Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2673 you were invited to submit a pompous leader on a trivial subject. Among the topics that unleashed your inner Thunderer were the abuse of the ‘eight items or less’ lane in supermarkets (to say nothing of the lamentable confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’) and the
In Competition No. 2672 you were invited to disprove G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. In his essay ‘The Poet and the Cheese’ Chesterton himself takes steps to put this right, penning a sonnet to a Stilton cheese, which, as he acknowledges, contains ‘echoes’ of another
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2668 you were invited to submit a poem that contains advice from young to old. Several of you took as your starting point Robert Southey’s po-faced ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and how he gained them’ — or Lewis Carroll’s much more enjoyable parody of it as
In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. You split into two camps: some infused with the bleak spirit of Billie Holiday’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (‘Gloomy is Sunday with shadows I spend
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2666 you were invited to supply an example of pretentious tosh in the shape of a review of a TV or radio soap opera or any other piece of entertainment aimed at the mass market. It is tempting with this type of comp to go over
In Competition No. 2665 you were invited to submit a lullaby suitable for the modern child. ‘But do lullabies lull?’ writes competitor W.J. Webster, who puts an adult fear of heights (not to mention a horror of half-rhymes) down to repeated exposure as a little’un to the strains of ‘Rock-a-bye baby’. Among the more nightmare-inducing
In Competition 2664 you were invited to submit a dialogue, in verse or prose, between two parts of yourself at odds with one another. As usual, verse entries vastly outnumbered prose ones. In an excellent field, Brian Murdoch, Adrian Fry, Bill Greenwell and Fergus Pickering stood out. Basil Ransome-Davies scoops the bonus fiver for a
In Competition No. 2663 you were invited to submit a politically correct version of a well-known fairy tale. The inspiration for this challenge was Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times by James Finn Garner, who recasts favourite yarns to take account of modern political sensibilities. In Garner’s PC world, witches
In Competition No. 2662 you were invited to submit a poem composed in the midst of a travel hold-up. The entry, a magnificent collective letting-off-of-steam, was peppered with exasperated references to apoplectic rage, bursting bladders and bickering children but these were tempered by those who acknowledged that there are benefits in being forced to take
In Competition No. 2661 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The Day of Doom’. As Google will tell you in a trice, the title is that of an epic poem about Judgment Day by the 17-century New England minister Michael Wigglesworth. Puritans lapped up its florid account of a wrathful God meting
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2660 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of a bodily part that has been overlooked by poets. You turned out in force to celebrate the unsung heroes of our anatomy. Sonnets to the spleen rubbed shoulders with paeans to the pancreas and odes
In Competition No. 2659 you were invited to take the title of a well-known novel and write an amusing poem with the same title. There are some long lines this week, which leaves space only to mention unlucky losers Mae Scanlan and Max Ross. The winning six get £25 each; Frank McDonald nabs £30. Anna
In Competition No. 2658 you were invited to submit a bedroom scene written by a novelist who would not normally venture into such territory. A wise choice, it seems: even literary giants come a cropper when writing about sex. John Updike was shortlisted four times for one of Britain’s least coveted literary prizes, the Literary
In Competition No. 2657 you were invited to imagine what merry band Chaucer might bring together if he were writing today. It was another bumper entry this week, and you fell into two camps. There were those who reasoned that were Chaucer writing today he’d probably use modern English. Others, though, couldn’t resist the lure
In Competition No. 2656 you were invited to submit a dialogue between two well-known figures from different centuries, each using the argot of the time. You responded to this challenge with your usual verve and skill, and I especially liked Frank McDonald’s conversation between Julius Caesar and Churchill (Templumcollis) on the trials of wartime leadership.
In Competition No. 2655 you were asked to submit a poem about a mundane household task such as boiling an egg or changing a light bulb in the style of a poet of your choice. Pastiche always pulls in the crowds, and true to form the entries came flooding in. Commendations go to Virginia Price
In Competition No. 2654 you were asked to submit a piece of lively and plausible prose, the first word beginning with ‘a’, the second with ‘b’, and so on, throughout the alphabet. Then to start again from ‘a’ and continue up to a maximum of 156 words. This was a real stinker, I admit. There
In Competition No. 2653 you were invited to submit a poem, written in the metre of Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, describing Hiawatha’s experiences at his computer. Longfellow’s epic, with its readily imitated metre, has spawned countless parodies. This is from the Literary Digest in 1925: ‘Have you ever noticed verses/ Written in unrhymed trochaics/
In Competition No. 2652 you were invited to submit an extract from the autobiography of a sportsman packed with as many clichés as possible. The World Cup will no doubt provide a feast of words and phrases that have had the life squeezed out of them, as well as ample opportunity to mock players and
In Competition No. 2651 you were invited to submit limericks that are also tongue-twisters. Thanks to J. Seery for suggesting this fiendish assignment. It is not easy to produce a true tongue-twister within the confines of the meter and rhyme scheme of the limerick. Perhaps the suggestion was inspired by Lou Brooks’s Twimericks: The Book