Lucy Vickery

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

In Competition No. 2855 you were invited to compose an elegy for an endangered profession. Estate agents, travel agents, publishers, record company executives; all have seen their livelihoods put in jeopardy by a brave new digital world. You also lamented the dwindling role of the milkman and the postman, and mourned the disappearance of the

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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