, the author, Mike