Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3064 you were invited to supply a newspaper leading article exposing the hitherto unsuspected corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item. This assignment was inspired by the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’.   It was a smallish field with a narrow focus. You divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery.

In Competition No. 3063 you were invited to submit a poem about puns containing puns.   Dryden regarded paronomasia as ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’; Samuel Johnson took an equally dim view. But this most derided form of humour produced a witty and accomplished entry that elicited only the occasional groan.   Robert Schechter’s four-liner — ‘Opun and shut’ — caught my eye: As the punster’s puns were reaching a crescendo, I said, ‘Take your puns and stick them innuendo!’ Also displaying considerable punache were Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Sylvia Fairley, Michael Jameson and Joseph Houlihan. They narrowly lost out to the winners, printed below, who pocket £25 apiece. W.J.

In Competition No. 3062 you were invited to submit a Shakespearean-style soliloquy that a contemporary politician might have felt moved to deliver.   Inspiration for this comp came from Aryeh Cohen-Wade’s imagining, in the New Yorker, of Donald Trump performing Shakespearean soliloquies: ‘Listen — to be, not to be, this is a tough question, OK? Very tough…’   The Donald kept an uncharacteristically low profile this week, with most choosing British politicians. Theresa May and Boris Johnson in particular had plenty to get off their chests. You drew on Hamlet ‘O that this too too shrouding garb would drop…’; Macbeth ‘Is this a compromise I see before me…?

In Competition No. 3061 you were invited to imagine a well-known author who doesn’t normally write in the genre having a go at science fiction and submit an extract from the resulting work. In a 2015 interview, Ursula K. Le Guin, always a staunch and eloquent defender of the genre, took a pop at writers of literary fiction who move into sci-fi and simply think that ‘they can use some of the images and tropes and so on from science-fiction and stick them in their book and put it on another planet or in a spaceship or something…’ Although a fair few entries this week were — understandably — guilty as charged, they were clever and entertaining nonetheless.

In Competition No. 3060 you were invited to provide an updated version of ‘Jerusalem’ starting with the words ‘And did those tweets…’One of my favourite parodies of Blake’s poem is by Allan M. Laing. In it he describes the wartime blackouts:   Bring me my torch of waning power! Bring me my phosphor button bright! Bring me my stick — O, dreadful hour! That brings the darkness of the night!   Laing was a colossus of literary competitions and his successors — veterans and newcomers alike — continue to shine in these pages. In a crowded and lively field this week, honourable mentions go to Nicholas Stone, David Silverman, Brian Murdoch, Ian Barker and Nick Vasey. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 3059 you were invited to supply a poem inspired by the periodic table. The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s system for classifying the chemical elements, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!’ Your entries were witty and well-turned, with many a nod to Tom Lehrer, whom I also had in mind when I set this challenge. Honourable mentions go to Frank McDonald’s smart acrostic, as well as to Martin Elster, Nicholas Stone and Christine Michael. The winners, printed below, snaffle £25 each.

In Competition No. 3058 you were invited to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or for British ones travelling abroad. This is an assignment that you always embrace with relish, though one competitor observed that it felt curiously difficult this time round because ‘the interaction between Britain and Abroad isn’t very funny just at the moment’. That may well be true, but your entries still raised a chuckle, and as usual those with a ring of plausibility worked best.

In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’.   Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless: ‘Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies/ Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside…’ John O’Byrne was good too but was just outflanked by the winners below who pocket £25 each.   Today we have comforting concepts such as finite-loop learning classifier systems, but in 2019 one could pretty much set up an artificial neural network and let it spread all over the electronic world like Japanese knotweed. With hindsight, the result was inevitable.

In Competition No. 3056 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of the High Street.   Your entries were poignant and clever, and transported me back to teenage Saturdays frittered away in the likes of Dolcis, Lilly & Skinner and Freeman, Hardy & Willis. John Morrison’s lines ‘Oh Amazon how swift you rise!/ Swamping all before your eyes…’ spoke for many, though J.R. Johnson thinks that the roots of destruction go deeper, pre-dating the advent of the net.   The winners earn £25 each. Bill Greenwell pockets £30. Hear their doors and cash-tills close, Play their dirges, sing their blues, Dolcis Shoes and Bargain Booze, Ottakar’s and Rumbelows.

In Competition No. 3055 you were invited to take a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. There is space only to high-five the winners below, who take £25 each. Bill Greenwell gets £30.   My boyfriend says I should ‘give in’ to his advances. What’s your advice?   Some boyfriend; some cheek. I would observe that many of his ilk have tried to break down such defences, but few have succeeded, at least not honourably. Upon resistance rests your future. Upon the strength of your redoubt rests the probity of your family, future as past.