Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 2752 you were invited to submit a short story ending with the phrase: ‘It is not all pleasure, this exploration.’ Dr Livingstone’s pronouncement, written in 1873 a few days before his wretched death, is putting it mildly. His final days had been plagued by pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers, piles, rotting teeth, leeches,

In Competition No. 2751 you were invited to paint a portrait in verse of Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot. In his Turf column last year, Robin Oakley wondered what the poet who, in 1823, described ‘the Thursday goings-on as “Ladies Day …when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine”’ would make of today’s proceedings. Well,

In Competition No. 2750 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of one of the deadly sins. The challenge was prompted by the following surprising admission by Taki in a High Life column earlier this year: ‘Lust, gluttony, pride, wrath and sloth I am rather proud to be guilty of, especially the first

In Competition No. 2749 you were invited to submit a poem, written by a poet laureate from the past, to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Thirteen out of the 19 former laureates featured in the entry. Unsurprisingly, the most popular were Betjeman and Tennyson, with Wordsworth and Hughes coming a close second. Alfred Austin and

In Competition 2748 you were invited to submit snippets of misleading advice for tourists visiting Britain. For those who are less than enthusiastic about the impending Games and the resulting hordes that will descend on the capital and beyond, this week’s postbag provides a potent arsenal of sadistic misinformation guaranteed to add an interesting twist

In Competition No. 2747 you were invited to encapsulate a well-known poem in four lines. These digests perform a valuable service to the time-starved reader of today, and How to be Well-versed in Poetry, edited by E.O. Parrott, contains some fine examples. Who needs to plough through Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’ when we have John Stanley Sweetman’s

In Competition No. 2746 you were invited to submit a sonnet using the following rhymes: pig, bat, cat, wig, jig, hat, rat, fig; lie, red, sob, die, bed, rob. This is a rerun of a brute of a competition that was set back in the 1950s, and the daft rhymes are those given as an

In Competition No. 2745 you were invited to submit an extract from a leader’s speech to a party conference, incorporating the titles of as many Beatles songs as possible. In 2007, Gregory Todd, a district court judge in Montana and fan of the Fab Four, managed to incorporate 42 Beatles song titles into his sentencing

In Competition No. 2744 you were invited to provide a poetic preview of the Olympic Games. The impending onslaught was viewed with a mix of dread and indifference. When pessimism and cynicism descend on the entry there are always a smattering of Pollyannas but on this occasion they were fewer than usual. Alan Millard’s evocation

In Competition No. 2743 you were invited to submit a recipe as it might have been written by an author of your choice. Kafka’s Soup, a complete history of world literature in 14 recipes by Mark Crick gave me the idea for this challenge. It contains such gastronomic delights as Cheese on Toast à la

In Competition No. 2742 you were invited to take as your first line ‘Dear Lord the day of eggs is here…’, which is the opening to Amanda McKittrick Ros’s poem ‘Eastertide’, and continue, in a similarly bad vein, for up to 16 lines. Described in the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature as ‘uniquely dreadful’, McKittrick

In Competition No. 2741 you were invited to submit an extract from the libretto of an opera that pays homage to the town of your choice. The Lottery-funded operatic venture Swindon: the Opera, which inspired the comp, catapulted that unlovely town into the cultural spotlight, and this assignment was meant to be an exercise in

In Competition No. 2739 you were invited to submit a poem lamenting an impulse buy on eBay. A hair from Justin Bieber’s chest; a colossal concrete brontosaurus; a lifesize poster of Albert Einstein; Franz Kafka’s shirt (with an authenticating Post-it note by Max Brod). These were just a few of the regrettable but hugely entertaining

In Competition No. 2738 you were invited to concoct a government ad that bravely attempts to attract applicants to an especially unappealing job of your invention. Some time ago a reader brought to my attention an ad for the position of ‘Band 3 Process Developers in the VOA2015 Process Team’. Such was its mind-boggling impenetrability

In Competition No. 2737 you were invited to submit a double dactyl. This popular and, judging by the size of the entry, extraordinarily compulsive poetic parlour game was invented in the Sixties by the celebrated poets Anthony Hecht and John Hollander and is described in the blurb of Jiggery-Pokery, their magnificent compendium of the form,

In Competition No. 2735 you were invited to take as your first line ‘My love is like a [fill in blank]’, and continue, in light verse. Amid the ailments — ‘a drippy nose’, ‘a whooping cough’; the animals — ‘a three-toed sloth’, ‘a sea urchin’; and foodstuffs galore: ‘ripe Gorgonzola’, ‘ a tub of lard’,

In Competition No. 2734 you were invited to provide anagrams of lines from Shakespearean sonnets. These assignments are not the most popular but every so often the urge to send you to anagram hell gets the better of me. ‘I found this competition exasperatingly difficult,’ wrote Josephine Boyle. Equally exasperated, it seems, was Basil Ransome-Davies,

In Competition No. 2733 you were invited to condense the plot of a Dickens novel into a triple limerick. In case you hadn’t noticed, it would have been Dickens’s 200th birthday this week, and this assignment is a modest contribution to the avalanche of Dickens-related events unleashed across the globe by the bicentenary. (Even estate

In Competition No. 2732 you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. This challenge is a twist on the magnificent annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which salutes the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ Entrants