Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3334 you were invited to submit a poem about conspiracy theories. Trawling the net for examples, I found, alongside the more familiar ones – a reptilian elite, JFK’s assassination, commie fluoridation – whispers of chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay and that Finland is a myth. In a hotly contested week, Adrian Fry, Sylvia Smith, Janine Beacham, Nicholas Lee and Nick MacKinnon earn honourable mentions while the prizewinners, printed below, snaffle £25 apiece. Our WhatsApp know what’s what. We knowthe council’s spying on our binswith microchip-type spyware, sothey know who puts out unwashed tins.

In Competition No. 3333 you were invited to submit a short story that features Donald Trump or another politician of your choice in a well-known fictional landscape. Joan Didion once observed that Ronald Reagan was the American politician to most fully embrace his own fictionality, making up stories in which he played the starring role. Didion put this down to ‘his tendency to see the presidency as a script waiting to be solved’. Needless to say, Reagan didn’t play a starring role in the entry; a medium-sized but impressive postbag was dominated by Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Competitors who shone included Sue Pickard, Nicholas Hodgson and Nigel Bennetton. The prize winners, printed below, earn £30.

In Competition No. 3332 you were invited to supply, in verse form, a retraction of beliefs previously believed in passionately. You weren’t obliged to step into the shoes of a real poet but many chose to and some smart, entertaining about-turns included Robert Schechter’s ‘Palinode on a Grecian Urn’: ‘Truth is beauty,’I said smugly,but lived to findthat truth is ugly. Other standout performers included Janine Beacham, George Simmers and Alex Steelsmith, and they were unlucky to miss out on a place in the winners’ enclosure. Those entries that made the final cut are printed below and earn their authors £25. The world is charged with grandeur we applaud,The sheen and perfume of its sky, sea, soil.To all that drones is nature’s spree the foil.

In Competition No. 3331 you were invited to write a resentful note of departure on behalf of a well-known figure from the field of fact or fiction. This challenge, set some time ago owing to seasonal production deadlines, was prompted by Suella Braverman’s splenetic broadside, but I decided to widen the brief beyond the political sphere. You duly cast your net far and wide, choosing subjects who ranged from Trollope’s unctuous, scheming curate Obadiah Slope to Nellie the Elephant. Alan Millard’s Revd William Spoonerearns a commendation: ‘Where is the hind kelp when needed by poor souls like me? Sadly it has been limply sacking from those who should cow more share for their staff. I therefore design as of row with little regret…’.

In Competition No. 3330 you were invited to submit some improbable forecasts, in verse, for the year ahead. Things you deemed unlikely to happen this year ranged from the predictable – peace in Ukraine, a reversal of climate change – to the whimsical: Donald Trump as the next Pope and Snoop Dogg eloping with Penny Mordaunt. The winners earn £25. Around the UK coast he’ll steerHis rusty, overladen barge,locating homes for refugees…What are you up to now, Farage? If punishment that’s capitalCan find itself again restored,There’ll be a chance for Penny M,To demonstrate her massive sword. Incompetently, CleverlyCalled Stockton some disgusting names,But, in this topsy-turvy world,The New Year holds great hopes for James.

In Competition No. 3329 you were invited to submit a villanelle on a festive theme.    Artistry and variety abounded in a most enjoyable entry. Hats off, everyone, and thank you for your brilliance and versatility over the year. The winners below earn £30. Happy Christmas, one and all. It seems it was a century ago That we had dreams of Christmas being white, When winter kissed our cheeks with flakes of snow. Magic there was that childhood could bestow When wonder closed our eyes on Christmas night. It seems it was a century ago. Peace and goodwill for everyone would flow With midnight presents sent for our delight, When winter kissed our cheeks with flakes of snow.

In Competition No. 3328 you were invited to submit a poem on a topical theme in which the last two words of each line rhyme. Some competitors were unsure whetherI meant that the last two words in each line should rhyme with each other, or with the next line. I meant the former, but given the ambiguous rubric either approach was acceptable. My foggy thinking didn’t stop you from producing a cracking entry and, in an especially fiercely contested week, a prize of £25 is awarded to the winners below and honourable mentions go to Alan Millard, Max Ross and Brian Murdoch. Statement done – ‘Who wins?’ begins; ‘Who gets an untoward reward?’ That pensioner’s a well-off toff, This claimant does – with scorn – shirk work.

In Competition No. 3327 you were invited to submit a rough resumé of the plot of a Shakespeare play such as might have been attemptedby a well-known fictional character of your choice. Literary sleuths featured prominently in the entry, with Poirot, Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes all making eye-catching appearances. A commendation to George Simmers for Professor McGonagall’s take on Macbeth and to John O’Byrne, who also gave us the Scottish Play, but through the eyes of Molly Bloom. The winners nab £25. Prince Hamlet is a melankoly dane who rite his girlfrend soppy poetry, chiz. He hav been played by many grate british actors from shaxpeere’s time to the modern da. When his father’s ghost apear to him and sa, ‘I hav been murdered.

In Competition No. 3326 you were invited to submit a nursery rhyme recast in the style of a well-known poet. One of my favourite twists on a nursery rhyme is Lewis Carroll’s ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat’, the Mad Hatter’s party piece in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!How I wonder what you’re at!Up above the world you fly,Like a teatray in the sky.   But ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ popped up only occasionally in the entry, outflanked by ‘Humpty Dumpty’, ‘Jack and Jill’ and, star of the show, ‘Three Blind Mice’. David Silverman leads the way with Milton’s version. He and his fellow winners take £25.

In Competition No. 3325 you were invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of P.G. Wodehouse. The seed for this popular challenge was Ben Schott’s much-praised 2018 homage to P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the King of Clubs, in which Jeeves and Wooster enter into the world of international espionage. A second instalment, Jeeves and the Leap of Faith, was labelled ‘pastiche-perfect’ by the TLS. As well as being a testament to Schott’s skill, their success bears out what Evelyn Waugh said about Wodehouse: ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.’ Commendations, in a hotly contested week, go to Sarah Drury, D.A.

In Competition No. 3324 you were in-vited to submit nonsense verse on an autumnal theme. W.J. Webster confessed that ‘sense kept breaking in’ to his entry, but the line between sense and nonsense is not always clear. As Anthony Burgess observed, in a review of Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber Anthology of Nonsense Verse, Mr Grigson ‘wisely evades, in his preface, anything like a definition of nonsense. He knows that we will only know what nonsense is when we know the nature of sense. Nonsense is something we think we can recognise, just as we think we can recognise poetry, but there has to be an overlap with what we think we can recognise as sense.’ The winners below earn £25.

In Competition No. 3323 you were invited to submit an extract from a book review written by a well-known author which trashes a work by another well-known author that is generally deemed to be a classic. Virginia Woolf took a dim view of Ulysses. In a 1922 diary entry, she wrote: ‘I finished Ulysses and think it a misfire… The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious.’ Graham Greene was no fan either, judging it to be ‘a big bore… really one of the most overrated classics’. Then there is H.L. Mencken’s characteristically pithy verdict on The Great Gatsby: ‘A glorified anecdote.

In Competition No. 3322 you were invited to submit a poem reflecting on the fate of the Sycamore Gap tree, planted in the late 19th century by Newcastle lawyer John Clayton. Antony Gormley, who has a studio in Hexham near the site of the felled tree, has described it as ‘a marker in the lie of the land’. Talk of replacing it with a sculpture is wrongheaded, he said, quoting fellow artist Mark Wallinger: ‘A sculpture and a tree are very different, and in most cases a tree is always preferable.’ Several competitors drew to great effect on Manley Hopkins’s 1879 ‘Binsey Poplars’, inspired by the felling of a row of poplar trees on the bank of the River Thames. David Shields earns a commendation. The winners below scoop £25.

In Competition No. 3321 you were invited to provide a love scene from a novel set in a location that might not be considered conducive to romance. There was a distinctly scatological flavour to this week’s postbag. Rubbing shoulders with the abattoirs and morgues were sewage treatment plants and waste-contaminated waters. Adrian Fry’s description of romance blossoming in a post-thermonuclear apocalypse government bunker earns an honourable mention: ‘Their past as local authority officials retreated to irrelevance, their future as irradiated cannibals above ground proved literally unimaginable…’. As does Nick MacKinnon’s glue factory tryst: ‘Julianna had been warned about the men in Industrial Adhesives.

In Competition No. 3320 you were invited to submit a poem extolling Epicureanism over Stoicism or the other way round. Stoicism is enjoying something of a revival, embraced by everyone from billionaire tech bros to self-help devotees. But Mary Beard is no fan of Marcus Aurelius and has said that she finds it ‘mystifying’ that people could be interested in ‘a philosophy that, if you looked at it really hard, was nasty, fatalistic, bordering on fascist’. The philosopher Catherine Wilson, author of How to Be an Epicurean: the Ancient Art of Living Well, doesn’t rate Stoicism either, arguing that, in the modern age, we should be looking to Epicurus and his followers for guidance on how to live a good life.

In Competition No. 3319 you were invited to supply a description of the house of a well-known figure from the field of fact or fiction that provides clues to their personality. This assignment was prompted by Laura Freeman’s reference in a Spectator articleto ‘Great Men’s Houses’, an essay Virginia Woolf wrote for Good Housekeeping in 1932. In it she describes a visit to the Chelsea house of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, observing: ‘One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies.’ Entries that impressed and amused me included Nick MacKinnon’s J.G.

In Competition No. 3318 you were invited to provide a verse portrait of Seamus Heaney by any other poet, living or dead. This challenge marks the tenth anniversary, last month, of Heaney’s death. Once asked if anything in his work struck him as appropriate as an epitaph, the Nobel Laureate quoted from his translation of Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles. Talking of the old king who dies and vanishes into the earth, the play’s Messenger says: ‘Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.’ Your portraits, in a modest-sized but affecting entry, touched on many themes of Heaney’s work: love, loss, family, nature, memory, politics. Those below take £25. They cut with shovels, dad and dad. He digs in with his pen instead.

In Competition No. 3317 you were invited to provide an opening to a novel that bears out Elmore Leonard’s tip to writers: ‘Never open a book with weather.’ Leonard’s other bêtes noires, outlined in his 2007 10 Rules of Writing, include prologues, exclamation marks and the modification of the word ‘said’ with an adverb. But his most important rule, he said, the one that sums up the ten was: ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’ On which note, over to your laboured, florid, banal offerings. They were a hoot to judge and earn their authors £25. The winds perform their lucubrations, crossing the silent furze, shifting hither and thither like shadowy thieves intent on looting the moorland, lifting the vegetation leaf by leaf, prickle by vicious prickle.

In Competition No. 3316, you were invited to recast Rishi Sunak’s five pledges in verse form. The tone this week was one of acerbic mischief. A nod to Ann Drysdale, who earns a commendation, and to Elizabeth Bishop, John Masefield and W.S. Gilbert, to whom entries below owe a debt. Prizes of £30 land in the laps of the winners. Five promises I pledge to save our nation And just like Half a Sixpence, Half a Crown, By halves I do things, so I’ll halve inflation And keep demands for higher wages down. Our economic record is appalling But, like Jack’s beanstalk, soon you’ll see it grow. I’ll make sure that our national debt keeps falling, And with the magic gold pay all we owe.

In Competition No. 3315, you were invited to invent a legend that explains the origin and nature of a flower other than a sunflower or narcissus, whose well-known origin story tells of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who draws the vengeance of the gods, falls in love with his own reflection in the waters of a spring and, in Ovid’s version, wastes away, the flower that bears his name springing up where he died. The winners below take £25. ‘I will come to you,’ said the young man, ‘under cover of darkness. Wait by the sea-cliff’s rocky edge, where I will surprise you.’ ‘But come to me in folds of silk, a tapestry on your tongue,’ said the nymph. ‘For your beautiful robes catch everyone’s eye. I am half in love with the way they cling.