Competition 3393 went in search of – and found – basic laughs by inviting you to submit a passage of historical fiction sprinkled with anachronistic detail. I was thinking along the lines of the grey squirrel in Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour (set during the War of the Roses), but it was generally
Comp. 3392 invited you to write ‘The Curse of King Thut’ (in poetry or prose) in response to the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Thutmose II, the first such since Tutankhamun’s. There were many imaginative curses, from the archaeologist Artemis Spendlove Jr’s tinnitus (Mark Ambrose) to the contents of the tomb turning out
For Competition 3390 you were invited to come up with your own version of the Groucho Marx song ‘I’m Against It’, from the film Horse Feathers: Your proposition may be good But let’s have one thing understood: Whatever it is, I’m against it. Hats off to David Silverman, who got into specifics: (‘Conniving, skiving; Mo
Comp. 3389 invited you to submit an estate agent’s blurb advertising a property development on Mars. There were many excellent entries, not all of them enticing. Sean Smith’s seemed potentially the most realistic, offering for £4.5 billion a 12 sq m dwelling with private sleeping quarters: ‘private on a rotational basis with other residents’. Nicholas Lee advertised
In Comp. 3387, for the centenary of the publication of The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway, you were invited to submit a passage in which one goes to the other’s party. It was especially hard to whittle this one down. Deserving a mention: Mrs D.’s West Egg dream by Brian Murdoch (‘“Sod the temporal perspective
Competition 3386 invited you to submit poems about the domestic arrangements at the White House. The idea was to inspire some visions of what goes on behind the official scenes – oh to be a fly on the East Wing wall. MAGA hats off to Frank McDonald, Elizabeth Kay, Daniel Pukkila, Nicholas Lee, Tom Adam,
For Competition 3385, with Valentine’s Day looming, you were invited to submit a passage in which one well-known character from literature goes on a date with another. There was a very full inbox, with enough excellent entries to fill weeks’ worth of competitions. It’s tempting to think that some of these imaginative pairings would have
For Competition 3384, since this issue appears on the first of the month, you were invited to submit a short story featuring someone who is a slave to superstition. Every corner of the country used to have its own folkloric behaviours that have now been forgotten (one wonders why salt and mirrors and magpies etc stuck).
In Competition 3383 you were invited to submit a Tripadvisor-type review by an alien who has visited Earth for the first time. Frank Upton pointed out that it could have been titled ‘Mostly Harmless’, Ford Prefect’s entire entry for Earth in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The submissions were full of inventive detail and
For Competition 3382 you were invited to write a poem to mark this day, officially the dreariest of the year. (This year, as a few pointed out, it doubles as Inauguration Day. Things can only get better!) Responses ranged from Tracy Davidson’s ‘It’s just a Monday. You’ll be fine’ to Sylvia Fairley’s despairing ‘When will
In Competition 3381 you were invited to write a proposal for the rebranding of a well-known product/entity to aim it at an entirely different market. It was of course inspired by Jaguar’s gender-fluid relaunch ad, which has already somehow faded into distant memory by now. The idea here was to rebrand an existing thing rather
In Competition 3380 you were invited to send in your predictions for 2025 in verse form. The entries suggested that not everyone is enchanted at the prospect of what the year may have in store. But absurdity flourished too, as in Ralph Goldswain’s fantasy that Keir Starmer will enter Eurovision in a glittery suit, while
Comp. 3379 invited you to submit a contribution to a collection of Christmas recipes by fictional characters. This is a festive version of one you made earlier, and it turned out well again. There were a couple of Ancient Mariners and Macbeth covens – special mention for Max Ross’s Christmas cauldron with its ‘badger’s head and reindeer’s
In Comp. 3377 you were invited to write a version of ‘Ozymandias’ for the future. (The original, which obviously is for all time, arose from a contest between Shelley and Horace Smith to write a poem with that title.) The idea was to elicit responses to the US election, and the President-elect does feature heavily,
In Competition 3376, prompted by news that avocado bathrooms are back in vogue, you were invited to compose poems about interior decor trends of yesteryear. Reading them, bubble chairs and spider plants swam before my eyes. Jane Smillie’s list deserves a mention: Artex and lava lamps, bamboo and tie dye,Pop art and sideboards and stereo
In Competition 3374 you were invited to write an ode to autumn. There was bathos amid the beauty. I regret not finding room for Alan Millard’s ‘Season of musts’, Elizabeth Kay’s garden musings, Joseph Houlihan’s paean to the blazing hills, Nicholas Lee on what Keats could do with ‘rotting vapes arranged about the scene’, and
In Comp. 3373 you were invited to mull on a line that Sigmund Freud almost certainly did not say, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, substituting another object if it seemed apt. In the event there was plenty about cigars as substitutes and not so much about their substitutes as substitutes. A word in praise
For Competition 3372 you were invited to submit a prose-style mash-up of Jilly Cooper and another famous writer. The entries were very amusing, though a handful were a little too pornographic for publication. Some of you seemed regrettably unfamiliar with the works of Cooper while others seemed to err in the other direction. I anticipated
Competition 3371 invited you to rewrite the lyrics of ‘Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off’ to be sung not by Fred and Ginger but by another mismatched pair. Trump and Harris cropped up the most, while Joseph Houlihan deserves a mention for his version (‘I’m a Zoomer, you’ve a Boomer’s/ Problematic sense of humour…’). Those
Competition 3370 invited poems about the predicament of the Nasa astronauts stranded on the ISS – thanks to Paul Freeman for this suggestion. There was a wide range of ideas about how they could use their time, from self–improvement to… other things. Due to a different space issue, many good entries had to be jettisoned,
