Competition

In Competition 2833 you were invited to submit an extract from the adolescent diary of a well-known public figure, living or dead. There wasn’t much between you this week and it was tough boiling the entry down to just six. Those who narrowly lost out include Pervez Rizvi, P.C. Parrish, Mark Shelton and John Whitworth, and I liked Ralph Rochester’s Baden-Powell doing battle with his raging libido. The winners below take £25 each. Shirley Curran nabs the bonus fiver. This morning I awoke with a dilemma often faced, I imagine, by other young men who will one day become famous literary figures. Which side of the bed ought I to arise from?

In Competition 2832 you were invited to compose an address to an item of food. The assignment was inspired by Burns’s ‘Address to a Haggis’, but you were not obliged to write in his style. Albert Black went for a Kipling-Burns mash-up and other competitors drew on Shelley and Shakespeare. The winners take £25 each and Basil Ransome-Davies pockets £30. Eggs Benedict, you pop my cork! I’m immune to the charms of a black-buttered skate Or a Frenchified way with roast pork. A confit de canard is not my soul-mate — A touch would embarrass my fork — While lapin au cidre I candidly hate, But I put out for you on our very first date In that old luncheonette in New York.

In Competition 2832 you were invited to compose what might be a quintessential opening paragraph from the pen of either Graham Greene, Frank Kafka, Jane Austen or Tolkien. It was a tall order to channel such literary genius, but on the whole you did it pretty well. Greene, with his immediately distinctive voice, was by far the most popular choice. As Nicholas Shakespeare wrote, ‘It rarely takes more than three ...sentences to situate you in Greeneland, a place whose moral temperature would wring sweat out of a fridge.’ Kafka proved the most difficult nut to crack. None of you quite managed to capture his finely calibrated blend of the nightmarish and the mundane, though Bill Greenwell came closest, and Josh Ekroy nailed well his exhaustive sentence structures.

In Competition 2830 you were invited to choose, from different authors, two characters who have the same job or position and give an excerpt of not more than 150 words from their conversation on meeting. The assignment brought forth an entertaining cast of literary pairings, with gentlemen’s gentlemen, sleuths, teachers and doctors featuring most strongly, but not forgetting, too, a sprinkling of sailors, spies, nannies and ladies of the night. Honourable mentions to Frank McDonald, Brian Murdoch, D.A. Prince and Sylvia Fairley. The bonus fiver is Chris O’Carroll’s and the rest take £30 each. ‘Welcome, Silver. Allow me to offer you a glass of wine.’ ‘Swab the deck with your blasted wine, Hook. Avast your Etonian airs. Rum or nothing for me.

In Competition 2829 you were invited to imagine what Philip Larkin might have made of the news that Hull has been anointed 2017’s City of Culture. Despite its unpromising image, this city-of-culture-in-waiting has nurtured a wide range of creative talents: from poets such as Andrew Marvell and Stevie Smith, to the actor Tom Courtenay, the film director Anthony Minghella and folk legends the Watersons. And of course Larkin himself, who sought refuge in the university library from celebrity and the metropolitan literati. Most of you had the poet conform to his self-perpetuated image of right-wing curmudgeon, but there was a glimpse here and there of a softer side too; that quiet voice of celebration that sits alongside the familiar detached world-weariness.

In Competition 2828 you were invited to submit a retrospective verse commentary on 2013. Reasons to be cheerful are, apparently, somewhat thin on the ground. Alanna Blake’s opening couplet captures the general mood of the entry: The year is past, it’s maybe best To let the poor thing lie at rest. The arrival of a royal baby injected a more positive note, albeit leavened by a healthy dash of cynicism. Here’s Jerome Betts: Yet still, you welcomed young Prince George, A howling future Head of State, Then let the media-vultures gorge On shots of —Wow! — unweighty Kate Commendations to Trish Davis and Chris O’Carroll, who were unlucky losers. The winners take £25 each and the bonus fiver belongs to Alan Millard. Happy New Year!

In Competition 2827 you were invited to submit a Christmas list, in verse, in the style of the poet of your choice.   This challenge called on you not only to pull off a convincing pastiche of a particular poet but also to come up with a plausible Christmas wish list for them.   There were neat references to Dorothy Parker’s ‘One Perfect Rose’ from Noel Petty and Martin Parker, and I liked Basil Ransome-Davies’s riff on MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’.

In Competition 2826 you were invited to submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme. The line between sense and nonsense is a blurred one; certainly Carroll’s crazy world has a bonkers internal logic all of its own. But perhaps the best way into nonsense is to put the quest for sense aside for once and simply surrender yourself to the whimsical, the topsy-turvy and the fantastical. The winners below take £25 each. The bonus fiver is Brian Allgar’s. ’Twas winter, and the gringeing goves Did quave and quemble on the ice, The cameroon howled like a loon And nibbled frozen lice.   ‘The miliband is close at hand!’ He sneezed with fear and snarled with pain. ‘A thousand legs like stumpy pegs, Yet only half a brain!

In Competition 2825 you were invited to supply a poem for a well-known painting of your choice. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the inspiration behind this challenge. His sonnet ‘Found’ was written in 1881 as a companion to an unfinished oil painting of the same title on the theme of prostitution, which is now in the Delaware Museum. Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite brethren featured strongly in the entry. Melanie Branton’s companion piece to ‘Ophelia’, a lament from a long-suffering Lizzie Siddal, made me smile. Rob Stuart, Sylvia Fairley, Adrian Fry, Philip Wilson and Chris O’Carroll were also strong contenders but narrowly missed joining the prizewinners below, who take £25 each. The bonus fiver is Alan Millard’s.

In Competition 2824 you were invited to submit double clerihews about a well-known sporting figure past or present.   The clerihew was invented by Edmund  Clerihew Bentley as a bored schoolboy. His  son Nicolas subsequently came up with the double clerihew and trebles have been recorded. Other noted practitioners include Chesterton and Auden — and, of course, James Michie, who contributed many stellar examples to this magazine.   The rules governing the form are not iron-clad, as I see it. After all, Bentley himself bent them from time to time, as in this example. The art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about maps, But Biography is about chaps. The winners below earn £15 for each entry printed.

In Competition 2823 you were invited to submit a school essay or poem written at the age of eight by a well-known person, living or dead, entitled ‘My Pet’ . Those of you who chose to step into the childhood shoes of well-known writers faced the tricky challenge of pulling off an element of pastiche while at the same time producing something that could plausibly have been written by an eight-year-old. Emily Dickinson, a famously precocious child, was a popular choice. Gordon Gwilliams’s entry revealed the stirrings of educational-reformist zeal in the young Michael Gove, while Richard Hayes’s brought to life Russell Brand, budding Narcissus. I also liked Susan McLean’s already-jaundiced Boy Larkin. The winners take £25 each.

In Competition 2822 you were invited to submit an extract from a scene from a contemporary soap opera (television or radio) as Shakespeare might have written it. The idea of filtering an aspect of popular culture through the lens of the Bard for comic effect is not a new one, of course. A recent example comes in the shape of a George Lucas-Shakespeare mash-up from Ian Doescher, who recasts the Star Wars saga as a five-act play in iambic pentameter: ‘In time so long ago begins our play / In star-crossed galaxy far, far away.’ In a closely contested field, Paul Goring, Anne Woolfe, Caroline Macafee, G. Tapper- and George Simmers (‘Tomorrow and tomo-rrow and tomorrow,/ Creep on these petty tales from day to day) impressed. The prizewinners pocket £30 each.

In Competition 2821 you were invited to supply a poem that provides instruction or useful information. This challenge was, of course, a nod to Virgil, whose Georgics, a didactic poem spanning four books, is part agricultural manual, part political poem. Although it was published way back in 29 bc or thereabouts, its lessons can still be applied today: a team of Italian archaeologists recently planted a vineyard in Sicily using Virgilian techniques. Although Virgil was the inspiration, the brief did not specify that entries be written in dactylic hexameter (Bill Greenwell’s was: impressive); neither were you committed to a theme of agriculture and country life. The winners pocket £25 each. Brian Murdoch takes the bonus fiver.

In Competition 2820 you were invited to supply a postscript to any well-known novel.   This challenge was suggested by a reader who drew my attention to Barbara Hardy’s neo-Victorian gem Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth Century Postscripts, which includes afterwords to Little Dorrit and Mansfield Park. I hoped it might appeal to anyone who has ever wondered whether Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy lived happily ever after.   Peter Ridley, Josephine Boyle, Rob Stuart and Adrian Fry were strong runners-up. The winners pocket £25 each and this week’s top dog is D.A. Prince, who takes £30. Ralph winced as the man, porphory-faced and fleshy, seized his hand. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Long time ...

In Competition 2819 you were invited to write a poem either in free verse mocking rhymed, metrical verse or in conventional verse mocking free verse.   Auden was no fan of vers libre: ‘If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun.’ (D.H. Lawrence, he felt, was one of the few poets who could pull free verse off.) But there are those who question the designation ‘free’. The poet and critic Yvor Winters maintained that ‘the free verse that is really verse, the best, that is, of ...Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound is the antithesis of free.’ And T.S. Eliot agreed with him. Last time this comp was run, the jury was split. This time round most of you came down on Auden’s side.

In Competition 2818 you were asked to merge two literary classics and provide a synopsis of the new title. You obviously had great fun with this one. Frank Osen came up with Pollyanna Karenina: ‘A girl from New England is so relentlessly upbeat about her affair with a Russian aristocrat that he throws himself under a passing train’; and A Dance to the Music of Time Management for Dummies: ‘This deluxe boxed set includes many helpful organising tips that will have you breezing through the 12-novel series in only a few hours.’ Mae Scanlan’s pun-packed blend of Henry Gray and Dorian Gray made me laugh, as did Sylvia Fairley’s Life of Roo. John O’Byrne’s Waugh-Mantel mash-up, Bring up the Vile Bodies, also warrants an honourable mention.

In Competition 2817 you were asked to provide a poem, in the manner of Harry Graham’s Perverted Proverbs, questioning the wisdom of a popular proverb. Graham was an immensely gifted lyricist and poet. In 1903, in the guise of one Col. D. Streamer, he published Perverted Proverbs: A Manual of Immorals for the Many, in which he brilliantly exposed the absurdity at the heart of those maddening nuggets of so-called wisdom that are trotted out when you least want to hear them. You weren’t obliged to follow Graham’s metre and rhyme, but those who did so earned extra points. Nick Grace and Brian Allgar deserve an honourable mention. The winners, below, earn £25 each; Chris O’Carroll takes £30.

In Competition 2816 you were invited to submit a short story with an ingenious twist at the end. I was inspired to set this challenge after coming across O. Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’ and then rereading Maupassant’s quietly devastating ‘The Necklace’. The moral of Bill Greenwell’s tale — dishonesty pays — struck me as a neat counterpoint to Maupassant. The winners earn £25 each. G.M. Davis takes the bonus fiver.   I answered the knock and was struck dumb. It was 20 years since we’d lived together. I’d undergone sea changes, but she was no different: the pleated pink minidress, the rhinestone gladiator sandals, glamour slap à la Joan Collins. Too late to invent an excuse: I had to let her in.

In Competition 2814 you were invited to describe how a great writer stumbled upon an idea that he or she later put to good use. Thanks to Messrs Allgar and Moore, Brians both, for suggesting that I challenge competitors to imagine the unlikely circumstances in which the seeds of great literary works were sown. I enjoyed Chris O’Carroll’s tale of the genesis of that famous stage direction ‘Exit pursued by a bear’ and John O’Byrne’s account of Samuel Beckett waiting with his mother for a bus that never comes. Stephen Walsh finds the origins of Hemingway’s spare, muscular prose in the classroom. The winners take £25 each. Lydia Shaxberd earns £30. Exhausted from his play, young Beckett slumped under the solitary tree.