Competition

In Competition 2627 you were invited to submit a rhyming prophecy for 2010. The entry was short on optimism but bursting with wit and ingenuity. Hats off to Mae Scanlan, a more-or-less lone Pollyanna in a sea of Cassandras, who foresees global peace and economic prosperity. She narrowly missed out on joining the winners, printed below. It’s £25 each and an extra £5 to Noel Petty. Happy New Year! January opens sunny, Bankers vote for parsimony, BBC sacks Ross (‘not funny’), Burmese colonels all resign. Waving fields of green shoots sighted, City overtake United, Ferguson says ‘Great! Delighted!’, Climate change declared benign.   GDP continues palmy, Scientists turn back tsunami, Afghans form a model army, Taleban apologise.

In Competition No. 2626 you were invited to submit a thank-you letter for an especially hideous or inappropriate present, which manages to be diplomatic while fending off future offerings along the same lines. A respondent to a BBC poll on ungratefully received Christmas presents was given a ‘handsome but visibly used hair comb’ by an eccentric if well-meaning relative. One can only imagine his efforts to shoehorn his features into the appropriate blend of delight and gratitude. It helps, of course, if the giver of the gift is not present for the unveiling, but this still leaves the thorny problem of the thank-you letter. Which is where you come in. The entry was a masterclass in tact and diplomacy. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition 2625 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of any well-known person named John (a real person, living or dead, or a character from literature). The verse tributes poured in, to Johns I had heard of — Prescott, the Baptist, Donne — and those I had not: ‘John Harington, my jo, John,/ You’re a hero to my mind/ For inventing water closets,/ Great good for all mankind...’ (Josephine Boyle). R.S. Gwynn’s fine contribution was inspired by a multitude of Johns; from Braine and Wain to Lennon and Dryden. And snapping equally insistently at the heels of the winners were David Silverman, Janet Kenny, Sylvia Fairley, Mark Weeks and Susan McLean, with an uplifting celebration of John Thomas.

In Competition 2624 you were invited to submit a poem in the style of the legendary William Topaz McGonagall on an issue of contemporary relevance to the Scots. Hailed by the TLS as ‘the only truly memorable bad poet in our language’, McGonagall built his reputation on appalling yet beguiling works of inadvertent comic genius. Neither plagued by a lack of self-belief nor hampered by self-awareness, the handloom weaver from Dundee forged ahead with his art in the face of universal mockery and derision. He has had the last laugh, though: his star burns brightly still more than a century after his death. The sincerity of the original voice (which no doubt accounts for its considerable charm) is difficult to capture in parody.

In Competition 2623 you were invited to submit an extract from a novel or a play, of which one letter of the title had been changed, in the style of the original author. It was especially tough this week to whittle a large postbag down to just six. Oh, to have the space to share with readers the delights of The Drapes of Wrath, Finnegans Cake, Wailing for Godot and Lady Chatterley’s Liver. Well done, one and all. D.A. Prince shone with ‘Paradise Post’, but, as I stipulated a novel or a play, she is excluded from the winning line-up. It’s £25 each to the victors, and Alan Millard nabs the bonus fiver. Such was the variety to be observed from the esplanade shelter that, to Scabber Crout, none resembled another.

In Competition No. 2622 you were invited to submit a rhymed curse penned by a motorist on a cyclist, a cyclist on a pedestrian or a pedestrian on either. Reading the entry brought to mind a question once posed by Matthew Parris: ‘Does cycling turn you into an insolent jerk?’ ‘You bet it does!’ came the semi-unanimous chorus. A bracing stream of vitriol was directed mostly at cyclists, especially those who wear Lycra, though I no doubt let motorists off lightly by not giving the cycling brigade the opportunity to respond in kind to their fellow road-users. While Brian Murdoch, Basil Ransome-Davies, Paul Griffin and Martin Elster were unlucky losers, this week’s king of the road is D.A. Prince, who nabs the bonus fiver.

In Competition No. 2621 you were invited to invent a new magazine combining two existing publications and provide an extract from it. It was with great reluctance that I disqualified Josh Ekroy’s poignant portrait of an angst-ridden budgerigar. The publications in question had to be real ones, and energetic attempts to track down Existentialist Monthly and Your Budgie came to naught. In a strong field, Frank McDonald and W.J. Webster stood out; while Bill Greenwell’s synthesis of the phenomenally popular Take a Break — which invites readers to sell their stories of ‘love and betrayal, loss and sin’ — and Identity, the BNP house mag, had a pleasing ring of plausibility He and his fellow winners bag £30 each. The bonus fiver is Adrian Fry’s.

In Competition No. 2620 you were invited to submit an argument, in verse, for the superiority of one vegetable over another. It was Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the artichoke’ that got me thinking about the pecking order in the vegetable kingdom. Here’s a snippet: ‘The cabbage/ Dedicated itself/ To trying on skirts,/ The oregano/ To perfuming the world,/ And the sweet/ Artichoke/ There in the garden,/ Dressed like a warrior,/ Burnished/ Like a proud/ Pomegranate...’ In a bumper crop of entries Martin Parker impressed, as did Frank Osen, David Mackie, Ray Kelley, Robert Schechter and Juliet Walker. In fact, you were all on sparkling form. But there’s room for only six winners, who are rewarded with £25 each. W.J Webster gets £30.

In Competition No. 2619 you were invited to submit a short fable culminating in a mangled aphorism. The fabulous theme of this comp is a salute to Jaspistos, celebrated translator of fables, whose rendering of La Fontaine’s was deemed by the not-easily-pleased Geoffrey Grigson to have been unsurpassed, ‘earthier and sharper than Marianne Moore’s’. The assignment was also a somewhat backhanded tribute to that most exacting of forms, the aphorism, described by Auden and Louis Kronenberger, in their foreword to The Faber Book of Aphorisms, as ‘an aristocratic genre of writing’. There was a lot to live up to, then, which perhaps accounted for a lower than usual turnout and a patchy standard overall.

In Competition No. 2618 you were invited to submit a sequel to Betjeman’s ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’. As a native of the home counties — born in Aldershot, raised in Camberley — I have a soft spot for Betjeman’s muse, who imparted a touch of glamour to this unlovely part of the world. The real Joan Hunter Dunn, white-coated goddess of the catering dept ardently admired by Betjeman from afar at the Ministry of Information in the early 1940s, was tracked down by a journalist 20 years later. And her life was, it turns out, a continuation of the poem. There was euonymus in her garden in Headley, Hants, and Joan Jackson, as she rather prosaically became, was still nimble about the tennis court well into her forties.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2617 you were invited, in the wake of Big Brother’s demise, to submit a proposal for a new TV reality show guaranteed to pull in the punters. This assignment was an invitation to plumb the depths of bad taste. And plumb them you did. I winced as I waded through a postbag that incorporated all the hallmarks of reality TV: cruelty, banality, inanity, exploitation, voyeurism and abject humiliation. W.J. Webster’s entry, the epitome of awfulness, was couched in language that managed to combine cliché, political correctness and bogus compassion in a truly toxic brew.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2616 you were invited to continue Edward Lear’s self-portrait in verse — ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’ — or T.S. Eliot’s response — ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot’ — for a further 15 lines, substituting the name of the poet of your choice, or sticking to the originals if you preferred. Lear’s poem, and Eliot’s response, proved to be a fruitful starting point, prompting an avalanche of entries in which Larkin, Eliot and Pound made regular appearances and were mostly unpleasant to meet.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2615 you were invited to provide a lesson in the facts of life courtesy of Mrs Malaprop or the Revd William A. Spooner. This comp produced an especially enjoyable entry, highlights of which deserve to be shared. Here’s Brian Murdoch: ‘In these days, when over-copulation has become a purse, it is important that boys yearn about losing their bodies in a gay that is wood. I entreat all mean-age tales, though assailed by the pierce fashions of youth, to resist above all the surge towards elf-abuse’. Over now to Adrian Fry: ‘When you children grow up and experience presbytery, you’ll feel sectionally tractored to the opposing agenda.

In Competition No. 2614 you were invited to submit a press release by the tourist board of one of the following fictional holiday destinations: Lilliput; Wonderland; Oceania; Brave New World. The entry was split fairly evenly between the first three destinations, while the prospect of trying to entice visitors to what Huxley referred to as a ‘negative utopia’ left you cold. Well, not quite: a solitary cheerleader in the wilderness was Susan McLean, who made a spirited if ultimately unconvincing case for ‘a vacation from morality’. Lilliput and Wonderland were undoubtedly easier to sell than Oceania, but a doughty few pulled off the impressive feat of making Orwell’s totalitarian horrors sound like a compelling reason to book a trip.

In Competition No. 2613 you were invited to submit a cautionary tale for our times, in the style of Hilaire Belloc, about the consequences of too much time spent texting or on social networking sites. The grisly fates of Belloc’s creations — Jim, eaten feet upwards by a lion, and Mathilda, burnt to a crisp — both thrill and appal children. I remember being puzzled, though, by a moral universe in which Algernon, who narrowly fails in his attempt to shoot his sister with a loaded rifle, gets off with a light reprimand; while Rebecca, for the relatively innocuous crime of slamming doors, perishes miserably, flattened by a marble bust of Abraham.

In Competition No. 2612 you were invited to provide an extract from an issue of The Spectator from the year 2109. Back in the mid-1950s competitors were asked to look into their crystal balls and come up with content from The Spectator of 2080.  In the report on the results, they were sternly berated for a lack of inventiveness; Orwell and Wells casting a long shadow over the entry. Viewed from 1955, the future was somewhat soulless and monochrome, and we are no less pessimistic 60-ish years on, it seems. This time around the smallish postbag was cheering in its quality but spirit-dampening content-wise. I longed for a sliver of optimism amid the dystopian visions of post-apocalyptic social breakdown, remorseless dumbing-down and the death of grammar and spelling as we know it.

In Competition No. 2611 you were invited to provide a poem to be recited on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Thanks to Juliet Walker, who suggested this challenge: it was a popular one that drew a large and bracing entry. What is more, I was unaware when I set it that there is already a fully fledged plinther poet in our midst. George Simmers, a regular on these pages, took to the plinth at 1 a.m. on 6 August and recited his specially composed poem, which begins: ‘So. Here we are. Trafalgar Square./ And I’m up here and you’re down there...’. A statement on his webzine, Snakeskin, reports that Mr Simmers ‘was there, he thoroughly enjoyed himself, and he didn’t fall off’.  And, unlike some, he remained fully clothed. Mike Morrison, G.M.

In Competition No. 2610 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of the partner of a famous person, past or present. The puns came fast and furious this week. ‘I’ll make him a nice bombe for his tea tomorrow,’ writes Guy Fawkes’s other half (Juliet Walker), while Caligula’s long-suffering steed Incitatus (Frank McDonald laments that ‘...one can’t say neigh to an emperor’. But John Plowman took the biscuit. Francis Nisbet records an exchange with her husband Nelson about his purported infidelity: ‘I said he was in denial. He did admit he was — in Egypt.’ Ouch! Honourable mentions to Josh Ekroy for an entertaining account, courtesy of John Bercow’s wife, of a fraught trip to John Lewis.

In Competition No. 2608 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of adjectives. While the inspiration for last week’s challenge was a verb-hating French doctor of letters, this time around you can blame Ezra Pound. In The Spirit of Romance he states, ‘The true poet is most easily distinguished from the false, when he trusts himself to the simplest expression, and when he writes without adjectives.’ The entry was a spirited and magnificently unPoundian celebration of this oft-maligned part of speech. Commendations to Martin Parker and Melissa Balmain. They were narrowly squeezed out by the winners, below, who are rewarded with £30 apiece. The bonus fiver goes to Bill Greenwell.

In Competition No. 2607 you were invited to submit a piece of verbless prose (present participles used as adjectives or nouns were permissible). ‘Invaders, dictators, usurpers of our literature,’ boomed the French writer Michel Thaler in the preface to his verb-free novel Le train de nulle part, published in 2004. His hatred of the doing word was such that he organised a symbolic, and well-attended, burial ceremony for it at the Sorbonne. There was a revolutionary mood in the ranks this week, with mutterings in the entry about the pointlessness of this kind of challenge. But it did produce a lively and varied postbag that was a pleasure to judge. On particularly cracking form were David Silverman, Esdon Frost and Seree Zohar.