Jaspistos

In Competition No. 2469 you were invited to supply a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first line.Another comp that was last set nearly 30 years ago, when it was won by J. Crooks with the intriguing key line, ‘Moguls at the BBC’. This time round many of the key lines had a topographical slant. Examples were ‘Liverpool Central’, ‘The midges on Mull’, ‘On Morecambe sands’ and ‘Street maps reveal’. Two delightful openings were ‘A camel, please!’ (Piers Geddes) and Laura Garratt’s Pepysian ‘And so he went to bed’. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes, with an extra handshake for his clinching joke, to Hugh King.

In Competition No. 2468 you were invited to imagine that you fall asleep and wake up 20 years hence, and then report your impressions without moving from the place where you awoke. Brian Murdoch reported new stamps issued for the Queen’s 100th birthday and the 2012 Olympics postponed yet again, for the 17th time. Mike Morrison envisaged an aged Ken Barlow supervising a pedestrian crossing in Coronation Street and Madonna in the news for adopting a Lithuanian grandmother. Last week I read H.G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes in which the hero, after a nap of a mere 203 years, is faced with ‘the nightmare of Capitalism triumphant — higher buildings, bigger towns, wickeder capitalists, labour more downtrodden than ever and more desperate’. Read or reread it.

In Competition No. 2467 you were invited to write a poem in which all the rhymes are eye-rhymes, not ear-rhymes. Many years ago, even before Jaspistos cast his shadow on this page, a similar competition was set, with this difference: clerihews were demanded. Stuart Woods won with this: If Johann Sebastian BachHad remembered to attachBraces to his LevisHe wouldn’t have been so embarrassed while conducting a missa brevis. Thirty years on ingenuity still rules OK. I especially liked the rhymes ‘Aristophanes’ and ‘planes’, and ‘intuit’ and ‘suit’. The standard was so high that I expect there will be disappointment among the near-winners. Console yourselves with the assurance that you were appreciated.

In Competition No. 2466 you were invited to supply a poem or piece of prose ending with the phrase ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ These words, according to Eric Partridge’s definition, are ‘applied in retrospect, jocularly or ruefully, to anything done impulsively with disastrous consequences, whether or not those were foreseeable at the moment of action’, like, I suppose, the self-castration of the priests of Cybele or the invasion of Iraq. I move aside to make room for six prizewinners, who get £25 each. The bonus fiver goes to Piers Geddes, who, if memory serves, is a newcomer. But if memory serves, it is often a fault.

The scissors-and-paste work involved in this, though laborious, is easy enough; what is difficult is to avoid sliding into nonsense. The trick is, in Dryden’s phrase, to ‘deviate into sense’ as often as possible. John C.H. Mounsey began promisingly: ‘I met a traveller from an antique land,/ A cricket cap was on his head./ “Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!/ Charge for the guns!” he said’, but lost the plot afterwards. Coincidence corner: two of you used the first line of ‘Ozymandias’ as an opener, and two others did the same with ‘Boys and girls, come out to play’. What are the odds against that?

‘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.