Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 2844 you were invited to provide an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information. I can now add the fact that Zanzibar is the world’s largest clove producer, and that 99 per cent of Estonians have blue eyes, to my cache of conversational titbits. Thanks, for those morsels of trivia, to J. Seery and Nicholas Hodgson. Basil Ransome-Davies takes £30; the rest nab £25. I was wearing out shoe-leather tracking Torpedo McCann across the city, learning why most American males prefer rubber soles. LA had expanded since it was bought by the US from Mexico in 1848 and I was building a thirst myself when he entered a saloon next to a tattoo parlour.

In Competition No. 2843 you were given a list of poets’ surnames — motion, bridges, wilde, gray, cope, hood, burns and browning — and asked to incorporate them into a poem or piece of prose. I gave you scope for showing off by inviting you to cram in extra names should you choose to. The award for class swot has to go to Albert Black, who pulled off the phenomenal feat of shoehorning 52 names into his entry. A nod to Frank McDonald, whose entry to another competition gave me the idea for this. Basil Ransome-Davies takes the bonus fiver; his fellow winners pocket £25 each. The bridge that burns can be the best of bridges. A pound of hope won’t buy an ounce of luck. Try Scotland, though you’ll have to cope with midges.

In Competition 2842 you were invited to compose the most off-putting book blurb that you could muster. There’s just space to say that I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy Jonathan Friday’s ‘groundbreaking exploration of the neglected beauty of bodily fluids and excreta’, which features ‘a striking array of scratch’n’sniff imagery’. G.M. Davis, nabs £30. The rest take £25. Like Ernest Vincent Wright and Georges Perec, Guillermo Pozoverde has written a lipogrammatic novel, an extreme one.

In Competition 2840 you were invited to provide an extract from the autobiography of a modern-day celebrity, ghostwritten by a literary great. Where would Jordan’s literary ambitions have been without the creative input of Rebecca Farnworth? And how many chapters would Wayne Rooney have managed without the guiding genius of Hunter Davies? Behind many a bestselling biography is an invisible man or woman, the unsung hero who has done most of the work but gets virtually none of the credit. There were some inspired pairings: Charles Dickens and Jamie Oliver; Charlotte Brontë and Susan Boyle; Stephen Fry and Samuel Johnson. Commendations to C.J. Gleed, Noel Petty and Josh Ekroy. The bonus fiver goes to D.A. Prince for her account of the life of Stephen Fry by way of Bleak House.

In Competition 2839 you were invited to submit a poem about the darker side of spring. There were references in the entry to Larkin, who could always be relied on to see the bleaker side of things (‘their greenness is a kind of grief’), as well as to Eliot and Thomas Edward Brown. There were also nice echoes of Ogden Nash and Wordsworth. Nicholas Holbrook and Josephine Boyle were unlucky losers and I liked Ray Kelley’s closing couplet: ‘It’s not by mere coincidence that vernal/ Rhymes so immaculately with infernal.’ The winners, printed below, earn £25 each. Bill Greenwell takes the extra fiver.

In Competition 2838 you were invited to submit a short story entitled Fifty Shades of whatever you chose. It was a bit of a mixed bag this week but I liked Gerard Benson’s twist on Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, Josh Ekroy’s 50 Shades of Ukip and Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead’s clever, grisly tale of a woman reduced to a piece of meat. Not all of you went the E.L. James route, but Chris O’Carroll’s winning entry clearly took its lead from the queen of erotica. He is rewarded with 50 lashes and £30. His fellow winners pocket £25 each.   Fifty Shades of Dan Brown ‘The Pope!’ he hissed in her ear. The Illuminati! Atlantis! Stonehenge! Inscriptions! Codes! Occult wisdom!

In Competition 2837 you were invited to submit a poem on the horrors of a reunion dinner. In days gone by, the allure of school reunions lay in the opportunity they offered to see — and assess — former classmates in their adult incarnations. But in an age of social media no one really loses touch and that element of mystery is all but gone. We’ve seen the pictures and read the status updates. Albert Black, Rob Stuart and Peter Goulding are highly commended. The winners take £25 each. The extra fiver belongs to Alan Millard. ‘Good evening, sir, wind down the window please, Perhaps you’d like to tell me where you’ve been.

In Competition 2836 you were invited to coin collective nouns for the following: tweeters, hackers, hoodies, WAGS, environmentalists, bankers, MPs and contrarians. This was by far the most popular competition we’ve run for a long time and it was cheering to see so many new names in the postbag. Inevitably, there was a fair amount of repetition: nest/cacophony/outrage/triviality of tweeters came up more than once, as did skulk/huggle/scowl of hoodies; bonus/wad/wunch/trough of bankers; knot/-perversity/Hitch of contrarians; vacuum/bling/surgery of WAGs; flood of environmentalists; expense of MPs; to list just a few.

In Competition 2835 you were invited to submit a profile for an online dating website for a well-known politician, living or dead. Unlucky loser John Samson’s Oliver Cromwell might, I suppose, appeal to those who like the masterful type: ‘That ye should seek matrimonial harmony by reading such vainglorious publications doth render thee unworthy of espousing this Puritan. Speak thus of me to thy more God-fearing sisters...’ Commiserations, too, to Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead and Hugh King. The winners take £25 each. W.J. Webster pockets the bonus fiver. Hi, my name is John. I’m from Yorkshire. We all know Yorkshiremen can be bluff and let me tell you straight out I’m 100 per cent bluff. I speak as I find and find as I speak. WICWIG as the young folk say.