Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 2538 you were invited to submit an extract from one of the following books: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself; Nuclear War: What’s in it For You; The Joys of Cataloguing. These are all genuine titles taken from the hugely entertaining Bizarre Books by Russell Ash and Brian Lake. I’m with W.J. Webster, who accompanied his entry about talking to yourself with a heartfelt note: ‘This is all horribly close to home!’. As many of you acknowledged, the advent of mobile phones has been a godsend to those of us who are in the habit of chatting animatedly to ourselves in public.

In Competition No. 2537 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘The Song of the Chartered Accountant’. You were allowed to substitute an alternative profession. I interpreted the word ‘profession’ loosely and was tempted by Mike Morrison’s personal shopper and touched by Martin Parker’s sexually frustrated retired flea-circus trainer, though they didn’t make the final line-up in the end. Chartered accountants are traditionally described in shades of grey, and many of you went down that route. But leading the field this week is Basil Ransome-Davies, who gets the bonus fiver. I was won over by his portrayal of a pin-striped-suited wage slave’s hot-blooded alter ego. D.A.

In Competition No. 2536 you were invited to take an apparently unpromising holiday location, or a superficially unappealing activity holiday, and give it the hard sell in prose or verse form. One of my favourite spots is Dungeness in Kent. A nuclear power station might not be everyone’s cup of tea but its brooding presence adds considerably to the haunting charm of this eerie wilderness. I wasn’t convinced, though, by Sue Cain’s utilitarian case for a holiday spent cleaning her house: ‘...you can take all your newly learned skills back home and put them to good use’. Hmm.

In Competition No. 2535 you were invited to submit a version of a Bible story recast for the atheist/agnostic market. This assignment, inspired by initiatives such as the Manga comic Bible and the Australian Bible Society’s text-message version of the Good Book, takes efforts to improve the accessibility of the Christian message to an absurd extreme in the interests of testing your powers of wit and ingenuity. It was a strong field and difficult to whittle down to six. Alanna Blake, Gerard Benson, Josh Ekroy, Virginia Price-Evans and Mrs E. Emerk were pipped at the post by the winners, printed below, who each get £25. The bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty’s rationalist Job.

In Competition No. 2534 you were invited to submit an extract from a speech given by the presenter of a Lifetime Achievement award at the Oscars in which the discerning listener can detect that the speaker is not as ‘delighted’ for the recipient as they purport to be. The film industry is clearly a cut-throat business and it is safe to assume that beneath the veneer of back-slapping and mutual congratulation at awards ceremonies runs an undercurrent of bitter rivalry. We can only imagine the outrage and vitriol that lurks behind the rictus smiles and brave applause of the losers. Hats off, then, to Bill Murray who, at the 2004 Oscars, turned his back on this collective hypocrisy and sat stony-faced, resolutely refusing to clap as fellow nominee Sean Penn collected his award.

If you are in awe of the wit and skill of those who appear regularly on the Spectator’s weekly competition pages, and are looking for an antidote to doom and gloom, do visit www.lightenup-online.co.uk, a new quarterly online magazine showcasing the best of contemporary light verse. It is edited by Martin Parker, a veteran competitor, and the first edition features comic gems by familiar names such as Bill Greenwell and D.A. Prince.

In Competition No. 2533 you were invited to submit an obituary of a well-known fictional character, which gave you the opportunity to try your hand at what is an often underrated art. The only fictional character that I am aware of who has been honoured with an obituary in the real world is Hercule Poirot, whose death was marked by a front-page splash on 6 August 1975 — in the New York Times, no less. There was a record postbag this week, with a welcome influx of newcomers. Popular subjects included William Brown, Sherlock Holmes and various members of the cast of the Pooh stories. While some of you stuck fairly closely to the fictional facts, others indulged in flights of fancy.

In Competition No. 2532 you were invited to take a recent news item and compress it into 25 words. I am grateful to Eric Smith in the West Indies who suggested the idea and drew my attention to the shadowy figure of Félix Fénéon, art critic and anarchist, among other things. His fait divers, or news in brief, published over the course of 1906 in Le Matin newspaper, are the work of a supreme stylist. Fénéon gravitated towards material that was violent, bloody and macabre, which he distilled into elegant, deadpan three-liners. Les Nouvelles en Trois Lignes was published last year as Novels in Three Lines in a translation by Luc Santé.

A couple of years ago there was a programme on the BBC in which well-known public figures gamely revealed the contents of their school reports. We learnt that Margaret Thatcher was a ray of sunshine in the classroom: ‘Her cheeriness makes her a very pleasant member of her form’. And if David Beckham (‘makes good cakes’) is looking for a career change he could always give Mr Kipling a call. There was a bumper crop of entries this week. Commendations to Barry Baldwin and Lynn Haken for entertaining glimpses of the schoolboy Jesus. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece. Top of the form is Bill Greenwell, who scoops the extra fiver.

In Competition No. 2529 you were invited to submit a poem describing what women are like. It was Wendy Cope’s funny and poignant poem ‘Bloody Men’ that prompted the comp. There was no obligation to mimic her style, though several did. A disturbing if familiar image emerged from some, though by no means all, of your entries of women as gossipy, ball-breaking, capricious shopaholics obsessed with the size of their bottoms — with increasingly good reason as the years pass.  Those who steered clear of cliché, or who leavened the unpalatable picture with an added twist of some kind, stood out. There were wise words from W.J.

Lucy Vickery presents the winners of Competition No. 2528 In Competition No. 2528 you were invited to submit an extract from an imaginary story in the Famous Five series written in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction. So it’s Blyton meets Hammett; the upper-middle-class crime-busting quintet, whose adventures are played out in a 1950s rural idyll punctuated by picnics and bicycle rides, filtered through the prism of gritty 1930s urban America, what Raymond Chandler calls ‘a world gone wrong’. Your entries bore many hard-boiled hallmarks: sharp repartee, staccato delivery, economy of expression, psychological drama, black humour and liberal use of simile; though there was a tendency to overdo it. The winners, printed below, get £25 each.

No. 2530: Show me the child You are invited to submit an extract from the school report of a well-known public figure, past or present (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2530’ by 31 January or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition No. 2527 you were invited to submit an extract from a Christmas round robin sent by a well-known historical figure. Dr Hugh de Glanville and Mrs E. Emerk pulled me up on the use of ‘round robin’ to mean a circular letter but my edition of Chambers allows it, as does Wikipedia, which is not everyone’s idea of an authoritative source.

In Competition No. 2525 you were invited to submit a poem in which the opening of Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ was adapted so that ‘two thousand and seven’ was substituted for ‘nineteen sixty-three’ and ‘sexual intercourse’ replaced by whatever you considered appropriate. Many of your entries had a Larkin-esque bleakness and grim humour. Here’s William Danes-Volkov, man of few words: My writing career began/ In two thousand and seven/ And ended.

In Competition No. 2524 you were invited to condense a Jane Austen novel into a limerick. You rose admirably to the challenge, and, as befits a competition based on the Austen oeuvre, your entries displayed sparkling wit, pithy observation and, in the main, metrical accuracy. (Although some of you are clearly not members of the J.A. appreciation society.) There was an absence of the ribaldry and innuendo traditionally associated with the limerick form, but the smutty possibilities of ‘Knightley’ proved irresistible to some. Gerard Benson’s final line, ‘And Emma gets her Mister, nightly’, was typical. There were entertaining contributions from Penelope Mackie, V.

Competition No. 2526: Mixed messages   You are invited to submit a newspaper article from the health pages which reveals that something previously thought to be bad for you has been found to boost longevity. Maximum 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2526’ by 2 January or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition No. 2523 you were invited to submit a review of one of Charles Dickens’s novels written by a character from another Dickens novel. The most frequently occurring bylines by far were those of Ebenezer Scrooge, Gradgrind, Wilkins Micawber and Alfred Jingle.

In Competition 2522 you were asked to submit a right-wing protest song. There are some fine examples of this underexploited genre in Tim Robbins’s mock-documentary film Bob Roberts which features a guitar-playing senatorial candidate who appropriates the language of the Sixties protest movement to peddle his ultra-conservative message. The campaign trail is peppered with numbers such as ‘Times Are Changin’ Back’ and ‘My Land’, which rail against drugs and lazy people. The standard was disappointing this week, with only four of you making the cut. Most went for the anthemic model of Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger, but this is hard to pull off from a right-wing perspective that lacks the righteous indignation of a mass movement feeling oppressed.

No. 2524: Condensing Jane You are invited to condense a Jane Austen novel into a limerick (maximum three entries each). Entries to ‘Competition 2524’ by 6 December or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2521 you were invited to submit an anecdote by a dinner-party bore that culminates in the dubious claim, ‘And that is how I came to eat a cucumber sandwich with the King of Norway.’ When Jaspistos was in hospital earlier this year one of his fellow inmates liked to ensnare nurses in a vice-like grip and subject them to dull and lengthy anecdotes, one of which culminated in this triumphant final flourish.

In Competition 2520 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’. In Competition 2520 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’. Betjeman’s portrayal of road rage in ‘Meditation on the A30’ — ‘You’re barmy or plastered, I’ll pass you, you bastard/ I will overtake you, I will — set me thinking about the misery inflicted by the London Orbital; those hours spent in a state of toddler-like fury with no discernible end in sight. I’m very fond of the A30, for all its faults, and wondered if perhaps the M25 has redeeming features I’ve failed to notice. Not as far as the comping contingent is concerned. Here’s G.

Competition No. 2522: Right on You are invited to submit a right-wing protest song (16 lines maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2522’ by 22 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2519 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘A Song from under the Floorboards’. There is a track of the same name by the post-punk band Magazine whose cheerless first line, ‘I am angry, I am ill and I’m as ugly as sin’, is delivered such relish by frontman Howard Devoto that it almost makes you wish you were him; equally mesmerising is James Mason’s performance as the narrator in the 1953 animated adaptation of the spine-tingling Edgar Allen Poe short story ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, which some of you alluded to.

Competition No. 2521: Tall tale You are invited to submit an anecdote by a dinner-party bore that culminates in the dubious claim: ‘And that is how I came to eat a cucumber sandwich with the King of Norway’. (150 words maximum.) Entries to ‘Competition 2521’ by 15 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2518 you were invited to provide an extract from the adolescent diary of a famous historical figure. Teenagers today publish their diaries online as blogs. How they can bring themselves to do this is beyond me — my own adolescent outpourings, a predictably toecurling blend of tormented introspection and pretentious pseudo-philosophy punct­uated by quotations from Nietzsche and Leonard Cohen — were kept firmly under lock and key.