Lucy Vickery

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.

In Competition No. 3314, you were invited to submit clerihews (two couplets, AABB, metrically clunky, humorous in tone) on well-known philosophers. Eric Idle’s ‘Bruces’ Philosophers Song’ cast a long shadow over a large and jolly postbag. ‘Extraordinarily hard to avoid couplets from the Monty Python song!’ wrote A.H. Harker in a note accompanying his entry.Brian Murdoch was thinking along the same lines, as were R.M. Goddard and Nick MacKinnon: ‘We petty clerihewers can only peep about beneath the huge legs of Eric Idle…’ An honourable mention, nonetheless, to Matt Quinn, Donald Mack and Anthony Stadlen, and £8 each to the winners below. Friedrich Nietzsche, Emerging glumly from a monster movie double feature, Said, ‘Godzilla is dead.

In Competition No. 3313, you were invited to supply a poem about the worms that were resurrected by scientists after being frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years. The tiny roundworms, buried deep underground since the late Pleistocene, were brought back to life by being immersed in water and transported to Germany – in a scientist’s pocket – to see what lessons the creatures might yield for 21st-century humanity. (They were, it was discovered, able to survive extreme low temperatures by entering a dormant state called cryptobiosis.) Their remarkable story produced a smart, lively and varied entry. A commendation to W.J.

In Competition No. 3312, you were invited to supply a contribution to a book of recipes invented by fictional characters, entries being for the Carrollean, Dickensian or Shakespearean sections. Commendations to Martyn Hurst and Jon Robins, both of whom provided Uriah Heep’s recipe for humble pie, and to Mike Morrison’s Hamlet (‘Sous-vide or not sous-vide, that is the question…’); a dishonourable mention to Joe Houlihan’s Fagin (‘in a pilfery pie the ingredients is never the same, being, as I like to say, bestowed by the Almighty… some carrots from the parson’s garden, lifted of a black night; a pound of beefsteak, vanished from beneath the very beak of old Butcher Barnes…’); and a chef’s kiss to the winners below who earn £25.

In Competition No. 3311, you were invited to submit a song suitable for inclusion in a parliamentary songbook. In an entry in which most scored pleasingly high on singability, W.S. Gilbert rubbed shoulders with Simon & Garfunkel and the Kinks. An honourable mention to Emily Matthews, but leading the winners below, who take £30 each, is Bill Greenwell’s twist on ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’.

In Competition No. 3310, you were invited to submit a horror story on the theme of artificial intelligence. None of your entries, creditable though they were, matched the horror of Harlan Ellison’s gruesome short story from 1967, ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’, which was at the back of my mind when I set this challenge. A sadistic supercomputer AM – Allied Mastercomputer – has wiped out all humanity except five unfortunate survivors, whom it can keep alive and take pleasure in torturing in perpetuity: ‘We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time…’. I queried Russell Chamberlain’s use of ‘light years’ as a measure of time rather than distance with a more scientifically literate friend, but gave it the green light.

In Competition No. 3309, you were invited to compose a poem starting with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first, the new poem being on a different subject from the original. Max Ross’s sonnet, reflecting on the demands of the task in hand, earns a commendation: The task for which I now am all too weakConsumes a wealth of hours as I imploreHundreds of poets to give me what I seekAnd sometimes I decide to search no more…  As does Bob Trewin’s entry, which uses Dylan Thomas’s line – ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ – to highlight the challenging consequences, for some, of net zero. The winners earn £25 each. Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster,Defeat can be rewarding all the same.

In Competition No. 3208 you were invited to submit a short story whose first or last line is: ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ The given line opens Walter de la Mare’s slippery, haunting, much-anthologised ‘The Listeners’ and many entries echoed the 1912 poem’s supernatural theme. An honourable mention to George Simmers and David Shields, and £30 each to the prizewinners below. ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller. ‘“Asked” would be better.’ ‘Or “enquired”?’ ‘Too ornate. Keep to your authorial voice.’ Laura. Sacked from her academic post for the unacceptable views in her paper ‘Narrative Queerness – A Neostructuralist Critique’ and reduced to giving Creative Writing courses to amateurs like me.

In Competition No. 3207 you were invited to submit a verse obituary of Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian former prime minister who, despite sex scandals and court battles, managed three stints as PM, died last month aged 86. His more startling gaffes included suggesting that Abruzzo earthquake survivors see their situation as ‘a weekend of camping’ and describing Obama as ‘young, handsome and tanned’. The winners, printed below, pocket £30 each.

In Competition No. 3306, you were invited to submit a poem about procrastination. Procrastination looms large in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s hilarious account of his attempt to write a study of D.H. Lawrence, and it struck me as an excellent topic for a competition. As Samuel Johnson wrote, the tendency to put things off is ‘one of the general weaknesses’ that ‘prevail to a greater or lesser degree in every mind’. The assignment did indeed strike a chord, attracting a large entry that was witty and technically adroit. Commiserations to Alex Steelsmith, C. Paul Evans, David Silverman and Frank McDonald who missed out on a spot in the winning line-up by a whisker.

In Competition No. 3305, you were invited to submit a sonnet entitled ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets’. The germ for this challenge was ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets And Experiences’ by the gifted, troubled Delmore Schwartz, friend to Robert Lowell and John Berryman (who wrote a suite of poems in memory of him). An imaginative and technically accomplished entry warrants high fives all round. The winners earn £20. Weary with toil, and grey and full of sleep,In the long, sleepless watches of the night,Below the thunders of the upper deep;Standing aloof, consider how my lightIs spent. No help? Come let us kiss and part.The world is too much with us, late and soon.

In Competition No. 3304, you were invited to submit Shakespeare’s reflections on a pressing issue of your choice. In BBC Radio Four’s Taking Issue With Shakespeare, which prompted this task, Michael Gove discusses levelling up with reference to King Lear, Will Self reflects on toxic masculinity in Hamlet, and Gordon Brown draws parallels between a rabble-rousing Marc Antony and Donald Trump. Many of your entries addressed our robot overlords. Here’s David Shields: AI or not AI: that is the question; Whether it is safer in the end to limit The capabilities of such artifice Or to take arms against a sea of robots And by opposing end them?... Hon menshes to George Simmers and D.A. Prince. The winners earn £25 each.

In Competition No. 3303, you were invited to submit an explanation of the facts of life by a person from the field of fact or fiction who might be deemed a surprising choice. A commendation to A.R. Duncan-Jones, whose lesson harnessed the reverse chronology of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow: ‘Every ejaculation is premature. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?… Quite apart from the disappointment and frustration, it’s also extremely embarrassing to find yourself ejaculating inside a girl that you’ve never even met.’ And to David Shields’s Gradgrind: ‘Sexual congress. Undertaken by one male and one female. Purpose: propagation of species. Method: introduction of sperm to ovum.

In Competition No. 3302, you were invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice. To mark the centenary last year of Philip Larkin’s birth, the poet Imtiaz Dharker wrote ‘Swiping left on Larkin’ in which she imagined how, given his complicated relationship with intimacy, the poet would present himself on such an app. This led me to wonder how other writers might set themselves apart in the online dating scrum. A shout-out to Paul A. Freeman’s Kipling (‘If you can eat steak rare when all about you/ Are ordering their sirloins darkly singed…’)’ and Max Ross’s Wordsworth (‘Sadly I wander lonely as a cloud/ And so I seek some kind companionship…’). Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Paul D.

In Competition No. 3301, you were invited to delete one letter in the title of a well-known novel and provide an extract from the new work. This one pulled in the punters. Highlights included Russell Chamberlain’s All the Pretty Hoses and Ralph Bateman’s Bleak Hose:‘Water everywhere. Water up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; water down the river, where it rolls defiled by untreated sewage. It was the wettest of times, it was the driest of times, it was a time of floods, it was a time of drought, it was the age of incompetence…’. There were also entertaining twists on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which saw Winston Smith transported back to the Roman Empire.

In Competition No. 3300, you were invited to describe in verse a meal of your choice with a well-known poet, living or dead.  The entry was a whopper, with too many star performers to name individually. Hats off, all round. The winners, which include David Silverman’s account of going on a bender with Dante, take £25. Our breakfast stood – a Loaded Plate –Of Bacon – crisply Hot Two Sausages – in bursting skins –Of mushrooms – a compoteThe farmyard’s Gift – two yellow Eggs  Whose faces – shamed the SunFried Bread that sizzled in the Pan –Hot Sauce upon my ThumbA dash of fragrant Marmalade  Tomatoes – in a SeaOf Baked Beans yielding rosy SauceFor added Piquancy.