Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3054 you were invited to compose double dactyls about double acts. I didn’t include the rules about double dactyls as it takes up space and I’ve done it before — and in any case they are easily Googled. Most of you seemed thoroughly at home with the form, and in a large, lively and accomplished entry double dactylic duos from time present (Trump and Melania, Declan and Anthony) and time past (Boney and Josephine) rubbed shoulders with the literary (Regan and Goneril), the musical (Gilbert and Sullivan, Simon and Garfunkel) and the comical (Stanley and Oliver). George Simmers and Mae Scanlan are highly commended. The winners, printed below, earn £15 each.   Hackety, rackety, Donald and Vladimir Sneer at collusion. ‘It’s Fake News!

In Competition No. 3053, an assignment prompted by Anthony Horowitz’s reflections on creating female characters for his latest Bond novel, you were invited to provide an extract from a well-known work that might be considered sexist by today’s standards and rework it for the #MeToo age. Highlights in a thoroughly enjoyable entry included Brian Allgar’s Constance Chatterley instructing Mellors in the importance of foreplay, Paul Freeman’s recasting of Orwell’s antihero as Weinstein Smith and Hugh King addressing the gender stereo-typing in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The worthy winners, printed below, earn £20 each.   ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’; Well, frankly, Will, I’d rather you did NOT.

In Competition No. 3052 you were invited to supply a sonnet inspired by a well-known contemporary figure’s characteristic feature. There was a spot of preposition-related confusion this week — my fault entirely — and sonnets either ‘to’ or ‘on’ were acceptable.   Entries ranged far and wide, from Victoria Beckham’s pout via Gorbachev’s birthmark to the rise — and fall — of Anthony Weiner’s penis. But both John O’Byrne and Barrie Godwin used Sonnet 18 to hymn hairstyles — Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s respectively (Shall I compare thee to a bale of hay?/ Thou art more windblown and intemperate…’).   Honourable mentions go to Mike Morrison, Jonathan Pettman, Douglas G.

In Competition No. 3051 you were invited to supply an entry by a well-known diarist describing the wedding day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.   There was a bracingly waspish streak running through your contributions. Here’s Noël Coward’s verdict on the groom: ‘Massively butch but far too hairy, when he wasn’t even in the Navy. Are beards de rigueur these days?

In Competition No. 3050 you were invited to submit a school essay written by a well-known author, living or dead, about one of their works. The germ of this challenge was the revelation that the novelist Ian McEwan helped his son to write an A-level essay about one of his books (Enduring Love), only to be awarded a less than stellar ‘C+’. The winners below did rather better, and shoot straight to the top of the class, scooping £25 each. Teacher’s pet Alison Zucker gets a well-done sticker and the bonus fiver.   I read The Outsider today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I can’t remember. I don’t think very much happened in it, though there may have been a murder at some point. Or not. I don’t care either way. I struggle to understand why M.

In Competition No. 3049 you were invited to submit a poem about a bromance.   Pairings including Friedrich and Karl, Laurel and Hardy, Nigel and Donald lit up an entry that was witty, touching and generally pleasingly varied. I liked Chris O’Carroll’s ‘Boris and Donnie’, a twist on Jimmie Rodgers’s ‘Frankie and Johnny’. And Bill Greenwell had the same idea, only with David and Jonathan from the Book of Samuel as the loved-up duo. Commendations also go to Shirley Curran, Jonathan Pettman, A.C. Smith and John Morrison.   Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry transported me back to the 1970s, when real men wore chunky cream-and-brown hand-knit cardigans. He and his fellow winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 3048 you were invited to take an existing word and alter it by a) adding a letter, b) changing a letter, and c) deleting a letter — and to supply definitions for all three new words.   Inspiration for this challenge came from across the pond, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Style Invitational column, whose regular neologism-themed contests are always a blast.   Though many entries were partially successful, few competitors managed to score a bull’s-eye in all three sections of the challenge. A fiver per definition goes to those printed below who hit the spot with just one or two.

In Competition No. 3047 you were invited to supply an imaginary testimonial for a high-profile figure that is superficially positive but contains hidden warnings to a potential employer.   This was an exercise in the artful deployment of ambiguity, as displayed in Robert J. Thornton’s L.I.A.R. The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations, a handbook for those who, whether out of kindness or fear of litigation, wish the precise meaning of their ‘recommendations’ to remain opaque.

In Competition No. 3046 you were invited to supply a poem beginning with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first line, the new poem being on a different subject all together.   This was a wildly popular comp, which elicited a witty and wide-ranging entry that was both pleasurable and painful to judge. The winners below, chosen only after much humming and hawing, earn £30 each.     I am the captain of my soul: Scant comfort when I’m six feet under Inside a crude and loamy hole. Has someone slipped up here, I wonder?   I thought that I would hob and nob With angels, all their wings aquiver, But I lie, stripped of pulse and throb, Inside some plywood, doomed to shiver.

In Competition No. 3045 you were invited to provide a poem about euphemisms.   You avoided politics and sex (mostly), preferring instead to focus on the language of dying and the words and expressions that enable us to sidestep the D-word (according to David Crystal, there are more than 1,000 words for death categorised in the Historical Thesaurus). I much admired Alanna Blake’s twist on Keats’s sonnet (‘Much have I dabbled in linguistic lore/ And many inexactitudes have used…’) and Max Ross’s neat acrostic. Hamish Wilson, Max Gutmann, Ann Drysdale and David Silverman also deserve a special mention. The prizewinners printed below earn £30 each. The extra fiver belongs to Bill Greenwell.