Competition

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2688 you were invited to submit a short story incorporating six book titles. A deceptively straightforward assignment, this one. It is trickier than you might think to weave titles into prose in a way that is both unstilted and inventive — without compromising the quality of the tale. There was no upper limit on the number of book titles used and many of you seemed hellbent on packing in as many as possible, which didn’t gain any extra points, I’m afraid. Commendations to J. Seery, Pete Ritchie and Geoff Muss. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. Frank McDonald scoops £30.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2687 you were invited to take a well-known poem, change one letter in the first line and continue the poem for up to a further 15 lines. Oh, for more space to do justice to a truly stellar postbag! It was agony whittling the entry down to just six. Deserving of a standing ovation at the very least are Robert Schechter, Gillian Ewing, John Whitworth, Iain Crawford, Chris O’Carroll, George Simmers, David Silverman and Martin Parker. The winners get £25 each, except Basil Ransome-Davies, who gets £30. She lied in the upstairs bedroom till she thought her tongue would bleed; he was halfway wise, but he bought her lies with the currency of need.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2686 you were invited to submit a love letter from one fictional character to another. An entertaining postbag included this endearingly cack-handed overture from Bridget Jones to Rochester: ‘the word is you are sex on legs, and I’ve been rather short in that department lately. Well, for a bloody long time. Ever get depressed and want to do tons of smoking, drinking and comfort eating?’ (Basil Ransome-Davies). And this touching attempt by Long John Silver to woo Miss Havisham: ‘Though ’tis true there be as many women as fish in the sea, there’s none matchin’ you, nor another as stirs up such great expectations in me.’ (Alan Millard).

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2685 you were invited to submit a marital dialogue in verse. The scene set was one of interspousal disharmony: a domestic hell peopled by a familiar cast of nagging frigid wives and long-suffering, emotionally disengaged husbands. Not much ammo there for the pro-marriage lobby, then. Tim Raikes, Bill Greenwell and Josephine Boyle were only narrowly eclipsed by the winners, printed below, who are rewarded with £25 each. Max Ross nabs the extra fiver. Shall I compare thee to a summer day? No, no — I need to sleep. No time for play. Then, dear, make me immortal with a kiss. I told you I’m too tired. Don’t take the piss. You walk in beauty like the night, I think. Please go to sleep.

In Competition No. 2684 you were invited to take a well-known literary figure and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. Some of you interpreted ‘literary figure’ as a fictional character; others as an author. Either was acceptable. You were all so good this week that it was difficult to whittle down what was a larger-than-usual entry to just six, so congratulations all round. The winners earn £25 each. George Simmers gets £30. Dear Uncle DHL. There is a pleasant young lady in accounts, whom I wish to invite to the firm’s Christmas ‘do’. What should I say to her?   Say little.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2683 you were invited to submit a sequel to ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’. Lear himself left fragments of one, the delightful if tear-jerking ‘The Children of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat’, a tale of premature death and penury. Yours, too, were mostly stories of unhappily-ever-after, though their wit and charm made me smile through the tears. J.C.H. Mounsey, Frank Osen and Sylvia Fairley narrowly missed the cut. The winners get £25 each, and £30 goes to Alan Millard. The Owl and the Pussy-Cat sailed away From the land where the Bong-tree grows, And gave not a fig for the poor Piggy-wig Who was left with a hole through his nose.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition. In Competition No. 2682 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of a Shakespearean character who has woken up to find him or herself transported to the present day. John O’Byrne, Frank Osen, Gillian Ewing and Josephine Boyle impressed this week but top honours go to George Simmers, who nets £30. His fellow winners, also printed below, get £25 each. Next week’s competition slot will be given over to a celebration of the 2,000th crossword so the results of Competition 2683, After the Dance, will appear in the issue dated 12 February. Indeed, Princess, ’tis a strange country we are in, for though this be Forest Gate by all the signs, yet see I no forest, nor no gate neither.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2681 you were invited to submit a treble clerihew about a public figure who was prominent in 2009 or 2010. Jaspistos, who ran a similar competition some years ago, noted that it was E.C. Bentley’s son, the author and illustrator Nicolas Bentley, who invented the double clerihew form. Examples of the treble are difficult to track down; my predecessor was breaking new ground with this assignment. Honourable mentions to John O’Byrne and Frank Osen. Shorter entries mean space for more winners this week. Those printed below are rewarded with £20 each. W.J. Webster storms home with the bonus fiver for the second week in a row. Bravo!

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2680 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem of which the first letter of each line spells out the words Happy New Year. This challenge elicited a whopping entry, and there were plenty of unfamiliar names among the regulars, which is always pleasing. You were under no obligation to exude optimism and goodwill; indeed, with a few notable exceptions, those valiant souls that did attempt to inject a note of cheer failed to convince. Most didn’t bother to try, though, and Bernadette Evans’s closing couplet encapsulates the general gloomy tenor of the entry: As politicians wonder if we’re happy, Reality suggests the future’s crappy.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2679 you were invited to usher in the New Year with a teetotallers’ drinking song. As usual with this sort of challenge, many that read well on the page didn’t lend themselves to being sung aloud. But an impressive entry yielded some rousing and not unpersuasive calls to shun the liquid devil. Their authors of the following earn £25 each while Ray Kelley nabs £30. In the instructions for Competition 2681 the year should have read 2010. Figures from either 2009 or 2010 will be acceptable. Charge your pannikin with water, Toast in springsprung H2O Staunch Aquarius, transporter Of the finest drink we know.

In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. It was a smallish and somewhat lacklustre entry, possibly owing to the earlier-than-usual deadline. But I warmed to D.A. Prince’s Lord Voldemort: ‘Get him; just get him. Then the series will be over’, and was amused by Chris O’Carroll’s Edward Hyde, ‘Be myself’, and Bill Greenwell’s Count Dracula: ‘Get a life’. Gerard Benson, meanwhile, kept it brief on behalf of Bill Sikes: ‘No more Mr Nice Guy!’ There is a distinctly Dickensian feel to the winners’ enclosure.

Lucy Vickery resents this week's competition In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas. The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the torture of office parties — among much else. Commendations to W.J. Webster, Chris O’Carroll and Shirley Curran. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece and the festive bonus fiver is Bill Greenwell’s. Happy Christmas!

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2676 you were invited to submit a reply to the poet from Wordsworth’s cuckoo or Keats’s nightingale. A huge entry yielded an entertaining parade of stroppy birds with a fine line in put-downs. While Wordsworth took the greatest punishment (deservedly, some might say) in terms of volume, the nightingales were on especially withering form. Everyone shone this week, but Jan D. Hodge, Catherine Tufariello, W.J. Webster, John Beaton and G.W. Tapper stood out and were unlucky losers. The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £25 apiece; George Simmers pockets the extra five pounds. Darkling I’ve listened, too, while you orate About my warbling till I’ve grown quite shirty.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2675 you were invited to submit a book-jacket blurb for a well-known work of fiction that is designed to be as off-putting as possible. You were on sparkling form all round this week, especially Marion Shore, Robert Schechter and John O’Byrne. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each and in a photo finish the bonus fiver goes to Chris O’Carroll by a nose. At last, a book that children and adults alike can turn to for a comprehensive analysis of the sexual mores and socio-economic paradigms that defined England in the 1930s. Mary Poppins is a stern young spinster employed by the Banks family (a name that alerts the reader to author P.L.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2674 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of Paul the Octopus, who died peacefully in his tank last month aged a respectable two-and-a-half. Paul was catapulted from the obscurity of an aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany to international celebrity when he accurately predicted the outcome of several World Cup matches. Commendations to Jerome Betts and Bill Greenwell. The bonus fiver is Noel Petty’s. His fellow winners get £25 each. Great Paul, the psychic octopus, is dead, His wisdom lost, locked in that mighty head. Eight times his art was tried, eight times it passed, Thus proving that the future is precast.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2673 you were invited to submit a pompous leader on a trivial subject. Among the topics that unleashed your inner Thunderer were the abuse of the ‘eight items or less’ lane in supermarkets (to say nothing of the lamentable confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’) and the plague of rubber bands visited on us by the Post Office. There is space only to congratulate Brian Murdoch, who gets £30. His fellow winners get £25 each. Most will pass in silence over the 40th anniversary next year of a blow struck — and still felt — at the very heart of the culture of the nation.

In Competition No. 2672 you were invited to disprove G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. In his essay ‘The Poet and the Cheese’ Chesterton himself takes steps to put this right, penning a sonnet to a Stilton cheese, which, as he acknowledges, contains ‘echoes’ of another well known poem: Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I — She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour... Ray Kelley, John Whitworth and George Simmers were unlucky losers, and while I was impressed by Clementine Travers’s Whitman pastiche the bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty by a whisker. His fellow winners pocket £30 each.

In Competition No. 2671 you were invited to submit a poem in which the rhymed ending of each line is a truncated word. This challenge invites you to follow in the footsteps of that master of light verse and lover of word-play Harry Graham, who, in his poem ‘Poetical Economy’, ‘found a simple plan/ Which makes the lamest lyric scan!’: When I’ve a syllable de trop, I cut it off, without apol.: This verbal sacrifice, I know, May irritate the schol.; But all must praise my dev’lish cunn. Who realise that Time is Mon. Honourable mentions to Jane Dards, Mae Scanlan, Paul Griffin and D.A. Prince, who were unlucky losers. The prizewinners, printed below, get a well-deserved £25 each while the bonus fiver belongs to Basil Ransome-Davies.

In Competition No. 2670 you were invited to catapult Mr Jingle into the 21st century and have him deliver an anecdote. Alfred Jingle, the lean, green-coated stranger, makes his first appearance in Chapter Two of The Pickwick Papers and immediately steals the show with his ‘lengthened string of ...broken sentences, delivered with extraordinary volubility...’ You captured him at his exhilarating and life-enhancing best, having him expound on, among much else, the joys of modern travel, the political and economic landscape, and the hell of out-of-town superstores (‘exhausted — very’.) As one competitor wrote: ‘Hoorah for Mr Jingle! Does any other character come zinging so instantly off the page?

In Competition No. 2669 you were invited to take one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies and recast it in the style of the author of your choice. This was an exceptionally strong field, with winners enough to fill several columns. Honourable mentions to G.M. Davis, Mary Holtby, Laura Garratt and Margaret Howell, and £30 each to those printed below. Catherine Tufariello bags the extra fiver. Miss Juliet Capulet, you are the sun, With that sheen on your skin and your braids half     undone! I’m a fool on a cliff, and you give me a shove— Is it any surprise that I’ve fallen in love?