Competition

In Competition No. 3093 you were invited to submit an extract from a novel that chronicles the adult life of a well-known fictional hero from children’s stories.   I enjoyed Jess McAree’s account of Paddington Bear’s Conrad-esque voyage — ‘evicted by Brexit, residence visa revoked’ — to the heart of darkness in deepest Peru. Hugh King, D.A. Prince and A.R. Duncan-Jones also shone with their portrayals of the later lives of the stars of the Just William and Noddy stories.   In Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the play based on J.K. Rowling’s books, the boy wizard has grown up and become a father of three who works for the Ministry of Magic.

In Competition No. 3092 you were invited to submit a spring villanelle. The villanelle lends itself to themes of loss and time passing, but the somewhat gloomy mood of the entry was offset by how well you rose to the form’s technical challenges. Congratulations all round, but especially to unlucky losers Noah Heyl, R.M. Goddard, Philip Roe, and Jasper and Julia Griffin. The winners earn £30 each.   A green haze hints that spring might soon appear, The trees come into leaf, unhurried, slow, Like Brexit, always coming, never here.   The sky grows blue, the grey begins to clear And as the flowers’ colours start to show, A green haze hints that spring might soon appear.

In Competition No. 3091 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies. This is an idea shamelessly pinched from the Washington Post, whose contests have produced the impressively so-bad-they’re good ‘Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze’ (Chuck Smith) and ‘Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever’ (Jennifer Hart). Yours, too, were gloriously cringe--inducing. Laboured, overwrought, banal, tasteless — yet grimly compelling for all that. The winners take a fiver each per analogy printed below. As the narcotic took effect, Frank felt extremely odd, as if he were sole occupant of a set in a Venn diagram containing men who loved the novels of Barbara Pym and people who sought the reintroduction of bear baiting.

In Competition No. 3090 you were invited to submit a recently discovered lost poem by a well-known poet that makes us see him or her in a new light. Step forward, Philip Larkin, flower arranger, Slough fan John Betjeman and knickers-on-fire Emily Dickinson. Congratulations all round are in order this week, but I especially admired Alanna Blake’s palinodic villanelle from Dylan Thomas:   Calm down, relax, accept the dying light, It will be unaffected by your rage, For all our sakes, give up this futile fight…   And G.M. Davis’s Tennyson revealing what he really thought of her maj:   What a prissy old Queen is Victoria! She looks like a case of dysphoria In the straitest of lace With that vinegar face, Though they say that in private she’s whorier.

In Competition No. 3089 you were invited to put your own spin on a weather forecast.   The seed for the task came from the Master Singers’ take on a weather report, soothingly intoned in the style of an Anglican chant. But as one competitor reminded me there is also that 1970s gem, courtesy of the Two Ronnies: ‘The sun will be killing ’em in Gillingham, it’ll be choking in Woking, dry in Rye and cool in Goole. And if you live in Lissingdown take an umbrella!’   The brief was deliberately open and it produced a pleasingly corpulent and diverse if somewhat gloomy postbag. An honourable mention goes to Brian Murdoch for his 12-isobar blues, the winners take £25 and Bill Greenwell’s Henry Reed-inspired bulletin earns him an additional fiver.

In Competition No. 3088 you were invited to submit a short story in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction set in the corridors of power. Raymond Chandler cast a long shadow over an entry bristling with stinging one-liners, dames, black humour and grandstanding similes laid on with a trowel. The mean streets of Westminster were the most popular setting, though there were glimpses of Brussels and the Oval Office too. Commiserations to unlucky losers Bill Greenwell, D.A. Prince and Alan Millard. High fives to the winners, printed below, who trouser £25 each.   Down these dull corridors a man must go who is not himself dull.

In Competition No. 3087 you were invited to submit haikicks. We already have short-form hybrids such as the clerihaiku (here’s one from Mary Holtby): Peter Palumbo Cries, ‘Mumbo-jumbo!’ and rails At the Prince of Wales   And the limeraiku:   A haiku will do   For a limerick trick, called A Limeraiku. That was by Arthur P. Cox.   Now Bill Webster, veteran of these pages, has come up with a new version of the haiku-limerick combination. Hence this challenge. You responded to it with your customary vim and wit, and with the help of such notables as William Spooner, Abraham Lincoln and Jeremys Clarkson and Paxman.   The winners, printed below, are rewarded with a tenner per entry printed.

In Competition No. 3086 you were invited to submit a poem about the difficulty of writing a poem.   In a far-larger-than-usual entry, A.H. Harker’s punchy couplet caught my eye: I’m stuck. Oh ****.   Elsewhere there were nods to Wordsworth, Milton and ‘The Thought Fox’, Ted Hughes’s wonderful poem about poetic inspiration. The winners below earn £25 each for their travails. I struggled with my verse time after time, Yet somehow I could never make it work. It scanned quite well, but there’s no use pretending My couplets had a satisfactory finish.   The words at their conclusion never matched; They would not rhyme, however hard I rubbed My head. The wretched quatrains fell apart, And I despaired of mastering the skill.

In Competition No. 3085 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Valentine’s Day. The day is said to have its roots in the Roman pagan festival of Lupercalia. But one scholar has proposed the theory that it was Chaucer who first designated 14 February as a day of love in his poem ‘The Parlement of Foules’, and I wondered if any of you would come up with a Chaucer-ian pastiche (you didn’t). The challenge certainly struck a chord, though, and you captured the ghastliness well: mediocre, overpriced dinners, chocolate genitalia, nasty cards — or no cards at all… A consolatory handshake to Fiona Pitt-Kethley, Susan McLean, Hamish Wilson, Robert Schechter and Mike Morrison, who were unlucky losers. The winners, printed below, pocket £25.

In Competition No. 3084 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Breaking up is hard to do’.   From David Kilshaw’s Brexit-inspired twist on Neil Sedaka — ‘Commons, commons, down, dooby, doo, down down…’ — to Dorothy Pope’s poignant haiku — ‘plum blossom petals/ mistaken now for snowflakes/ so cold is your love’ — this was an inventive and accomplished entry full of witty flourishes. Space is short this week, so without further ado I’ll hand over to the winners below, who earn £25 each.   In Dame Europa’s school the teachers peered Out at the children thronging the school yard. The term seemed to have lasted forty years, But just now, breaking up was rather hard.

In Competition No. 3083 you were invited to submit a poem or a short story that begins ‘It started with a tweet…’.   Hats off to Philip Machin for an appropriately pithy submission: It started with a tweet — There’s nothing wrong in that — But, sadly, indiscreet: It ended with a cat. Elsewhere, in a varied and engaging entry, there were echoes of Shelley’s skylark, Lear’s owl and Hitchcock’s Birds. The winners below are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 3082 you were invited to write a poem taking as your first line ‘Happy the man, and happy he alone’, which begins the much-loved eighth stanza of poet--translator Dryden’s rendition of Horace’s Ode 29 from Book III.   At a time of year when we traditionally take stock and have a futile stab at self-reinvention, you came up with prescriptions that were witty, smart and wide-ranging. The best are printed below and earn their deserving authors £20 each. Happy the man, and happy he alone, Who dwells securely in his comfort zone, Disdaining the temptations of success While relishing the fruits of idleness.

In Competition No. 3081 you were invited to supply a parable rewritten in the style of a well-known author. Like Milton, many of you seemed taken with the Parable of the Talents. Here is Sylvia Fairley channelling Mark Haddon: ‘He gave five talents to one, that’s 14,983 shekels, and two to the next, 5,993 shekels. Those are prime numbers. I like prime numbers…’ I thought Kafka might loom large but he cropped up only once in a sea of Austens, Hemingways, Trollopes and Wodehouses. Strong performers, in a keenly contested week, were Joseph Harrison, W.H. Thomas, Philip Machin, Hamish Wilson, David Silverman, David Mackie, Jan Snook and Hannah Burden-Teh. The winners, below, pocket £25 each.

In Competition No. 3080 you were invited to supply an elegy on a piece of obsolete technology. Thanks to Paul A. Freeman for suggesting this challenge — there’s nothing like a blast of nostalgia to usher in the new year. Sinclair C5s, faxes, floppy discs, typewriters; all were eloquently hymned. I admired Hamish Wilson’s elegy on a radiogram and John O’Byrne’s Whitman-esque homage to the Walkman:   O Walkman! O Walkman! our cassette days are done, My ears have enjoyed every tune, the tapes I played are worn, The phone has come, the apps are here, the playlists all inspiring, But Apple killed this mobile thing for designs sleek and aspiring.   The winners below earn £25 each.

In Competition No. 3079 you were invited to supply a new anthem to welcome 2019, starting with the first line of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and continuing in your own way.   ‘Is not the Scotch phrase “Auld lang syne” exceedingly expressive?’ wrote Robert Burns to his friend Frances Dunlop in 1788, referring to the words of an old folk song that he had heard, written down and later sent to James Johnson, who published it in the Scots Musical Museum. These days, of course, they are sung with gusto by the in-ebriated the world over on New Year’s Eve — an expression of fellowship and nostalgia.   Not much of that in the entry, needless to say. Though the occasional sliver of cheeriness (C.

In Competition No. 3078 you were invited to submit a politically correct Christmas carol.   One of Donald Trump’s election pledges was to end ‘the war on Christmas’, and he has given the electorate the presidential nod to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again instead of the more inclusive ‘Happy holidays’.   But was this ‘war’ pointless and misguided in the first place? As Adam Gopnik points out in the New Yorker, Christmas ‘is, at its roots, the very model of a pagan-secular--synthetic festival as much as it is a religious one — just the kind, in fact, that the imaginary anti-Christmas forces are supposed to favour…’ and concludes: ‘he war on Christmas is over. Christmas won.

In Competition No. 3077 you were invited to submit a sonnet with the name of a Shakespearean character hidden in each line This one pulled in a bumper haul of entries, from old hands and newcomers alike. While some competitors described the challenge as ‘fun’, others greeted it with a squeal of horror. C. Paul Evans, for example: ‘The mother of all horrors, what a comp,/ A theme to turn my ashy locks to dust!…’ The shoehorning in of names occasionally led to some stilted lines, but there were bursts of remarkable fluency too. In an entry full of witty touches and clever flourishes, commendations go to David Silverman, Chris O’Carroll, Jan Snook and Julia Griffin; a prize of £20 belongs to each of those printed below.

In Competition No. 3076 you were invited to submit seriously misguided love poems. You seemed to embrace this task especially wholeheartedly, and I admired your powers of invention in finding so many ways of making my toes curl. Even Brexit got a look-in: ‘Let me be your Brexit backstop/ I will never set you free…’ (Ian Barker). Dishonourable mentions go to Hamish Wilson and David Shields. The winners take £25 each. The extra fiver is Brian Murdoch’s.   Let me compare thee to this bag of chips, For you are as desirable. They taste Just slightly salty, like a woman’s lips And steam invitingly, fresh, hot, and chaste. In shape each single chip is uniform And you are also slim, pale, not too long, And nicely firm.

In Competition No. 3075 you were invited to submit poems by Donald Trump.   The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, which is the brainchild of Rob Sears, represents the fruits of Mr Sears’s efforts to find evidence of the President’s sensitive, poetic side in his tweets and transcripts. The verses in the book are stitched together from Trump’s own words, and promise to reveal ‘a hitherto hidden Donald, who may surprise and delight both students and critics alike’.   There were some excellent candidates for volume two in an entry in which haikus were especially popular —‘Terrible! Just found/Obama had my wires tapped./-McCarthyism!

In Competition No. 3074 you were invited to submit a scam letter ghostwritten by a well-known author, living or dead.   Falling for a scam is costly and tedious (and more easily done than you might think), but the comedian James Veitch found a silver lining when he decided to engage with his persecutors: the ensuing correspondence — lengthy, labyrinthine and often hilarious — went on to form the basis of a popular TED talk and book.   It was a tricky assignment, judging by the smallish postbag, but you made some clever choices of author whose prose style lent itself well to the art of phishing: poor spelling (Molesworth via Geoffrey Willans); apparently outlandish claims (Kafka). The winners, printed below, earn £25 each.