Competition

‘What we have to facilitate is a bottom-up approach.’ In Competition No. 2464 you were invited to provide a specimen of ministerial waffle. ‘What we have to facilitate is a bottom-up approach.’ When I heard those words come out of the mouth of Ruth Kelly (could she really have been Secretary of State for Education?), I knew we had a competition. I am grateful to Virginia Price Evans for drawing my attention to ‘bafflegab’, defined in Chambers as ‘the professional logorrhoea of many politicians, officials and salespeople, characterised by prolix, abstract circumlocution and/or a profusion of abstruse technical terminology used as a means of persuasion, pacification or obfuscation.’ Dr Johnson rides again!

In Competition No. 2463 you were invited to incorporate in a piece of plausible prose examples of the following terms: oxymoron, personification, simile, hyperbole, archaism, periphrasis, solecism, paronomasia, alliteration, epizeuxis. My apologies for having misspelt ‘paronomasia’ in setting the comp. At least it gave Mike Lunan the chance to launch a mocking epizeuxis combined with alliteration at me: ‘Paranomasia, paranomasia? You stupid son of a simpleton, it’s not spelt like that.’ Five of you misread the instructions and incorporated the terms themselves instead of examples of them, with very strange results.

In Competition No. 2462 you were given the lines, ‘A man so various that he seemed to be/ Not one prime minister but twenty-three ...’ (a rejig of Dryden’s famous couplet) and asked to continue. Dryden’s Zimri, the various man who ‘in the course of one revolving moon/ Was  chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon’, is a caricature of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, who killed in a duel the Earl of Shrewsbury, while the countess, Buckingham’s lover, watched, disguised as a page. The incident is commemorated at Cliveden, where it happened, by flowers arranged in the shape of crossed swords, with the date 1667. The standard this week was exceptionally high, and judging accordingly difficult.

In Competition No. 2461 you were invited to think up Seven Deadly Virtues and to mock them in verse. Chastity and sobriety and political correctness were obvious Aunt Sallies. Michael Saxby gave a wise warning against honesty: ‘Thus “Does my bum look big in this?” will land one in a mess/ Unless one says, “Of course not, dear” when really one means “Yes!”’, while Mike Morrison derided ‘the heinous vice/ Of being so insufferably nice’. The notion of the Seven Deadly Virtues, by the way, comes from George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man, which strikes a lot of attitudes but also hits a great many nails on the head. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Martin Woodhead.

In Competition No. 2460 you were invited to submit a short story with the title ‘The Man Who Did Not’. This assignment gave you the opportunity to step into the shoes of the doomed young writer Konstantin in The Seagull (though, given his fate, you’d perhaps have chosen not to). Konstantin’s Uncle Sorin suggests the title of a short story which reeks of frustrated dreams and failed lives. In the Martin Crimp version now running at the National it is rendered as ‘The Man Who Did Not’, while Michael Frayn, in his adaptation, translates it as ‘The Man Who Wanted To’, which strikes me as marginally less bleak. The standard of the entry, though, was far from depressing. The prizewinners, printed below, get £30 each.

In Competition No. 2458 you were invited to disprove Chesterton’s assertion that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’. I meant disprove by your own efforts, not disprove historically, but either approach was acceptable. Belloc waxed lyrical on the subject in an essay, ‘In Praise of Cheese’, and the American writer Clifton Fadiman happily described it as ‘milk’s leap towards immortality’, but it was left to you to represent the poets. Among your recommendations were some strangers to me: Havarti, Geitost, Caboc (a double-cream cheese wrapped in oatmeal) and, most romantic, ‘the truckle from Appledore’. Commendations to Doris Davies.

In competition No. 2457 you were invited to offer a poem entitled ‘The Picnic’. The picnics of my youth in Surrey were enjoyable but slightly suburban — Newlands Corner, Chobham Common and so on — but never as suburban as Tony Goldman’s Betjeman-inspired picnic, which ended up with him ‘silent upon a peak in Godalming’. Later I discovered the joys of Pyrenean dingles with secret meadows dotted with natural tables of smooth rock. Nowadays I prefer my tables less natural. Your picnics veered between the halcyon déjeuner sur l’herbe and the sodden disaster.

In Competition No. 2456 you were invited to supply a poem lamenting the degeneration of the traditional English pub.The ideal pub in literature is surely the Potwell Inn, that Kentish riverside paradise where H.G. Wells’s Mr Polly found contentment at last with his pint and his punt and his plump landlady. I used to like some pubs; now I loathe them all, and I got the impression that you share my disillusionment. If you want no music, no game machines and no mobiles allowed, there’s only one pub I know in central London to go to — but you’ll have to pay through the nose for your drink. My advice is, drink at home, where you can hear yourself think. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Watson Weeks.

In Competition No. 2455 you were invited to incorporate a dozen given words, all beginning with b, into a plausible piece of prose. The given words were on the surface less testing than usual, but that was only to lure you into the trap of the too obvious. Cleverclogs, like Jeremy Chilcott and L.E. Betts, who managed it in half the maximum number of words lost in entertainment what they gained in brevity, even though they impressed me. David Jones, Andrew Brison and W.J. Webster were all close to the money. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Alan Millard earns the extra fiver for his Cumbrian fantasy.

In competition No. 2453 you were given beginning and ending words and invited to supply a short story within them. The given words were the opening and closing sentences of a story by V. S. Pritchett entitled ‘The Evils of Spain’, with one small difference: owing to a misprint, Pritchett’s ‘Angel’, a male, became our ‘Angela’.  It contains a delightful moment: ‘The proprietor said: “M’sieu, whether you were drowned or not drowned this morning you are about to be roast. The hotel is on fire.’’’ Commendations to Alanna Blake, Patrick O’Byrne and Richard Ellis. The prize-winners, printed below, get £25 each and the bonus fiver is awarded to G. M. Davis. We took our seats at the table.

In Competition No. 2452 you were invited to write an elegy on the death, in Queensland, Australia, of a 176-year-old tortoise called Harriet, who had met Darwin in the Galapagos Islands and was for most of her life wrongly thought to be male. D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore and Ogden Nash have all written lyrically about tortoises, so you were in good company. As for Harriet (whose parents were Testudo and Tartarus and whose favourite snacks were aubergine, courgette, beans and barley), a biologist tells me that it’s not as simple as you might think to tell the sex of a tortoise. Just try it! I realise now that my childhood tortoise Zebedee may well have been a Zuleika.

In Competition No. 2451 you were asked to imagine that two strangers have met through our column ‘The Love Bug’ and that both have simultaneously posted letters indicating that further meetings are not on. You were invited to provide both letters. Only once have I responded to a sex advertisement. As a result I found myself outside 231 Majuba Road in some suburb in a light drizzle. I was welcomed by a drab couple, who offered me Nescafé, after which I was invited to enjoy the wife on the rug in front of an electric fire while the husband photographed us from the next room. It was easy to decline, but difficult to find the right words for refusal. This week you were not as amusing as I’d hoped, though I continue to think that the comp was potentially uproarious.

In Competition No. 2450 you were invited to offer a poem, on any subject, in which the first letters of each line spell out MIDSUMMER NIGHT. It’s surprising how many people think that Midsummer’s Day is on 21 June. That is calendrically the longest day. The 24th, the feast day of St John the Baptist (and my birthday), is the true magical day of Shakespeare’s play; it is also, less happily, Quarter Day, when debts fall due and, as Keith Norman cheerfully tells me, along with Christmas the time of year when most suicides occur. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Paul Griffin for his poem entitled ‘Repertory’.

In Competition No. 2449 you were invited to provide an Alice in Wonderland-style conversation between two chess pieces, either in prose or in verse. Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de piqueCausent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.It was this wonderful image of Baudelaire’s that suggested to me the notion of a conversation between chess pieces. Among those of you who gave your entries a contemporary slant, I particularly enjoyed Tim Raikes’s lines: ‘But is that a man by the shrubs I can seeHaranguing a blooming camellia tree?’‘Now that...,’ said the Queen as she fingered her ring,‘That is my son, and he wants to be King.’The prizewinners, printed below, get £30 each, and the bonus fiver is John Whitworth’s.

In Competition No. 2448 you were invited to write a poem entitled ‘A Description of a City Shower’. The poet of rain is undoubtedly Hardy. His titles fairly drip with it — ‘A Wet August’, ‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’, ‘Rain on a Grave’ and, more to the point, ‘A Thunderstorm in Town’, which charmingly features a snatched kiss inside a hansom cab. I can’t resist quoting the last three lines from Swift’s poem with our title:Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.I expected ‘a City shower’ to be interpreted by some as a mob of unpleasant stockbrokers, and so it was.

In Competition No. 2447 you were invited to supply an imaginary extract from one of three real book titles: The Philosophy of Beards, Five Years of Hell in a Country Parish, Unmentionable Cuisine. The first title, by Thomas S. Gowing, was published in Ipswich by J. Haddock c. 1850; the second, by the Revd Edward Fitzgerald Synnott, published in 1920, describes the torments of a vicar in the parish of Rusper in West Sussex which end in his being acquitted of charges of impropriety; the third, by Calvin W. Schwabe, contains, among others, recipes for silkworm omelette and red ant chutney. The second title failed to elicit much entertainment from you, with the honourable exception of Bill Greenwell, so I have confined the prizewinning entries, printed below, to the two other titles.

In Competition No. 2446 you were invited to provide a poem with the title of ‘The Danger of Queer Hats’. There are one or two queer hats in literature, like the one worn by Lear’s Old Man in the Kingdom of Tess, which was ‘a loaf of brown bread, in the middle of which he inserted his head’; or the one shared by Chesterton’s two friends who companionably smoked the same cigar underneath it. Dangerous hats are a different matter. Apart from some desperate puns — ‘bodyline bowlers’ and ‘poisonous berets’ — your hats were odd rather than lethal except for Shirley Curran’s judge’s black cap, ‘the real one to dread,/ For the day that he dons it he tells you, “You’re dead.

In Competition No. 2445 you were given a dozen words and invited to incorporate them, in any order, in a plausible piece of prose, using them in a non-snooker sense. Despite the fact that occasionally someone writes to complain that this is a boring type of comp, this week’s entry was the largest ever, nigh on 200. To avoid an outbreak of salaciousness I deliberately denied you the chance to use screw as well as kiss in a non-snooker sense, and the result was refreshingly clean and various. Among those who delighted me with their ingenuity I single out Noel Petty, Robert Kingston, Mae Scanlan and G.M. Davis. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Derek Morgan for a seemingly effortless episode of domestic banality. ‘Kiss me, Gerald.

In Competition No. 2444 you were invited to offer two stanzas in the metre and rhyme-scheme of Byron’s ‘Don Juan’, making fun of one or more of the Labour party’s present embarrassments. ‘Never,’ said Charles Seaton, my predecessor, when he passed on the sacred baton, ‘give them a political subject. They get too hot under the collar to be funny.’ How wrong he was! Congratulations not only on being amusing but also on handling the challenging ottava rima with verve and skill. Moyra Blyth and Ray Kelley deserve better than to be runners-up. The winners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty. For Charles, the warning bells began to chime.

In Competition No. 2441 (wrongly numbered 2443) you were invited to choose a title of a well-known work of fiction and write an amusing poem with the same title. This gave rise to much comic lateral thinking. Esther Waters featured the hosepipe ban, Scoop followed a dog on a walk, Orwell’s title was transmuted into a rugby disaster: ‘Our side lost 19–84’, I was informed that ‘finnegans wake at half-past ten’ and told of Howard’s gory end. Godfrey Bullard and Bill Greenwell are unlucky runners-up. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Noel Petty runs away with the bonus fiver.