Competition

In Competition No. 2504 you were invited to invent nine muses for the 21st century.It was left to you to decide which form to use, so variety was the order of the day. Some went for straightforward lists; others for verse. D.A. Prince kindly provided her line-up with symbols, but most didn’t. While the lion’s share of entrants had fun coming up with 21st-century names, William Danes-Volkov went out on a limb, sticking to the designations of the original nine but giving them new jobs, more fitting to the modern age.Bill Greenwell hit the spot with ‘Proactiviope, the muse of business memoranda and blue sky thinking’ as did Michael Saxby’s ‘Portia, the muse of fast motoring’. A commendation goes to Frank McDonald.

In Competition No. 2503 you were invited to supply new words for the British national anthem, to be sung to the original tune. Spain’s opposition leader Mariano Rajoy recently called for its anthem to be given words following complaints from athletes who were fed up with humming self-consciously or staring solemnly into the middle-distance while it was playing at major sporting events. The story prompted the Today programme to invite the poet Murray Lachlan Young to come up with new words for ‘God Save the Queen’ which would reflect our changing political society. His opening was pretty feeble: ‘On this Atlantic rock/ We do complain a lot/ And like a drink...’ And it didn’t get much better, which goes to show that this assignment was a challenging one.

In Competition No. 2502 you were invited to submit a review by a critic identifying the literary precursor(s) to a popular music star of your choice. I was originally going to stipulate that the entry be in the style of a rock critic to winkle out the hipsters among you (although Christopher Ricks, whom I pegged the comp. to, was coming at Dylan from the perspective of an academic). But unsure how much of a crossover there would be between the readership of The Spectator and that of the NME, I lost my nerve and plumped instead for ‘critic’, which seemed to cover all bases.

In a large entry you divided almost exactly equally between Pepyses and Pooters. I suppose that one of the differences between the two diarists was that Pepys was a ‘somebody’ who generally got things right while Pooter wasn’t and didn’t. Basil Ransome-Davies was spot-on — with Pooter flattered by lots of letters inviting him to become ‘a valued customer’ and offering him loans: ‘it is gratifying to know that I have a trustworthy reputation’. I also liked Peter Meldrum’s Pepys asking at the Admiralty about ‘our sailors captured in Persia’ — were they much hurt? ‘No, Sir, they are writing their diaries for publication.’ The winners below get £25 each while the extra fiver goes to Bill Greenwell.

In Competition No. 2500 you were invited to describe a modern-day Test match in the style of Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘breathless hush’ poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’.Summoned by the holidaying Dr Lucy to provide columnar cover, your locum tenens was initially worried that his prescription would not tick the right boxes, float enough boats. It was a big ask, but you played a blinder, whacking Sleazey, Sledgey, Streaky and that prat Silly Fancy-Dressy all round the park. Best entries were the 24-liners, which adapted the poet’s conceit of cricket as metaphor for the Great Game of war and indeed life itself (one can’t imagine such stuff being written after 1914).

In Competition No. 2499 you were invited to submit a poem eulogising a pet.It was not only Dr Johnson’s Hodge who inspired this assignment; credit, too, goes to Jeoffry, immortalised by Christopher Smart in ‘For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry’ from ‘Jubilate Agno’: ‘...For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature./ For he is tenacious of his point./ For he is a misture of gravity and waggery./...’A rather more unusual pet, belonging to the bohemian poet Gérard de Nerval, was brought to life by Bill Greenwell.

In Competition No. 2498 you were invited to submit a speech by one of our newly ‘emotional literate’ politicians unveiling a piece of legislation and incorporating the following words: ‘dysfunctional’, ‘narrative’, ‘empower’, ‘co-dependent’, ‘holistic’, ‘self-actualisation’, ‘closure’. The traditional ministerial waffle of government policy documents now has a new ingredient as politicians vie with each other to feel our pain, threatening to drown us in an ocean of empathy. David Cameron’s much-mocked ‘Hug a hoodie’ slogan is but one example.

As a teenager I devoured, in private and with a tinge of shame, my local library’s entire collection of Mills & Boon, so it was a relief to discover that, according to a recent survey conducted on behalf of the Costa Book Awards, 85 per cent of us have a guilty-secret author whose work we read avidly but never in public. Perhaps there are some closet Jilly Cooper fans out there; some of you made a mightily convincing stab at taking off the queen of the racy romp. I liked Tom Durrheim’s Violet Elizabeth swooning over William’s ‘hard magnetism: the square shoulders, the tousled hair, the glittering eyes that twinkled with eternal mischief’, and J. Seery’s saucy Romeo. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. W.J.

In Competition no. 2496 you were invited to submit a short story whose final line is ‘Sir, when I heard of him last he was running about town shooting cats.’ The challenge was to make this extract — from a passage in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson about the Doctor’s beloved cat Hodge — follow on convincingly from the rest of the story rather than appearing to be tacked awkwardly on to the end. The standard was disappointing; a lot of entries stormed along promisingly only to falter badly at the final hurdle. Liz Childs played a blinder, though, and is a worthy recipient of the bonus fiver. I’m reliably informed that her story is packed with in-jokes for physicists. The other prizewinners, printed below, get £30 each.

In Competition 2495 you were invited to submit a poem establishing the principles of a new religion. This competition was inspired by Larkin’s ‘Water’: My liturgy would employImages of sousing,A furious devout drench... A lot of entries were slightly gloomy satire recommending the twin creeds of selfishness and shopping. Commendations to Barbara Smoker and G.M. Davis, and to Moyra Blyth for her paean to the carrot, but the winning poems are printed below. The prizewinners each receive £30, and the bonus fiver goes to D.A. Prince. My faithful ones, our principles must beBoth carbon-neutral and pure, GM-free.No living creature should be harmed (though germsMay be exempted, as any gastric worms).

In competition no. 2494 you were invited to submit a poem written by a hypochondriac about a minor ailment.Many of you alluded to the fact that the internet is fertile hunting-ground for the hypochondriac, providing limitless scope for self-diagnosis. Cyberchondria sends hordes of the worried well to their GPs brandishing wads of incontrovertible downloaded ‘evidence’. What hypochon-driacs crave above all else, of course, is vindication. To doubting doctors, spouses, friends and family, the message rang out loud and clear: ‘You’ll be sorry...’ — or, as the epitaph on Spike Milligan’s gravestone reads, ‘I told you I was ill’.The winners, printed below, get £30 each. The bonus fiver goes to a restrained W.J.

In Competition no. 2493 you were invited to take a famous scene from literature and retell it from the point of view of one of its minor characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were plucked by Tom Stoppard from the chorus line and catapulted into the limelight with dazzling results. A lot of you followed Stoppard down the Hamlet route, but tended to veer uneasily into dodgy cod-Shakespearean territory. While many went for pastiche, others, like Adrian Fry with his account of Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party filtered through the covetous eyes of Otho Sackville-Baggins, steered clear of the voice of the original author. Brian Murdoch’s take on Lucky Jim Dixon’s ‘Merrie England’ speech was impressive but the extra fiver goes to Bill Greenwell.

In competition No. 2492 you were invited to write a piece of prose entitled ‘Irritable Vowel Syndrome’, without using the letter ‘u’. This assignment should have been a piece of cake. After all, the wild and woolly Frenchman Georges Perec wrote a whopping 300-page novel, La Disparition, without using a single ‘e’. What’s more, Gilbert Adair translated it into ‘e’-free English — an heroic feat. There was no getting away from Nancy Mitford this week, who popped up in lots of entries, including that of bonus-fiver recipient W.J. Webster. The other winners, printed below, net £25 apiece. ‘Open wide and say “Ah”.’‘I don’t have a problem with my R’s, Doctor. It’s the old I.O.

In Competition No. 2491 you were invited to submit a piece of prose describing what happens when you wake up one morning to find yourself transformed into an insect but not a beetle. Beetles were outlawed so that you weren’t scribbling quite so much in Kafka’s shadow. But in fact, the correct translation of Ungeziefer is vigorously disputed. In his lecture on The Metamorphosis Nabokov insisted that Gregor Samsa’s new incarnation was not as a cockroach, as it is sometimes rendered, but as a ‘big beetle’ with wings, capable of flight had he but known it. The more generous than usual wordcount means fewer winners. G.

In Competition No. 2490 you were invited to give an account of the life of a historical figure condensed into seven days. The assignment was inspired by a 19th-century nursery rhyme which tells the bleak tale of Solomon Grundy, who was born on a Monday and apparently dead by Sunday. It struck terror into me as a child, having the tone of a cautionary tale but giving no discernible clue as to what SG might have done to deserve such a grim fate. Of course I know now that it’s a riddle, stupid. The standard was exceptionally high, and it was a struggle to whittle it down to just six. The bonus fiver, though, goes to Basil Ransome-Davies. The other prizewinners, printed below, get a well-deserved £25 each. Friday, April 13, 1906. Born astride the grave in Foxrock. Why Foxrock?

In Competition No. 2489 you were invited to submit a poem with the title ‘In Praise of Slow’. In Praise of Slow is a book by Carl Honoré, a chronicler of the Slow Movement, whose philosophy is that the important things in life should not be rushed.The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 apiece. Honoré would no doubt approve of the take-a-chill-pill spirit of Dorothy Pope, whose entry had the following footnote: ‘emails retrieved only on Sundays’. Hear, hear. The extra fiver, though, goes to Adrian Fry. The rhyme of ‘fjords’ with ‘Lords’ works well, as does the teasing reference to Auden’s ‘Night Mail’; Fry’s expansive ‘glacial pace’ contrasting with Auden’s careering rhythm.

In competition No. 2488 you were invited to write a publisher’s press release for one of the following: Weeds in a Changing World; Bombproof your Horse; How Green were the Nazis?. The assignment was inspired by the contest for the Oddest Book Title of the Year, run since 1978 by the Bookseller. Bombproof your Horse (helpfully subtitled: Teach your Horse to Be Confident, Obedient, and Safe No Matter What You Encounter), a serious manual for equestrians by Rick Pelicano and Lauren Tjaden which sells a steady 400 copies a month, stormed to victory in 2004. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 a piece.

In Competition No. 2487 you were invited to submit a theatrical critic’s response to a production of a modern play in ancient costume. There were easy laughs to be had at the expense of ropy chitons and inadequate loincloths and in general you took a harsh line. Most of you set your jaundiced sights on productions of works by just a few (Pinter, Osborne and Coward loomed large). None, though, scaled the scornful heights of Kenneth Tynan’s much-quoted take on Gielgud in modern dress, whom he described as having ‘the general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella’. A more or less lone chorus of approval came from W.J. Webster, who nets the bonus fiver. The other prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each.

In Competition No. 2486 you were invited to submit a retrospective verse comment from the other world on the assassination by Caesar or by one of the conspirators. Most of you chose to put yourself in Caesar’s bloodied sandals, consigning the conspirators to the sidelines, which they would have hated. Adam Campbell was pithy and to the point:Talk about being stabbed in the back!Nasty way of getting the sack.The prizewinners, printed below, scoop £25 each. The extra fiver goes to D.A Prince, who used some nice half rhymes. I particularly liked ‘whine’ with ‘Elysium’, the rhyme and the meaning working together in a very satisfying way.

In Competition No. 2485 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ The standard of the entry was mixed, but none was worthy of the mockery heaped on Anthony Trollope’s novel of the same name by Punch, which, infuriated by the indecisiveness of the heroine Alice Vavasor, referred to it as ‘Can You Stand Her?’ Henry James wasn’t much of a fan of Alice either, reputedly remarking that he could ‘forget her too, for that matter’. The unforgettable prizewinners, printed below, get £35 each. Hats off to Peter Smalley’s beguiling if bemusing Pinteresque two-hander, but the bonus fiver goes to Brian Murdoch’s compromised priest. *** ‘Father,’ came the whisper. ‘I need a quick favour.