Competition

In Competition No. 2753 you were invited to submit a new national anthem for Greece. The entry was split between those who present Greece’s woes as being mostly self-inflicted and a more sympathetic bunch, who acknowledge the wider forces that may have helped to bring this once great nation to its knees. Both camps are represented in the winning line-up. W.J. Webster takes the bonus fiver. His fellow winners pocket £25 each. Hellas! Hellas! All Hellenes cry ‘Hellas!’ Our great descent is known to all Who’ve heard of Europe’s story, From giants too many to recall Who laid our claim to glory. Here history first got its name, We gave the epic birth; Geometry owes us its frame, We even measured Earth.

In Competition No. 2752 you were invited to submit a short story ending with the phrase: ‘It is not all pleasure, this exploration.’ Dr Livingstone’s pronouncement, written in 1873 a few days before his wretched death, is putting it mildly. His final days had been plagued by pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers, piles, rotting teeth, leeches, hostile African tribesmen and a large blood clot in his gut. Several competitors wove Livingstone in, but the postbag was impressively wide-ranging: crime rubbed shoulders with horror and sci-fi, and there was even a smattering of erotica — very much the genre du jour. Commendations to Lance Levens and Frank Osen, £25 each to the winners and £30 to Josephine Boyle. I am inquisitive: I love discoveries. Usually.

In Competition No. 2751 you were invited to paint a portrait in verse of Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot. In his Turf column last year, Robin Oakley wondered what the poet who, in 1823, described ‘the Thursday goings-on as “Ladies Day ...when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine”’ would make of today’s proceedings. Well, the entry is a fulsome tribute to the Ladies of 2012, urging us to delight in the life-enhancing antics and ensembles that raise them hats and shoulder pads above their ‘angelic’ predecessors. The winners pocket £25 apiece. Brian Allgar gets £30. The ladies are charming, although it’s alarming To see how they jostle and chatter — ‘And guess what he said, dear...

In Competition No. 2750 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of one of the deadly sins. The challenge was prompted by the following surprising admission by Taki in a High Life column earlier this year: ‘Lust, gluttony, pride, wrath and sloth I am rather proud to be guilty of, especially the first and the last.’ Though lust didn’t get much of a look-in in the entry, you were with Taki on sloth, which, along with gluttony, produced all six winners. Marion Shore and John O’Byrne were on pithy, witty form; commendations also go to Barbara Wilcock Bland, Janet Kenny, Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead and Derek Robinson. The winners get £25 each. Bill Greenwell nabs £30.

In Competition No. 2743 you were invited to submit a recipe as it might have been written by an author of your choice. Kafka’s Soup, a complete history of world literature in 14 recipes by Mark Crick gave me the idea for this challenge. It contains such gastronomic delights as Cheese on Toast à la Harold Pinter and Fenkata à la Homer and is a masterclass in literary impersonation. You gave Mr Crick a run for his money. This was another cracking entry and competition was stiff for the top spots. Commendations to unlucky losers Alannah Blake, Frank Osen and W.J. Webster. The winners are printed below and are rewarded with  £25 each. Mike Morrison pockets the bonus fiver.

In Competition No. 2742 you were invited to take as your first line ‘Dear Lord the day of eggs is here...’, which is the opening to Amanda McKittrick Ros’s poem ‘Eastertide’, and continue, in a similarly bad vein, for up to 16 lines. Described in the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature as ‘uniquely dreadful’, McKittrick Ros, who died in 1939, nonetheless boasted devotees among the literary elite. Aldous Huxley wrote an essay on her extraordinary use of language, highlights of which include ‘globes of glare’ (eyes), ‘bony supports’ (legs) and ‘southern necessary’ (pants). Congratulations, all round. It was a magnificent entry and there are too many honourable mentions to list individually.

In Competition No. 2741 you were invited to submit an extract from the libretto of an opera that pays homage to the town of your choice. The Lottery-funded operatic venture Swindon: the Opera, which inspired the comp, catapulted that unlovely town into the cultural spotlight, and this assignment was meant to be an exercise in doing the same thing for other, unfairly perhaps, mocked parts of the country. But as I didn’t make that clear enough in my brief, Aldeburgh and London share the stage with Milton Keynes and Walthamstow in the winning line-up below. Susan Therkelsen’s Woking, Janet Kenny’s Lewes, Chris O’Carroll’s Bognor and Josh Ekroy’s Guildford were unlucky losers. The victors nab £30 and Noel Petty takes the bonus fiver.

In Competition No. 2740 you were invited to submit the ten work Commandments of the writer of your choice, living or dead. There were some cracking entries this week — far more winners than there is space to print. Here is a taste of Brian Murdoch’s Tolkien: ‘1. If a book’s worth writing, it’s worth spinning out to three volumes ... 4. You don’t need many women; it’s a man’s world in Middle Earth and 1930s Oxford colleges’; G.M. Davis’s Patience Strong: ‘Why dwell on thoughts that might give pain?/ Bring joy, like sunshine after rain.’ And J. Seery’s Hemingway: ‘if the writing is not running like a properly punched nose 1. Punch somebody. 2. If that fails, shoot a big, dangerous animal. Try a lion.

In Competition No. 2739 you were invited to submit a poem lamenting an impulse buy on eBay. A hair from Justin Bieber’s chest; a colossal concrete brontosaurus; a lifesize poster of Albert Einstein; Franz Kafka’s shirt (with an authenticating Post-it note by Max Brod). These were just a few of the regrettable but hugely entertaining online purchases that featured in a large and lively entry. Honourable mentions go to Shirley Curran, Mae Scanlan, Gerard Benson and Melissa Balmain. I also liked W.J. Webster’s eBay Blues: ‘Woke up this morning, heard a click inside my head....’ Chris O’Carroll’s magnificent all-singing, all-flopping wall-mounted rubber bass narrowly lost out to Brian Allgar, who nabs the extra fiver.

In Competition No. 2738 you were invited to concoct a government ad that bravely attempts to attract applicants to an especially unappealing job of your invention. Some time ago a reader brought to my attention an ad for the position of ‘Band 3 Process Developers in the VOA2015 Process Team’. Such was its mind-boggling impenetrability (‘The VOA2015 Programme is redesigning the Agency’s processes to create a simplified process model that will better support the new structure of the Agency as it moves into Business Streams...’) that it brought me to wondering who would conceivably apply for such a job and whether the ad could perhaps have been written in a more beguiling way — which is where you come in. Derek Morgan gets the extra fiver.

In Competition No. 2737 you were invited to submit a double dactyl. This popular and, judging by the size of the entry, extraordinarily compulsive poetic parlour game was invented in the Sixties by the celebrated poets Anthony Hecht and John Hollander and is described in the blurb of Jiggery-Pokery, their magnificent compendium of the form, as a ‘devilish amalgam of rhyme, meter, name-dropping and pure nonsense’. The challenge generated a quirky parade of double-dactylic notables. I especially liked Bill Greenwell’s double dactyl as it might have been written by that mangler of meter William McGonagall; commendations, too, to Mike Morrison, Luci Thomas, Christopher Greening, Roger Munson, Alannah Blake and Penelope Mackie.

In Competition No. 2736 you were invited to submit bible stories as retold by modern authors. There were plenty of eager contenders, and unsurprisingly so. Works of heavyweight literary scholarship have documented the all-pervasive influence of the King James Bible on British and American literature. The rhythms of its language are clearly discernible in the work of writers as diverse as Wodehouse, Hemingway and Kipling, who mined not only its style but its content too. Kipling’s phrase ‘dark places of the earth’ (from Psalm 74:20) is also borrowed by Conrad in Heart of Darkness. You clearly had great fun with this assignment, letting the likes of Jilly Cooper, Irvine Welsh and J.K. Rowling loose on Sunday School favourites. I was especially entertained by E.

In Competition No. 2735 you were invited to take as your first line ‘My love is like a [fill in blank]’, and continue, in light verse. Amid the ailments — ‘a drippy nose’, ‘a whooping cough’; the animals — ‘a three-toed sloth’, ‘a sea urchin’; and foodstuffs galore: ‘ripe Gorgonzola’, ‘ a tub of lard’, ‘a rack of ribs’, Bridget Rees’s inventive opening impressed: ‘My love is like a — do you know,/ I don’t know what he’s like!/ I thought I knew for twenty years/ And then he took a hike...’ Honourable mentions, too, to Max Ross and Adam Campbell. The winners get £25 each. Basil Ransome-Davies nets £30.

In Competition No. 2734 you were invited to provide anagrams of lines from Shakespearean sonnets. These assignments are not the most popular but every so often the urge to send you to anagram hell gets the better of me. ‘I found this competition exasperatingly difficult,’ wrote Josephine Boyle. Equally exasperated, it seems, was Basil Ransome-Davies, whose email subject line read: ‘Everlasting fire for this one’. Shirley Curran expressed her frustration anagrammatically: It is rather gawky to reinvent bards! (It is the star to every wand’ring bark). While W.J. Webster injected a refreshing note of cheeriness: ‘Lovely competition! Two Scrabble sets and a laptray — the insomniac’s dream!’ But I am not alone in inflicting such torture.

In Competition No. 2733 you were invited to condense the plot of a Dickens novel into a triple limerick. In case you hadn’t noticed, it would have been Dickens’s 200th birthday this week, and this assignment is a modest contribution to the avalanche of Dickens-related events unleashed across the globe by the bicentenary. (Even estate agents have jumped on the bandwagon: ‘Dickens Mania Brings sales boost to Victorian Homes in the Capital’.) The challenge attracted an enormous and impressive postbag. Well done, one and all. It is a tall order to boil down the great man’s works to 15 lines, and you didn’t shy away from the especially densely plotted doorstops such as Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.

In Competition No. 2732 you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. This challenge is a twist on the magnificent annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which salutes the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ Entrants are invited to come up with deliberately dreadful openings to imaginary novels. It was a most enjoyable competition to judge. I was entertained by some truly vile abuses of the English language, the best-worst of which appear below and earn their authors £25 apiece. Dishonourable mentions to Charles Chadwick, Adam Campbell, R.S. Gwynn, W.J. Webster and Katie Mallett. The bonus fiver goes to Basil Ransome-Davies.

In Competition No. 2731 you were invited to supply a poem in praise of punctuation. An excellent entry, this. Space is tight and I very much regretted not having room for Alan Millard, David Duncan Jones and Frank Osen in addition to the worthy winners below. The bonus fiver belongs to Basil Ransome-Davies. The rest pocket £25. I dallied with a comma whose cute curves had made me pause And catch my breath, if only for a second, But she’d a wild obsession with an adjectival clause Whose charismatic syntax always beckoned. My rebound squeeze, a semi-colon eager to be kissed, Proved versatile, a mark of many talents. She had the power to subdivide a rather lengthy list Or function as the pivot of a balance. And did I stop there? No!

In Competition No. 2730 you were invited to supply a refutation in verse of Philip Larkin’s assertion ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. ‘This Be The Verse’ may not be Larkin’s finest poem but it is certainly his best-known and most oft-quoted (he himself wryly commented that he fully expected to hear it recited by a thousand Girl Guides before he died). The challenge generated a large and generally impressive postbag. Commendations to Frank Osen, Adrian Fry, Robert Schechter and John Whitworth. Star of the show is Alan Millard, who pockets the extra fiver. His fellow winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each. You lying toad!

In Competition No. 2729 you were invited to recast a well-known nursery rhyme, filtering it through the lens of a recent news story. Josh Ekroy was on fine form: ‘Liam had a little friend/ his suit was white as snow/ and everywhere that Liam went/ his friend was sure to go.’ In a strong entry, honourable mentions also go to Mae Scanlan, Katie Mallett and Noel Petty. The winners get £20 each. The extra fiver is Mike Morrison’s. Mary, Mary, ordinary In décolletage, Thought, ‘Such tedium being medium, Why not plump for large?

In Competition No. 2728 you were asked to provide a parody, with a Christmas connection, of a living British writer with an international reputation. The assignment invited you to follow in the mighty footsteps of Max Beerbohm, whose talent for parody few have matched. His A Christmas Garland, whose centenary falls this year, is considered one of the finest collections of parodies ever written in English, and on its publication reviewers agreed that not only had he captured the styles of his subjects but appeared to have gained ‘temporary loan of their minds’ too. A tough act to follow, then. Derek Morgan, G.M. Davis, David Mackie, Shirley Curran and Chris O’Carroll impressed, but first prize goes to Alan Millard. His fellow winners get £25 each.