Competition

In Competition No. 3073 you were invited to submit a short story in the Gothic style with a topical twist.   The seed of this challenge was the recent reopening of Strawberry Hill House and Garden, the neo-Gothic creation of Horace Walpole, whose 1764 chiller The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first Gothic novel.   Russell Clifton deployed the framing device, updated for contemporary sensibilities: ‘Gathered about the campfire that October evening in Lark Wood, someone suggested we tell horror stories.

In Competition No. 3072 you were invited to supply a short verse biography of a well-known figure from history.   In a commendable entry, notables long gone — Diotisalvi, Vercingetorix the Gaul, Dr Dee — rubbed shoulders with those still very much with us — Anthony Weiner, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson. There were borrowings from Edward Lear and Lennon and McCartney (‘BoJo was a clown who thought he was a leader/ Made it to King Charles Street too…’) as well as echoes of Ogden Nash.   An honourable mention goes to Brian Allgar for getting into the Halloween spirit with his life of Vlad the impaler. On equally eye-catching form were D.A. Prince, Sylvia Fairley, Bill Greenwell, Douglas G. Brown and W.J. Webster, who submitted a concrete poem.

In Competition No. 3071 you were invited to supply a demotivational poem.   This was your opportunity to come up with a bracing antidote to the world-view peddled by an eye-wateringly lucrative self-help industry that feeds on a mix of insecurity and the aspirational narcissism du jour.   You came at the challenge from various angles, but the opening to Tracy Davidson’s entry speaks for many:   It doesn’t matter what you do in life, It’s just a constant loop of pointless shite.   Honourable mentions go to Adrian Fry’s paean to the power of no and to Douglas G. Brown’s 21st-century spin on Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life’. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each.

In Competition No. 3070 you were invited to provide a poem with the title ‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be [insert name here]’.   Performance poet Megan Beech was so incensed by the abuse heaped by Twitter trolls on her idol Mary Beard that she wrote a poem called ‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard’ (‘an academic and a classy lady to boot’). Which is what gave me the idea for this challenge.   Another classicist, the esteemed Peter Jones, was the object of W.J. Webster’s affection. Otherwise it was an eclectic entry that ranged from the Dalai Lama to Donald Trump. Commendations to Alan Millard, Douglas G. Brown and Paul Carpenter, who wants to be Rod Liddle when he grows up. The winners earn £25 each.

In Competition No. 3069 you were invited to provide a spoof version of the song ‘My Favourite Things’ for the constituency/demographic of your choice. I decided to set this comp after stumbling across the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic recast as it might have been sung by an elderly Julie Andrews (‘Maalox and nose drops and needles for knitting,/ Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings…’).

In Competition No. 3068 you were invited to provide a sonnet in reverse, using as your model Rupert Brooke’s ‘Sonnet Reversed’, which turns upside-down both the form — it begins on the rhyming couplet — and the Petrarchan concept of idealised love, starting on a romantic high but ending in prosaic banality.   This challenge produced a delightfully varied and engaging entry. Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies, Jennifer Pearson, David Shields, George Simmers and Philip Roe. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £20 each.   Six days to build the Cosmos! I was hot! With stars and planets, galaxies, the lot — And life! Amoebae, microbes, dinosaurs, Crustaceans, fish… and so on down the line.

In Competition No. 3067 you were invited to provide a tale of travel misery on behalf of a well-known traveller from the fields of fact or fiction.   The seed of this assignment was a column in the Observer called My Crap Holiday, which invited readers to share travel horrors: inclement weather, devil children, oven-like bedrooms, Arctic bedrooms, wardrobe--like bedrooms — you get the idea.   I had high hopes of this one but it clearly failed to light your fire, producing only a modest haul of entries. D.A.

In Competition No. 3066 you were invited to submit an ode to a piece of sporting equipment. There is a long and distinguished tradition of verse inspired by sport, going all the way back to Pindar’s odes celebrating ancient Greek athletic achievement. (As London mayor, Boris Johnson commissioned a poem in the style of Pindar to mark the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games.) Some entries adopted the grand ceremonial tone and structure of classical odes Pindaric, Horatian or Sapphic. Others took the more modern, anything-goes route. Ian Barker and Philip Machin earn an honourable mention, as does Adrian Fry’s clever, Kipling-esque entry. The winners below are rewarded with £25 each. Sylvia Fairley pockets the bonus fiver.

In Competition No. 3065 you were invited to supply a happy ending for a well-known play, poem or novel.   Nahum Tate (the worst poet laureate ‘if he had not succeeded Shadwell’, according to Robert Southey) gave King Lear a cheery ending: Lear regains his throne, Cordelia marries Edgar, and Edgar joyfully declares that ‘truth and virtue shall at last succeed’. Charles Lamb hated it, but Samuel Johnson was a fan and so were the punters, it seems: Tate’s 1681 The History of King Lear is thought to have replaced Shakespeare’s version on the English stage, in whole or in part, for some 150 years. In a generally mediocre entry, Ian Baird, Paul Carpenter and Adrian Fry stood out.

In Competition No. 3064 you were invited to supply a newspaper leading article exposing the hitherto unsuspected corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item. This assignment was inspired by the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’.   It was a smallish field with a narrow focus. You divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery.

In Competition No. 3063 you were invited to submit a poem about puns containing puns.   Dryden regarded paronomasia as ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’; Samuel Johnson took an equally dim view. But this most derided form of humour produced a witty and accomplished entry that elicited only the occasional groan.   Robert Schechter’s four-liner — ‘Opun and shut’ — caught my eye: As the punster’s puns were reaching a crescendo, I said, ‘Take your puns and stick them innuendo!’ Also displaying considerable punache were Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Sylvia Fairley, Michael Jameson and Joseph Houlihan. They narrowly lost out to the winners, printed below, who pocket £25 apiece. W.J.

In Competition No. 3062 you were invited to submit a Shakespearean-style soliloquy that a contemporary politician might have felt moved to deliver.   Inspiration for this comp came from Aryeh Cohen-Wade’s imagining, in the New Yorker, of Donald Trump performing Shakespearean soliloquies: ‘Listen — to be, not to be, this is a tough question, OK? Very tough…’   The Donald kept an uncharacteristically low profile this week, with most choosing British politicians. Theresa May and Boris Johnson in particular had plenty to get off their chests. You drew on Hamlet ‘O that this too too shrouding garb would drop…’; Macbeth ‘Is this a compromise I see before me…?

In Competition No. 3061 you were invited to imagine a well-known author who doesn’t normally write in the genre having a go at science fiction and submit an extract from the resulting work. In a 2015 interview, Ursula K. Le Guin, always a staunch and eloquent defender of the genre, took a pop at writers of literary fiction who move into sci-fi and simply think that ‘they can use some of the images and tropes and so on from science-fiction and stick them in their book and put it on another planet or in a spaceship or something…’ Although a fair few entries this week were — understandably — guilty as charged, they were clever and entertaining nonetheless.

In Competition No. 3060 you were invited to provide an updated version of ‘Jerusalem’ starting with the words ‘And did those tweets…’One of my favourite parodies of Blake’s poem is by Allan M. Laing. In it he describes the wartime blackouts:   Bring me my torch of waning power! Bring me my phosphor button bright! Bring me my stick — O, dreadful hour! That brings the darkness of the night!   Laing was a colossus of literary competitions and his successors — veterans and newcomers alike — continue to shine in these pages. In a crowded and lively field this week, honourable mentions go to Nicholas Stone, David Silverman, Brian Murdoch, Ian Barker and Nick Vasey. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 3059 you were invited to supply a poem inspired by the periodic table. The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s system for classifying the chemical elements, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!’ Your entries were witty and well-turned, with many a nod to Tom Lehrer, whom I also had in mind when I set this challenge. Honourable mentions go to Frank McDonald’s smart acrostic, as well as to Martin Elster, Nicholas Stone and Christine Michael. The winners, printed below, snaffle £25 each.

In Competition No. 3058 you were invited to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or for British ones travelling abroad. This is an assignment that you always embrace with relish, though one competitor observed that it felt curiously difficult this time round because ‘the interaction between Britain and Abroad isn’t very funny just at the moment’. That may well be true, but your entries still raised a chuckle, and as usual those with a ring of plausibility worked best.

In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’.   Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless: ‘Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies/ Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside…’ John O’Byrne was good too but was just outflanked by the winners below who pocket £25 each.   Today we have comforting concepts such as finite-loop learning classifier systems, but in 2019 one could pretty much set up an artificial neural network and let it spread all over the electronic world like Japanese knotweed. With hindsight, the result was inevitable.

In Competition No. 3056 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of the High Street.   Your entries were poignant and clever, and transported me back to teenage Saturdays frittered away in the likes of Dolcis, Lilly & Skinner and Freeman, Hardy & Willis. John Morrison’s lines ‘Oh Amazon how swift you rise!/ Swamping all before your eyes…’ spoke for many, though J.R. Johnson thinks that the roots of destruction go deeper, pre-dating the advent of the net.   The winners earn £25 each. Bill Greenwell pockets £30. Hear their doors and cash-tills close, Play their dirges, sing their blues, Dolcis Shoes and Bargain Booze, Ottakar’s and Rumbelows.

In Competition No. 3055 you were invited to take a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. There is space only to high-five the winners below, who take £25 each. Bill Greenwell gets £30.   My boyfriend says I should ‘give in’ to his advances. What’s your advice?   Some boyfriend; some cheek. I would observe that many of his ilk have tried to break down such defences, but few have succeeded, at least not honourably. Upon resistance rests your future. Upon the strength of your redoubt rests the probity of your family, future as past.

In Competition No. 3054 you were invited to compose double dactyls about double acts. I didn’t include the rules about double dactyls as it takes up space and I’ve done it before — and in any case they are easily Googled. Most of you seemed thoroughly at home with the form, and in a large, lively and accomplished entry double dactylic duos from time present (Trump and Melania, Declan and Anthony) and time past (Boney and Josephine) rubbed shoulders with the literary (Regan and Goneril), the musical (Gilbert and Sullivan, Simon and Garfunkel) and the comical (Stanley and Oliver). George Simmers and Mae Scanlan are highly commended. The winners, printed below, earn £15 each.   Hackety, rackety, Donald and Vladimir Sneer at collusion. ‘It’s Fake News!