Competition

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 assumed that subtlety would get lost and the absurder the better: the anachronisms were more larded in than dusted on. I especially liked Janine Beacham’s vision of Henry VIII enjoying a strawberry gelato while he ‘considered a dalliance with that most charming teenaged babe, Catherine Howard’. Profound thanks to all who entered, and here are the winners. ‘OMG!’ cried pretty Nell Gwyn. ‘I didn’t see Your Maj hiding down there.

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.

For Competition 3391 you were invited to submit one of Keats’s odes rewritten as a sonnet or a limerick. Four out of the five odes composed by Keats in the spring of 1819 feature in the winning line-up, as does ‘To Autumn’, written in September of that year. Once again there were many more winners than we have space for. A consolatory pat on the back to unlucky losers Benedict King, Duncan Forbes, Gail White, John Redmond, Jennifer Zhou, Iain Morley, David Cram and Mark Brown. The winners below earn a £25 John Lewis voucher. It’s autumn, harvest-time, maturing sun, Cue mellow fruitfulness, soft mists and bees, Things ooze, swell, ripen, overflow and run, Plump, sweet and sticky, plopping off the trees.

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 Salah diving;/ Texting while driving/ VAR’). Also to Sylvia Fairley, Nicholas Lee, Bill Greenwell and others. Sue Pickard channelled the true spirit of Groucho by keeping it general: I am the very model of a modern-day contrarian If you are a sophisticate then I’ll be a vulgarian Whatever your opinions are, mine are antithetical I was determined from an early age to be heretical. The winners below get the £25 vouchers.

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 ‘Mars-a-Lago, where namby-pamby accommodation is a thing of the past; where you can hang out with your backwoods pals, eat baked-bean tablets and grow a beard’. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Kay had ‘two enviable corner plots … with magnificent views of the glorious Prekrasny Putin, previously known as Olympus Mons’.

For Competition 3388 you were invited to submit a poem written from the point of view of a prepper. While the topic of this challenge was a bit of a downer, the standard of your poems – inventive, sad and funny – was cheering. I was sorry not to be able to fit in Chris O’Carroll’s nod to the Beatles: ‘We’re the Ardent Preppers’ Chance Stockpile Band…’ and David Silverman’s twist on Masefield’s Cargoes: Wrinkle-cream of Nivea on discount offer: Packed, for life on sunny Exoplanet 59, With box sets of Homeland, Line of Duty, Game of Thrones and Last of the Summer Wine. There were near-misses, too, for Bill Greenwell and Nicholas Hodgson, but the £25 John Lewis vouchers go to those below.

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 and narrative shifts,” she thought, “I need a nap”’) and Basil Ransome-Davies’s rendering of stream of consciousness (‘newspaper vendors at Piccadilly Circus, pigeons marooned in roof space, university architects, pistachio ice cream in a Viennese café… What made her wonder if Mr Carraway was Mr Gatsby’s petit ami like that mad young French poet?’); also Sue Pickard, Sylvia Fairley, Joseph Houlihan and others. The £25 vouchers go to those below.

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, Paul Freeman and others, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s final verse seems apt: It’s hard to read a mind in disrepair Or one as shiny and airtight as chrome: Two four-year tenants, signally aware That an official house is not a home. The £25 vouchers go to the winners below. Clean, baby, clean. That place is full of germs and foreign little microbe-alien things. I want it pure for all my future terms, bright as the hope my MAGA-presence brings.

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 real potential. Lady Chatterley’s Mellors rendez-vous’d once with Lorelei Lee and twice with Clarissa Dalloway: it was hard to choose. Sadly I had to disallow Mrs Mala-prop’s encounter with Revd Spooner (‘too late, I understood what he’d meant by a “nosy little cook”’). Her other date was with Holden Caulfield (‘Golden Cornfield?’).

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). These days individuals who use ritual to ward off misfortune are told they have OCD.

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 hard to whittle down. I liked Bill Greenwell’s prankster alien: ‘Staid the nihgt on Manhattan, enjoyd the screeming, skyscapers were a pushover.’ Jonathan White’s extraterrestrial dug jazz (‘an audible chaos I could resonate with’) while Mark Ambrose’s was amused by Earthlings believing Stonehenge to be manmade: ‘Some of the ancient stones from Kalibor’s moon have fallen down, but you can still make out the first landing site.

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 the End of Life bill become law?’ The £25 prizes go to the following. I never liked the Christmas crowd, Carolling all and sundry. A January man, and proud, My feast day is Blue Monday, Which I keep rather as a fast, Doing no holidaying, I work, like others of the past Whose debts required paying. No offices need I perform, I work all day. Come evening, I sit home, hopeless, far from warm, Devout yet unbelieving.

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 than reinvent it, but the lines blurred sometimes. Among those deserving a mention: D.A. Prince’s idea to reposition the National Trust as a body that looks after wild coastlines and historic houses etc, which seemed like a crowd-pleaser. Basil Ransome-Davies took over Liz Truss’s PR (‘It’s irony, stupid.

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 Hamish Wilson offered a set of unlikely scenarios: ‘Putin bangs the drum for peace,/ Pearson joins the woke police.’ Hats off also to Jasmine Jones, Joseph Houlihan, Frank McDonald, Brians Murdoch and Allgar, Tracy Davidson and others. I wish you all a happy new year, and let it be one in which WW3 and Antipodean fleas etc don’t feature.

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 toes, robin’s beak and snowman’s nose.’ A few gave meal plans rather than recipes, but George Simmers’s J. Alfred Prufrock deserves to be quoted anyway: In the room the ladies come and go, Preparing to watch The Gruffalo.

In Competition 3378, you were invited to give the full 18th-century, mock-heroic, rhyming-couplets treatment to any trivial recent event. Whether this was applied to news stories or more personal minor tragedies, the standard was remarkably high, with near misses for Alan Millard, Max Ross, Elizabeth Kay, Jasmine Jones and others. It was also striking just how many Spectator readers are impressively knowledgeable fans of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! The following win £25. As burnish’d russet fruit of spreading trees Burst from their spiny nests across the leas, Heroes were pitched in combat, ever bent On triumph in a momentous world event. For hark! The clash of conkers filled the air; Who dealt the mightiest blows, attacked with flair?

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, but a desert of oblivion interrupted only by stone Trumps seemed too unremitting. The mood could be downbeat, so for some light relief here’s a snatch of Janine Beacham’s entry: ‘My name is Kardashian, Queen of Bling:Look on my bod, yearn for my derriere!’No followers remain. No downloads play,Despite research, high tech, we’ve not one prayerOf knowing what this colossus had to say.

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 hi-fi,LP racks and shagpile and chakra batik,These are what passed for Seventies chic. As does David Blakey’s light verse: That rocket lamp’s no longer mine.I can’t remember what I did.But I’ve seen one for sale onlineFor almost seven hundred quid. There was a suggestion of Betjeman in many of the entries (‘Are the requisites all in the toilet?’). Among other noteworthies were Jayne Osborn, Tracy Davidson, C.

In Competition 3375 you were invited to submit an extract in which P.G. Wodehouse had a go at writing Raymond Chandler noir. Sad – and perhaps slightly pedantic – to report, quite a few entrants got this the wrong way round, writing Wodehouse’s material in a Chandler style, with references to hot dames at the Drones club etc. Some of these were admittedly very good but as The Spectator takes a stern line on the importance of reading the question, the following win £25 each. ‘Well done helping me sort that one out, Jeeves. The cops have arrested the chap with the face like an off-colour watermelon, and so Lydia won’t be going to the chair. More to the point, she seems to have given up on the idea that we are engaged.

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 this from Anca Gramaticu: ‘a flock of leaves took their flight/ In a roar of applause’. Finally, there’s just space for Daniel Galef’s poem in full: ‘The first leaf that falls –/ That takes balls.’ Those below win £25. Supposing autumn to be a country doctorIn his vintage russet car and wholemeal tweeds,Prescribing to both plutocrat and pauper.