Literary competition

Estate agents, travel agents, publishers, record company executives; all have seen their livelihoods put in jeopardy by a brave new digital world. So it seemed fitting to invite competitors to compose an elegy for an endangered profession. You lamented the dwindling role of the milkman and the postman, and mourned the disappearance of the old-style pub landlord: ‘The last true pub landlords would much rather die/ Than stick on the telly for soccer on Sky,/ For they know the atmosphere’s stronger by far/ In a dank, convalescent-home type of a bar.’ (Adrian Fry) I admired Paul Evans’s entry but wasn’t convinced that being an England football fan qualifies as a

As if there weren’t enough recipe books in the world, the latest assignment challenged competitors to invent a title for yet another one, with a fresh angle, and supply a publisher’s blurb. A quick trawl of the web reveals that there is already stiff competition out there. The Star Wars Cookbook (may the sauce be with you) and Cooking in the Nude both caught my eye, and those of you who suggested a roadkill-based approach have been beaten to it by Buck Peterson, who published The Original Road Kill Cookbook in the mid-Eighties (yours, on Amazon, for under a fiver). Commendations go to D.A. Prince, Tracy Davidson, Sylvia Fairley and

The most recent competition invited you to incorporate the following seven words (real geological terms) into a piece of plausible and entertaining prose so that they acquire a new meaning in the context of your narrative: corallian, permian, lias, kimmeridge, oolite, cornbrash, ampthill. The inspiration for this challenge came from a bit in Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful The Old Ways where he muses on the names of the surface rock formations in the British Isles: ‘It’s tempting to lend them hypothetical definitions. Great Oolite (the honorific of the panjandrum of a non-existent kingdom). Cornbrash (a Midwest American home-baked foodstuff)….’ There was a great deal of wit and ingenuity on show this

In Competition No. 2851 you were invited to mark Jeremy Paxman’s departure from Newsnight by supplying an extract from an interview with a politician or statesman in which the interviewer doggedly but unsuccessfully attempts to get a straight answer to a straight question. Even if you didn’t specify Paxo as your questioner, I was looking for something of the spirit of the man in your inquisitorial style. You didn’t hit his contemptuous, eyebrow-arching heights—who does?—but you provided an entertaining feast of mealy-mouthed obfuscation. The winners take £30 and W.J. Webster nabs the extra fiver for an entry that features a slippery Boris Johnson. W.J. Webster I. Would you like to

The latest call, for proverbs that sound profound but have no meaning, attracted an enormous entry. It was a pleasure to judge, and cheering, too, to see lots of unfamiliar names in among the regulars. The best entries contain just the promise of a profound meaning — but frustrate the reader’s attempt to work out exactly what it is. I tried to weed out those submissions (some of them very amusing) that did express a clearly discernible deeper truth, but some may have slipped through the net. The following competitors deserve an honourable mention: ‘The shallow puddle floods no meadows’ (D.A. Prince); ‘A circular argument cannot be broken’ (Barry Baldwin);

The latest challenge, to supply a poem in praise or dispraise of the BBC, fell on somewhat stony ground. The entry felt a bit flat and you seemed to be lacking any real conviction either way. Roger Theobald’s opening lines pretty much reflected the general mood: ‘To praise or dispraise: well, if that’s the question,/ The record is too mixed to be quite sure…’ An honourable mention goes to Jerome Betts for his pithy four-liner — ‘Beeb, overstaffed and overspent,/ At which the licence-payers cavil,/ How sad to witness your descent/ From Reithian heights to Jimmy Savile.’ — and to Frank McDonald and Ray Kelley. Basil Ransome-Davies romps home with

The latest challenge to competitors was to submit a poem commenting on Scottish independence in the style of William Topaz McGonagall, the poet hailed by the TLS as ‘the only truly memorable bad poet in our language’. The deluded handloom weaver from Dundee built his reputation on appalling yet beguiling works of inadvertent comic genius. Unhampered by self-awareness, and buoyed up by uncrushable self-belief, he forged ahead with his art in the face of universal mockery and derision. Here is a particularly awful line from his most famous poem, ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ of 1880: ‘And the cry rang out all o’er the town, Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is

The latest competition, in which you were invited to compose a poem celebrating a famous duo, produced a colourful cast of pairings. Ray Kelley sang the praises of Flanders and Swann: ‘Never was there a sweeter fit/ of wit to melody, melody to wit’. Brian Allgar proposed a toast to that gruesome twosome Burke and Hare. And Martin Parker saluted south London kings of retail Arding and Hobbs: ‘Posh Knightsbridge had Harrods for nabobs and nobs./ The folks down at Clapham had Arding and Hobbs.’ Hugh King was impressive, as were Michael Swan and Alanna Blake, but they were edged out by this week’s overall champ, Chris O’Carroll, who takes

The most recent challenge, to incorporate a list of poets’ surnames — motion, bridges, wilde, gray, cope, hood, burns and browning — into a poem or piece of prose, presented ample opportunity for showing off. My invitation to cram in extra names of your choosing was taken up with gusto and the award for Class Swot goes to Albert Black, who pulled off the phenomenal feat of shoehorning 52 names into his prose piece. But while Mr Black gained points for quantity, it was the poets who performed best, and this is reflected in the winning line-up. A nod to Frank McDonald, whose entry to a previous competition gave me

Last week, you were asked to dream up a short story entitled “Fifty Shades of”. The entries were a bit of a mixed bag, but I enjoyed Gerard Benson’s twist on Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, Josh Ekroy’s 50 Shades of Ukip and Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead’s clever, grisly tale of a woman reduced to a piece of meat. Though not all of you went the E.L. James route, Chris O’Carroll’s winning entry clearly took its lead from the queen of erotica, as well as from another publishing sensation whose appeal I find equally mystifying. He is rewarded with 50 lashes and £30, and his fellow winners pocket £25 each. Fifty Shades

Spectator literary competition No. 2838 The latest competition asked for profiles for an online dating website for well-known politicians, living or dead. Gallic ladykiller François Hollande loomed large in the entry, as did Gorgeous George Galloway, Ann Widdecombe and Adolf Hitler. And while John Samson’s somewhat unlikely lothario Oliver Cromwell might appeal to those who like the masterful type — ‘That ye should seek matrimonial harmony by reading such vainglorious publications doth render thee unworthy of espousing this Puritan. Speak thus of me to thy more God-fearing sisters…’ — those seeking cosy nights in need look no further than Bill Greenwell’s Eric Pickles: ‘I do like to go out a

Spectator literary competition No. 2837  This week let’s have a poem about the horrors of a reunion dinner. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 26 February. The recent invitation to give a classic of children’s literature the hard-boiled treatment produced a flood of entries that were a joy to judge. Much-loved children’s classics, filtered through the prism of gritty 1930s urban America (what Raymond Chandler called ‘a world gone wrong’), were given a bracing new lease of life. All the hallmarks of the genre were there: sharp repartee, staccato delivery, economy of expression, psychological drama, black humour and the liberal use of simile.