Jaspistos

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 after dinner was silver — before dinner, golden.’ ‘Finesse’ was the tricky one: I didn’t think it sounded unforced on the lips of either Gerard Benson’s plodding policeman or Brian Murdoch’s violent burglar. Blackjack and poker led to a lot of GBH, but the top prize (£30) goes to Margaret Joy’s peaceful rural scene, in which the zoology may not be plausible but the joke is.

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 (1925) by Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. Set in darkest Shropshire, it is, according to my Reader’s Encyclopaedia, ‘a story of fierce, morose country people, in which Prudence Sarn, the narrator, finds a husband who appreciates her in spite of her harelip’.

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 much further than: ‘A horse along a shore can happily trot: A carthorse in an orchestra cannot.’ To my amazement, I was landed with a big entry that glittered with ingenuity. (Some of you, I suspect, own anagram dictionaries, and why not?) Commendations to Tim Raikes, Andrew Brison and Basil Ransome-Davies. The winners, printed below, get £25 each, barring Shirley Curran, who comes top with £30.

In Competition No. 2382 you were invited to supply pretentious ‘intellectual’ tosh in the form of a review of a play, book, film or piece of classical music. Back in 1990 that grand old comper Roger Woddis sent me a wonderful specimen of pseudocrap perpetrated by James Wolcott in the Observer. It deserves some space: ‘What’s interesting about Richard Ford’s Wildlife is not its chipped polish but its numb insularity. For all its Western smoke, it reads like a chamber play for phantoms. It has the ghostly rustle of white folds begging for a bloodstain.’ My apologies to those of you who misread my intentions: the tosh, I presumed, belonged to the reviewer not the work reviewed, and the latter, I also presumed, would be real, not imaginary.

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 the seasoned veterans carried the day. Noel Petty, G. McIlraith and Godfrey Bullard can count themselves unlucky not to be among the honoured band. Keith Norman gets £30 for his editor’s lament and the other winners, printed below, have £35 each. He claims he laboured through the long night watches,And yet it falls to me to trim and prune,Ameliorate the rubs, disguise the botches,And have it finished earlier than soon.

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. My youngest son, whose verbal reports on his teachers have always interested me more than their written ones on him, helped me judge this lot. Some of the plums he picked out were: ‘He thinks Paris is the capital of France. He needs a good kick up the arse’; ‘Attendance: satisfactory, except for the time he had that complete nervous breakdown’; and ‘He should make more effort to learn names. Some take advantage of their anonymity’.

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 a lawsuit by a unanimous verdict he’ll find fault with his lawyer for having omitted several points in presenting his case.’ ‘If he disturbs an owl on a walk he’ll exclaim, “Glory be to Athene!” before he goes on.’ That’s Theophrastus on our three types.

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 of staff. Hoping that alcohol would fuel his courage, he invited the doomed man to lunch. The brandy was being drunk and H felt the strength welling up in him when the victim leant forward, aimed his finger at H and announced waggishly, ‘You’re fired!’ A year afterwards, visiting New York, I learnt that he was still in the job. The first title I offered you was, not surprisingly, published in Beverly Hills, the second, less predictably, in Bicester.

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 broken resolutions concerning drinking, smoking, dieting and fitness, it was a relief to find some more unusual aspirations: Paul Griffin resolved to ‘see the meaning in these winter days’, Josh Ekroy to be late for every date, and Shirley Curran to put the cat out before going to bed. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, but Keith Norman gets an extra fiver for excellence.

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 ring of authenticity came from Usam Ghaidan in the Netherlands, who recalled that the first time he listened to the BBC World Service was in the Pit of Salman, Iraq’s desert prison for political detainees, on the day after President Kennedy was assassinated. Fact or fiction, I didn’t care as long as it was a good yarn.

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 words picked out in white pebbles on his bungalow lawn. Talking of justice, I regret that for a time the top winner will not receive a bonus prize, since we are temporarily short of sponsorship. We must march through a desert patch until an oasis is spotted. Commendations this week to Martin Parker and Paul Griffin, and a salute but, alas, nothing drinkable to Ray Kelley, whose entry was my favourite. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each.

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. Some items were funnier than others, so should I award prize money by item, or plump for those whose ten contained the most gold? I chose the latter, and easier, course. The winners, printed below, get £25 each, and the last bonus prize of Cobra Premium beer (for our spell of sponsorship is over) goes to Michael Swan. If anyone has still not received their Cobra prize, please write to Claire Eaves at The Spectator.

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 was impressed by the range of your other unfortunate toilers — gorillagram-deliverers, apostles, toddlers, wheel-clampers, goalies, newsreaders, pedants, backbenchers, porn stars and greengrocers (spelling problems). God bless us every one, as Tiny Tim said. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the Cobra Premium beer goes to Martin Parker.

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. To make room for seven worthy winners (Brian Braithwaite’s ‘shorty’ is too impressive not to include) I am simply wishing you all a happy New Year with my most benevolent beam. The winners, printed below, get £25 each, and the Cobra Premium beer is Margaret Joy’s. The two ‘wise men’ were allies in adversity.

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, from remote Siberia,/ Is quite like Eeyore, only drearier.’ And W.J. Webster, Adrian Fry and Bill Greenwell were all in sparkling form. There was a ginormous entry, judging was pleasure mixed with agony, and I confess that sheer caprice played a part in my final decisions. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Jill Green’s purely avian octet gains the Cobra Premium beer.

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 a smoking room; on the other, I dislike the smell of Virginia tobacco and would never allow anyone to smoke at my table. So I was a pretty impartial judge this week. Given the fact that the Victorian temperance hymns are pale ghosts compared to their red-blooded rivals, traditional drinking songs, I was expecting the Devil to have all the best tunes, but that wasn’t so. The prizewinners — three anti and three pro — get £25 each, and the Cobra Premium beer goes to G.M.

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 Stephen’s reign, and after the battle of Worcester. Moving to today, several of you concentrated on the animal rights brigade, who were busy freeing beasts from zoos, tearing down ‘Fox and Hounds’ and kindred inn signs and disrupting equestrian events. All in all, the chaos was delightful. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the Cobra Premium beer stays here because Michael Cregan says he doesn’t drink.

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 who doesn’t feel violently antisocial. Noel Petty takes the crate of Cobra Premium beer. ‘Noel, you must meet Hugo: Hugo sings.‘Noel plays viols, you know. Or is it lutes?‘Anyway, Hugo, one of those early things.’And off she trips to coin more attributes.

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 Read, loftily retorted, ‘Rhyming couplets didn’t do Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan much harm.’ There was a tricky contradiction in my request for something that would both amuse readers and make them squirm with embarrassment: some of you were too polished to embarrass and others too clumsy to entertain; still others offered lyrics that it was hard to imagine being sung.

In Competition No. 2366 you were invited to describe the opening of a bizarrely themed restaurant in this country. Berlin features its restaurant for anorexics and one for the blind where customers eat in pitch darkness, served by blind waiters; also a café run by an Argentinian where you eat what you’re given, then pay what you think the meal is worth.