Foundling Voices at the Foundling Museum in London’s Bloomsbury (until 30 October) is the fruit of an oral history project that recorded the memories of 74 men and women (the youngest is now 68, the oldest 98) born to unmarried mothers who were placed as babies in the care of the Foundling Hospital Schools in
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2695 you were invited to submit the last will and testament of a fictional character. It is always striking when it comes to a challenge of this sort how like-minded the comping community is in its choice of fictional characters. There is a pretty wide range
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2694 you were invited to provide the female equivalent to Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. Thanks to Phyllis Reinhard who submitted a pithy, witty entry that triumphed, she confesses, in a similar competition run by Another Magazine a decade or so ago. This disqualifies it from
In Competition No. 2693 you were invited to supply a hitherto unpublished extract by Lewis Carroll relating the further adventures of Alice. The location was left up to you. Parliament was the most popular choice of venue, which was no surprise. Westminster feels like a natural successor to Wonderland, with its circular arguments, twisted logic
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2692 you were invited to supply a poem suitable for inclusion in Now We Are Eighty-Six. A strong entry fell into two camps: those infused with the gung-ho spirit of Jenny Joseph’s ageing purple-clad heroine (‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/ With
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2691 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies. Gratitude and respect to my opposite number over at the Washington Post’s Style Invitational contest from whom I plundered this idea. So impressed was I by the sublimely funny winning entries this challenge generates across the pond
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2690 you were invited to invent names to fit jobs. This assignment was suggested to me by a regular and long-standing competitor-who-wishes-to-remain-nameless, and was also a favourite of the brilliant Mary Ann Madden, who for many years presided over New York magazine’s literary competition. Several of
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s Competition In Competition No. 2690 you were invited to invited to submit quatrains reflecting on current events in the Middle East in the style of Edward FitzGerald/Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald is, of course, master of the beautifully turned aphoristic phrase. And, as Cedric Watts points out in his introduction to the
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2688 you were invited to submit a short story incorporating six book titles. A deceptively straightforward assignment, this one. It is trickier than you might think to weave titles into prose in a way that is both unstilted and inventive — without compromising the quality of
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2687 you were invited to take a well-known poem, change one letter in the first line and continue the poem for up to a further 15 lines. Oh, for more space to do justice to a truly stellar postbag! It was agony whittling the entry down
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2686 you were invited to submit a love letter from one fictional character to another. An entertaining postbag included this endearingly cack-handed overture from Bridget Jones to Rochester: ‘the word is you are sex on legs, and I’ve been rather short in that department lately. Well,
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2685 you were invited to submit a marital dialogue in verse. The scene set was one of interspousal disharmony: a domestic hell peopled by a familiar cast of nagging frigid wives and long-suffering, emotionally disengaged husbands. Not much ammo there for the pro-marriage lobby, then. Tim
In Competition No. 2684 you were invited to take a well-known literary figure and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. Some of you interpreted ‘literary figure’ as a fictional character; others as an author. Either was acceptable. You were all so good this week
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2683 you were invited to submit a sequel to ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’. Lear himself left fragments of one, the delightful if tear-jerking ‘The Children of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat’, a tale of premature death and penury. Yours, too, were mostly stories of unhappily-ever-after,
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition. In Competition No. 2682 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of a Shakespearean character who has woken up to find him or herself transported to the present day. John O’Byrne, Frank Osen, Gillian Ewing and Josephine Boyle impressed this week but top honours go to
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2681 you were invited to submit a treble clerihew about a public figure who was prominent in 2009 or 2010. Jaspistos, who ran a similar competition some years ago, noted that it was E.C. Bentley’s son, the author and illustrator Nicolas Bentley, who invented the double
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2680 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem of which the first letter of each line spells out the words Happy New Year. This challenge elicited a whopping entry, and there were plenty of unfamiliar names among the regulars, which is always pleasing. You were
Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2679 you were invited to usher in the New Year with a teetotallers’ drinking song. As usual with this sort of challenge, many that read well on the page didn’t lend themselves to being sung aloud. But an impressive entry yielded some rousing and not unpersuasive
In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. It was a smallish and somewhat lacklustre entry, possibly owing to the earlier-than-usual deadline. But I warmed to D.A. Prince’s Lord
Lucy Vickery resents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas. The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the