Competition

In Competition No. 2403 you were invited to supply a poem lamenting the fate of a famous person in which bathos is the keynote. Bathos, or unintentionally falling flat, implies a hoped-for height to fall from. A poet like McGonagall whose verse is consistently bad is pathetic rather than bathetic, whereas Wordsworth could drop hundreds of feet in seconds; witness the ‘Lucy’ poem which plunges fatally in the last two lines: ‘But she is in her grave, and Oh!/ The difference to me.’ In awarding the prizes I haven’t strictly applied the above distinction; in fact Gerard Benson’s entry never fell because it never tried to rise, but since it made me laugh on a glum day he is among the winners printed below.

In Competition No. 2402 you were invited to supply an imaginary example of the traditionally facetious, learned and topical last editorial article in a quality newspaper. ‘Aesop could have written this morality fable. And the millionaires who are not going to win the lottery tonight can comfort themselves with Schadenfreude, and the parable that life itself is a lottery.’ Last Saturday’s Times ‘fourth leader’ showed the genre still going strong. Why is it that I associate the style with a male — a retired teacher or an unfrocked clergyman, say? My mind’s eye cannot see an elderly schoolmistress or a disgraced nun penning this sort of stuff. Perhaps that’s why this week presents the rare case of no woman among the winners.

In Competition No. 2401 you were invited to provide a dialogue in verse or prose between two parts of yourself at odds with each other. Hands up anyone who has never talked to themselves…. Not a hand? I thought so. And yet it’s odd that when one does it, it isn’t a dialogue. ‘For God’s sake pull yourself together,’ my voice may say, but the Caliban bit of Jaspistos being addressed never replies in speech, just grunts mutinously. In the 17th century a poetic dialogue between Body and Soul was common, and I anticipated modern arguments between Ego and Superego, but I got few. Never mind, it was a good week. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each except for Mike Morrison, who takes £30.

In Competition No. 2400 you were invited to write a sonnet picturing one of Hercules’ labours. I used the word ‘picturing’ with a purpose: I wanted you to be visual. I was thinking of the sonnets in Les Trophées (two describe vividly the Nemean and Stymphalian missions), written by José-Maria de Heredia, that gifted, Cuban-born (father Spanish Creole, mother Norman) Parnassian French poet whose cameo-like glimpses of the Classical world enchanted me early. Out of the 12 labours, easily the most popular (are you filthy-minded?) was the cleansing of the Augean stables, which would have defeated seven maids with seven mops, sweeping for half a year. The winners, printed below, get £25 each, and Michael Swan scoops £30.

In Competition No. 2399 you were asked for a reply in blank verse by the maid addressed in Tennyson’s poem, ‘“Come down, O maid from yonder mountain height:/What pleasure lives in height?” the shepherd sang...’ You can only catch a glimpse of me this week, since my head is going to disappear behind the curtain once I have announced that there are seven winning entries to this comp, all in a photo-finish bunch. The camera adjudges Basil Ransome-Davies top winner. He gets £30 and the others have £20 each. That’s all, folks. ‘What pleasure lives in height?’ Why, sir, you seemTo picture mountain tops as barren, cold And void of the amenities enjoyedBy dwellers in the valley. ’Tis not so.

In Competition No. 2398 you were invited to write an entertaining piece of prose incorporating a dozen given cricketing terms, but using them in a non-cricketing sense. One competitor added a postscript: ‘I have not used the term “Chinaman” to refer to a native of that country as, according to Collins, that usage is now considered offensive.’ Accordingly, he appeared as a person in charge of the porcelain department in a shop. Can political correctness be more exquisitely expressed? The given words tended to elicit thoughts of crime and violence in you, but perhaps any dozen words would have the same effect, such is human nature. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Peter Smalley has the extra fiver. A nightwatchman found the body at 6 a.m.

In Competition No. 2397 you were invited to supply an acrostic poem, the first letter of each line to spell out TRAVEL TROUBLES. I had my share of these recently. The Saturday flight to Milan was cancelled. Our tickets were adjusted (incorrectly, it turned out) for Sunday. On Sunday the flight is cancelled again, but a bus is promised to take us to Milan with a free overnight stay at a hotel — subito! Finalmente a bus appears and after a nine-hour journey deposits us at a frightful hotel at 3 a.m., where we are told that we shall be alarm-called in one hour’s time for further bussing to an airport 50 kilometres away. No apologies, no explanations, no food. I was tempted to make the acrostic DON’T FLY ALITALIA but thought better of it.

In Competition No. 2396 you were invited to supply a description of a sporting event by an intellectually pretentious journo. ‘Khan the high priest fast uniting greatness and wealth in holy boxing matrimony’ — Owen Slot in the Times. But Gerard Benson has capped my example with a magnificent piece of tosh by Robbie Hudson in last month’s TLS: ‘Football is both an international language with local dialects and an open-ended narrative offering endless opportunities for self-definition.’ Tell that to Beckham! The rot set in in the Fifties when Professor Ayer started to support Spurs. Did you know that Italo Svevo was a keen fan of Charlton Athletic? The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each except for Adrian Fry, who takes the extra fiver.

In Competition No. 2395 you were invited to write a rhymed witch’s spell to bring someone or something either good or ill. William Dalrymple in his excellent book From the Holy Mountain lists some quaint old Nestorian spells: ‘the anathema of the Angel Gabriel against the Evil Eye’, ‘a charm for binding the guns and engines of war’, ‘the charm for a cow which is excited towards her mistress’.... Although I invited benedictions as well as curses, curmudgeons that you are you didn’t offer a single one. Commendations to Basil Ransome-Davies and Noel Petty. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Ralph Rochester, whose cantrip struck me as especially potent, is rewarded with £30.

In Competition No. 2394 you were invited to supply a rhymed poem offering four parental vetoes on children’s behaviour, followed by four juvenile vetoes on parental behaviour. Exhausted and sleepless, back two days late due to botched air travel, I shall cut the cackle. The prizewinners, printed below, get £20 each, except W.J. Webster, who takes £30. Bon voyage, this summer! Don’t spend a lifetime watching screens —There is another world outside.And music’s best not amplifiedUntil you can’t hear what it means.Self-cleaning rooms aren’t Nature’s trick,So don’t leave litter to decay.And ‘like’ is a word you shouldn’t sayWhen it’s just like ‘you know’ a tic.

In Competition No. 2393 you were given the first 101 numerals representing the value of π and asked to supply a piece of prose in which each word has the number of letters corresponding to the figures, zero to be represented by a ten-letter word. My thanks to Martin Kochanski for this idea. The consensus was summed up by Mae Scanlan’s final words: ‘Callous, diabolical, crafty villain, Jaspistos!’ Hilary and David Wade get the top £30, and the other prizewinners, printed below, have £25. I have included my personal effort (without reward) just to show that I’m prepared to swallow my own medicine. ‘It’s a maze. A prize conundrum. No bloody doubt.’ Our guest shrugged miserably. ‘Mycroft? Unusually, not in the Diogenes Club.

In Competition No. 2392 you were invited to supply a poem in praise of something generally considered ugly. Chesterton beatified the donkey ‘with monstrous head and sickening cry, And ears like errant wings’ who carried Christ to Jerusalem, and Stephen Spender rhapsodised (as one of you did) about pylons, ‘bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret’. I could not accept a 1930s Murphy radiogram as an icon of ugliness (nostalgists might adore one), nor wasps, which are pesky rather than unbeautiful, but the back end of a bus (especially when you have just missed it) I allowed. The winners are printed below, Paul Griffin taking £30 and the rest £25 each.

In Competition No. 2391 you were invited to offer six unappealing programmes, together with a TV critic’s unpersuasive recommendation. This week I feel, like Macbeth, that ‘I have supped full of horrors’. Ohne mich! as they say in Berlin. I have reduced the main prizewinners’ entries by one item each in order to include a few extra single felicities. So Brian Murdoch gets £30, the five other main winners get £20 each, and the single-time merchants £5 apiece. Thank you all. I was greatly amused. Mean City!: In the search for Britain’s most average town we go north of the border to see whether Cowdenbeath can match last week’s powerful entry from Chigwell.

In Competition No. 2390 you were invited to produce a poem which incorporates the titles of at least eight current West End theatrical productions. What with on the town, the anniversary, the birthday party, guys and dolls and blithe spirit, celebration was the keynote. ‘How we laughed to see the woman in white tights/Do cartwheels by the dresser in the hall,’ Tim Raikes recalled. He, Bernadette Evans, G.M. Davis, Shirley Curran and Brian Murdoch all sent in tempting entries, but the winners charmed me with a combination of an easy manner and a choice of the unexpected scene. I have had to take some things on trust, so don’t write to me pointing out that, strictly speaking, the Old Vic is not in the West End.

In Competition No. 2389 you were invited to provide a short story or anecdote entitled ‘Mishap with Pyjamas’. The germ of this competition was a statistic presented to me on television: last year 22 cases of admission to hospital came under the heading ‘mishaps with pyjamas’. My mind grew feverish trying to imagine the different incidents which made up this alarming figure, and so I handed over to you. My own troubles with pyjamas, which I won’t bore you with, would never have got me into Accident and Emergency, though they might have landed me in a police station for the night. Commendations to Jeremy Lawrence, Basil Ransome-Davis, Keith Norman and R.J.

In Competition No. 2388 you were invited to offer a poem expressing aversion to an object or person popularly regarded as picturesque. Is it ironical, a fool enigma,This sunset show?...Is it a mammoth joke?... These unconventional lines were written when Victoria was on the throne by T.E. Brown, best known as the author of that soppy piece ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!’ Your abominations ranged far and wide — teddy bears, fluffy yellow chicks, Paris in the springtime, Princess Diana.... Mary Holtby saw the robin as ‘a Machiavellian vermicide’ and for D.H. Prince a rose was ‘only a bloody rose’. The prizewinners are printed below. Gerda Mayer gets £30 for her baby-bashing piece, the others have £25 each.

In Competition No. 2387 you were invited to provide a sketch of a villainous character on their first appearance in an imaginary novel. I turned at once to Dickens, whose introductory descriptions of characters are usually so vivid, and was surprised that when Fagin enters we are told nothing about him except that he had red hair and was repellent-looking. The best male villain, for my money, is Count Fosco, that obese charmer with disconcertingly nimble movements; the best female one (and there aren’t many — Becky Sharp is a bitch, not a villain) is surely Charlotte in Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte, a really nasty bit of work — I mean the character, not the wonderful novel.

In competition No. 2386 you were invited to provide an extract from an imaginary autobiography of a boaster. The dramatic critic James Agate unabashedly called his diaries, in nine volumes, Ego. Cellini was a bit of a braggart, but the autobiographer’s cake is surely taken by Frank Harris, just ahead of George Moore, though I incline to believe that more of the former’s related sexual conquests were true than the latter’s. I suspect that straightforward pounces between stops in Victorian railway carriages were successful more often than we might imagine. Speaking absolutely candidly, to tell you the honest truth, as the politicians say, this competition was disappointing. Few of you struck the right note.

In Competition No. 2385 you were invited to incorporate 13 given words into a plausible piece of prose, using them in a non-card sense. Searching for Tolstoy’s ‘happy families’ quotation in my Bartlett’s, what did I find bang next to it? This from War and Peace: ‘The old man used to say that a nap after dinner was silver — before dinner, golden.’ ‘Finesse’ was the tricky one: I didn’t think it sounded unforced on the lips of either Gerard Benson’s plodding policeman or Brian Murdoch’s violent burglar. Blackjack and poker led to a lot of GBH, but the top prize (£30) goes to Margaret Joy’s peaceful rural scene, in which the zoology may not be plausible but the joke is.

In Competition No. 2384 you were asked to supply an extract from an imaginary translated novel which unwittingly conveys the utter boredom of simple agricultural life. The great boring British novel in this genre is Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, recommended to the nation by the prime minister Stanley Baldwin and parodied soon after its publication (1925) by Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. Set in darkest Shropshire, it is, according to my Reader’s Encyclopaedia, ‘a story of fierce, morose country people, in which Prudence Sarn, the narrator, finds a husband who appreciates her in spite of her harelip’.