Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 2684 you were invited to take a well-known literary figure and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. Some of you interpreted ‘literary figure’ as a fictional character; others as an author. Either was acceptable. You were all so good this week that it was difficult to whittle down what was a larger-than-usual entry to just six, so congratulations all round. The winners earn £25 each. George Simmers gets £30. Dear Uncle DHL. There is a pleasant young lady in accounts, whom I wish to invite to the firm’s Christmas ‘do’. What should I say to her?   Say little.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2683 you were invited to submit a sequel to ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’. Lear himself left fragments of one, the delightful if tear-jerking ‘The Children of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat’, a tale of premature death and penury. Yours, too, were mostly stories of unhappily-ever-after, though their wit and charm made me smile through the tears. J.C.H. Mounsey, Frank Osen and Sylvia Fairley narrowly missed the cut. The winners get £25 each, and £30 goes to Alan Millard. The Owl and the Pussy-Cat sailed away From the land where the Bong-tree grows, And gave not a fig for the poor Piggy-wig Who was left with a hole through his nose.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition. In Competition No. 2682 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of a Shakespearean character who has woken up to find him or herself transported to the present day. John O’Byrne, Frank Osen, Gillian Ewing and Josephine Boyle impressed this week but top honours go to George Simmers, who nets £30. His fellow winners, also printed below, get £25 each. Next week’s competition slot will be given over to a celebration of the 2,000th crossword so the results of Competition 2683, After the Dance, will appear in the issue dated 12 February. Indeed, Princess, ’tis a strange country we are in, for though this be Forest Gate by all the signs, yet see I no forest, nor no gate neither.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2681 you were invited to submit a treble clerihew about a public figure who was prominent in 2009 or 2010. Jaspistos, who ran a similar competition some years ago, noted that it was E.C. Bentley’s son, the author and illustrator Nicolas Bentley, who invented the double clerihew form. Examples of the treble are difficult to track down; my predecessor was breaking new ground with this assignment. Honourable mentions to John O’Byrne and Frank Osen. Shorter entries mean space for more winners this week. Those printed below are rewarded with £20 each. W.J. Webster storms home with the bonus fiver for the second week in a row. Bravo!

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2680 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem of which the first letter of each line spells out the words Happy New Year. This challenge elicited a whopping entry, and there were plenty of unfamiliar names among the regulars, which is always pleasing. You were under no obligation to exude optimism and goodwill; indeed, with a few notable exceptions, those valiant souls that did attempt to inject a note of cheer failed to convince. Most didn’t bother to try, though, and Bernadette Evans’s closing couplet encapsulates the general gloomy tenor of the entry: As politicians wonder if we’re happy, Reality suggests the future’s crappy.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2679 you were invited to usher in the New Year with a teetotallers’ drinking song. As usual with this sort of challenge, many that read well on the page didn’t lend themselves to being sung aloud. But an impressive entry yielded some rousing and not unpersuasive calls to shun the liquid devil. Their authors of the following earn £25 each while Ray Kelley nabs £30. In the instructions for Competition 2681 the year should have read 2010. Figures from either 2009 or 2010 will be acceptable. Charge your pannikin with water, Toast in springsprung H2O Staunch Aquarius, transporter Of the finest drink we know.

In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. In Competition No. 2678 you were invited to submit the New Year’s resolutions of a fictional villain. It was a smallish and somewhat lacklustre entry, possibly owing to the earlier-than-usual deadline. But I warmed to D.A. Prince’s Lord Voldemort: ‘Get him; just get him. Then the series will be over’, and was amused by Chris O’Carroll’s Edward Hyde, ‘Be myself’, and Bill Greenwell’s Count Dracula: ‘Get a life’. Gerard Benson, meanwhile, kept it brief on behalf of Bill Sikes: ‘No more Mr Nice Guy!’ There is a distinctly Dickensian feel to the winners’ enclosure.

Lucy Vickery resents this week's competition In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas. The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the torture of office parties — among much else. Commendations to W.J. Webster, Chris O’Carroll and Shirley Curran. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece and the festive bonus fiver is Bill Greenwell’s. Happy Christmas!

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2676 you were invited to submit a reply to the poet from Wordsworth’s cuckoo or Keats’s nightingale. A huge entry yielded an entertaining parade of stroppy birds with a fine line in put-downs. While Wordsworth took the greatest punishment (deservedly, some might say) in terms of volume, the nightingales were on especially withering form. Everyone shone this week, but Jan D. Hodge, Catherine Tufariello, W.J. Webster, John Beaton and G.W. Tapper stood out and were unlucky losers. The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £25 apiece; George Simmers pockets the extra five pounds. Darkling I’ve listened, too, while you orate About my warbling till I’ve grown quite shirty.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2675 you were invited to submit a book-jacket blurb for a well-known work of fiction that is designed to be as off-putting as possible. You were on sparkling form all round this week, especially Marion Shore, Robert Schechter and John O’Byrne. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each and in a photo finish the bonus fiver goes to Chris O’Carroll by a nose. At last, a book that children and adults alike can turn to for a comprehensive analysis of the sexual mores and socio-economic paradigms that defined England in the 1930s. Mary Poppins is a stern young spinster employed by the Banks family (a name that alerts the reader to author P.L.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2674 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of Paul the Octopus, who died peacefully in his tank last month aged a respectable two-and-a-half. Paul was catapulted from the obscurity of an aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany to international celebrity when he accurately predicted the outcome of several World Cup matches. Commendations to Jerome Betts and Bill Greenwell. The bonus fiver is Noel Petty’s. His fellow winners get £25 each. Great Paul, the psychic octopus, is dead, His wisdom lost, locked in that mighty head. Eight times his art was tried, eight times it passed, Thus proving that the future is precast.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2673 you were invited to submit a pompous leader on a trivial subject. Among the topics that unleashed your inner Thunderer were the abuse of the ‘eight items or less’ lane in supermarkets (to say nothing of the lamentable confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’) and the plague of rubber bands visited on us by the Post Office. There is space only to congratulate Brian Murdoch, who gets £30. His fellow winners get £25 each. Most will pass in silence over the 40th anniversary next year of a blow struck — and still felt — at the very heart of the culture of the nation.

In Competition No. 2672 you were invited to disprove G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. In his essay ‘The Poet and the Cheese’ Chesterton himself takes steps to put this right, penning a sonnet to a Stilton cheese, which, as he acknowledges, contains ‘echoes’ of another well known poem: Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I — She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour... Ray Kelley, John Whitworth and George Simmers were unlucky losers, and while I was impressed by Clementine Travers’s Whitman pastiche the bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty by a whisker. His fellow winners pocket £30 each.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2668 you were invited to submit a poem that contains advice from young to old. Several of you took as your starting point Robert Southey’s po-faced ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and how he gained them’ — or Lewis Carroll’s much more enjoyable parody of it as recited by Alice in chapter five of her Adventures In Wonderland. Michael Birt, Tim Raikes, Katie Mallett and Josephine Boyle impressed but were squeezed out by the winners, printed below, who earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch bags the bonus fiver. You are old, Father William, though threescore and ten Is not the top whack any more, And everyone tells me (though heaven forfend!) You might live to a hundred and four.

In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. You split into two camps: some infused with the bleak spirit of Billie Holiday’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (‘Gloomy is Sunday with shadows I spend it all, / My heart and I have decided to end it all’); others full of the joys of lie-ins, an ocean of colour supplements, bacon and eggs, and Sunday worship. It was Wallace Stevens’s meditation that inspired this challenge, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s response to it earns him the bonus fiver. His fellow winners get £25. I read it first in trancelike puzzlement.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2666 you were invited to supply an example of pretentious tosh in the shape of a review of a TV or radio soap opera or any other piece of entertainment aimed at the mass market. It is tempting with this type of comp to go over the top and points were awarded to those competitors whose tosh, however affected and overblown, had at least the semblance of developing an argument. Patrick Smith and Adrian Fry were unlucky losers; the winners get £30 each except Brian Murdoch, who nets £35. I am not I, they are not they, Coronation Street is not Inkerman Street. Coronation Street is, however, an ongoing paradigm, a speculum humanae vitae, whose cobbles incorporate the Heideggerian necessity of existence.

In Competition No. 2665 you were invited to submit a lullaby suitable for the modern child. ‘But do lullabies lull?’ writes competitor W.J. Webster, who puts an adult fear of heights (not to mention a horror of half-rhymes) down to repeated exposure as a little’un to the strains of ‘Rock-a-bye baby’. Among the more nightmare-inducing elements that you weaved into your songs for the infant of today were global warming, economic meltdown, gastric bands and cyber childcare. There were more winners than space this week, so bad luck to D.A. Prince, George Simmers and Martin Parker, who narrowly missed out. Bill Greenwell pockets the bonus fiver while his fellow winners net £25 apiece.

In Competition 2664 you were invited to submit a dialogue, in verse or prose, between two parts of yourself at odds with one another. As usual, verse entries vastly outnumbered prose ones. In an excellent field, Brian Murdoch, Adrian Fry, Bill Greenwell and Fergus Pickering stood out. Basil Ransome-Davies scoops the bonus fiver for a hilarious exchange between id and superego. This is your superego calling, Who finds your conduct quite appalling. do da dirty do da sin dump da pussy in da bin To raise us from the primal swamp We must curtail the instinct’s romp. why dont we do it in da road up ya bum ya moral code A sense of civic duty needs To govern all our words and deeds.

In Competition No. 2663 you were invited to submit a politically correct version of a well-known fairy tale. The inspiration for this challenge was  Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times by James Finn Garner, who recasts favourite yarns to take account of modern political sensibilities. In  Garner’s PC world, witches are ‘kindness impaired’ and Cinderella wears a robe ‘woven from silk stolen from unsuspecting silkworms’. Bill Greenwell pockets the extra fiver this week. His fellow winners, printed below, get £30 apiece. Honourable mentions go to G.M. Davis, Robert Schechter, Gillian Ewing and Marion Shore.

In Competition No. 2662 you were invited to submit a poem composed in the midst of a travel hold-up. The entry, a magnificent collective letting-off-of-steam, was peppered with exasperated references to apoplectic rage, bursting bladders and bickering children but these were tempered by those who acknowledged that there are benefits in being forced to take things more slowly. Basil Ransome-Davies was one of them, and he pockets the bonus fiver. The other winners, printed below, get £25 each. Honourable mentions go to D.A. Prince, Ray Kelley, Gail White, Bill Greenwell and Joan Harris. When trains are late you wait. There is no     choice.