Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3060 you were invited to provide an updated version of ‘Jerusalem’ starting with the words ‘And did those tweets…’One of my favourite parodies of Blake’s poem is by Allan M. Laing. In it he describes the wartime blackouts:   Bring me my torch of waning power! Bring me my phosphor button bright!

In Competition No. 3059 you were invited to supply a poem inspired by the periodic table. The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s system for classifying the chemical elements, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of

In Competition No. 3058 you were invited to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or for British ones travelling abroad. This is an assignment that you always embrace with relish, though one competitor observed that it felt curiously difficult this time round because ‘the interaction between Britain and Abroad isn’t

In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’.   Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless: ‘Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies/ Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside…’ John O’Byrne was good too

In Competition No. 3056 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of the High Street.   Your entries were poignant and clever, and transported me back to teenage Saturdays frittered away in the likes of Dolcis, Lilly & Skinner and Freeman, Hardy & Willis. John Morrison’s lines ‘Oh Amazon how swift you

In Competition No. 3055 you were invited to take a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. There is space only to high-five the winners below, who take £25 each. Bill Greenwell gets £30.  

In Competition No. 3054 you were invited to compose double dactyls about double acts. I didn’t include the rules about double dactyls as it takes up space and I’ve done it before — and in any case they are easily Googled. Most of you seemed thoroughly at home with the form, and in a large,

In Competition No. 3053, an assignment prompted by Anthony Horowitz’s reflections on creating female characters for his latest Bond novel, you were invited to provide an extract from a well-known work that might be considered sexist by today’s standards and rework it for the #MeToo age. Highlights in a thoroughly enjoyable entry included Brian Allgar’s

In Competition No. 3052 you were invited to supply a sonnet inspired by a well-known contemporary figure’s characteristic feature. There was a spot of preposition-related confusion this week — my fault entirely — and sonnets either ‘to’ or ‘on’ were acceptable.   Entries ranged far and wide, from Victoria Beckham’s pout via Gorbachev’s birthmark to

In Competition No. 3051 you were invited to supply an entry by a well-known diarist describing the wedding day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.   There was a bracingly waspish streak running through your contributions. Here’s Noël Coward’s verdict on the groom: ‘Massively butch but far too hairy, when he wasn’t even in the