Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 2599 you were invited to step into the shoes of a well-known writer, past or present, and give their account, in verse or prose, of a career path they might have taken. The assignment was inspired by the Observer’s ‘My other life’ column, in which writers reveal their fantasy job. Jan Morris, for example, harbours a desire to take to the waves: ‘If I weren’t me, I would like to be a ship...’. No ships in a large and excellent entry, but step forward Jane Austen, stripper; John Betjeman, trapeze artist; Harold Pinter, florist; Geoffrey Chaucer, astronaut; and John Samson’s Ernest Hemingway, stand-up comedian (‘Which painter had both inside and outside pissoir? Two-loos Lautrec.

In Competition No. 2598 you were invited to provide pithy definitions of Hell. Thanks to Michael Cregan, who proposed this competition and reminded me of Kim Howells MP’s unpopular pronouncement that his idea of Hell was three Somerset folk singers. The folk tradition didn’t crop up in the entry, but you are clearly not fans of the avant-garde; Harrison Birtwistle and John Cage in particular (‘Hell is full of music, all of it Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s’: Adrian Fry). Gerard Benson and Paul Griffin narrowly missed the cut this week. The winners, printed below, get £25 each.

In Competition No. 2597 you were invited to submit a report written by a social worker on a character from Shakespeare. Congratulations all round: you were on top form. All the biggies — Hamlet, Lear, the Macbeths, Richard III — were subjected to the beady if sometimes myopic eye of social services. There were some sparkling examples of death by jargon, among which Adrian Fry stood out. Admirable though a determination to see the good in people is, the blind optimism in some of your reports had a chilling topical resonance.

In Competition No. 2595 you were invited to submit a poem incorporating the titles of at least six Alfred Hitchcock films. On one of my aimless ambles along the information highways and byways, I stumbled upon a quote by Fellini describing The Birds as a ‘filmic poem’, which got me thinking about a Hitchcock-related comp. The master of stylish suspense made more than 50 films, so there were plenty of titles to choose from. Most of you used more than six, and although I wasn’t awarding points on that score, hats off to Jim Hayes, who managed to cram in a stonking 45. W.J. Webster, George Simmers, Michael Brereton and Ray Kelley are unlucky losers. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. Alan Millard gets £30.

In Competition No. 2594 you were invited to submit a short story beginning ‘It was the wrong number that started it...’ and ending ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.’ In case you were wondering, the first line is the opening of City of Glass by Paul Auster and the final one is the conclusion to Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Both rank in the American Book Review’s top hundred first/last lines of novels. The comp generated a gratifyingly weighty postbag in which transposed digits, con artists and murderous spouses featured strongly. I liked Keith Norman’s snapshot of salad rage, and was equally impressed by Sid Field, Rosemary Fisher and Eric Grunwald. The winners are printed below and are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 2593 you were invited to submit a Dear John letter in the style of a poet or author of your choice. These days, dispatching a loved one generally involves texting ‘u r dumped’ or ‘i h8 u’ and pressing send. This comp was prompted by a longing for a return to the time when giving the heave-ho was a protracted business; when jilters sat hunched over a blank sheet of paper for hours on end, agonising over the right choice of words. You were out in force this week, both veterans and newcomers. Verse outnumbered prose by a long way. Robert Burns and Elizabeth Barrett Browning featured strongly, while Joan Hunter Dunn was consigned to the scrapheap with great panache by Katie Mallett and G.M. Davis.

In the dog’s dinner that was Competition No. 2592 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘The Name’ in which each line either was an anagram of the name of a well-known poet or contained an anagram of the same. There are two winners in the first category; three in the second. The first version elicited politely expressed howls of protest from some corners — one competitor likened it to the ‘intellectual equivalent of a full body wax’; mark II produced a collective sigh of relief, though some doughty souls, having already struggled through a week of anagram hell, felt compelled to stick with the original brief. It was acceptable to use either surnames only or the full monty. General congratulations: it was a pig of an assignment.

In Competition No. 2591 you were invited to submit an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information. Your entries not only made me laugh out loud but also armed me with a mine of useless information with which to bring conversations to a grinding halt should the need arise. I have learnt, for example, that it takes four hours to hard-boil an ostrich egg; that Oxford Circus Tube station has 14 escalators; and that Georges Simenon required sexual intercourse thrice daily. Commendations to Marion Shore, Michael Limb, Steve Baldock and Rosemary Fisher, but top dog this week is Basil Ransome-Davies, who bags the bonus fiver. The other winners, printed below, get £25 each.

In Competition No. 2590 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of a form of asceticism. But first, a revision to the brief for last week’s competition no. 2592. I meant to ask for a poem in which each line contains an anagram of the name of a well-known poet. It would be unfair on those brave souls who have already entered to change the comp completely, so instead it will be split into two categories, with three winners in each. Those who wish to stick to the original brief may do so (but beware: one veteran competitor’s entry was accompanied by a note describing the experience as ‘nightmarish’, and there is a discussion thread in cyberspace entitled ‘Speccie Anagram Hell’).

In Competition No. 2589 you were invited to submit an extract from the school essay of a well-known figure past or present, aged eight, entitled ‘What I Did On My Holidays’. It was a large and vivid entry, and competition was hot for a place in the winners’ enclosure. Those narrowly pipped to the post include Adrian Fry’s scary eight-year-old John Stuart Mill: ‘We stopped at a fish and chip stall where, as a philosophical investigation, Father attempted to order only “and”; the linguistic and ontological implications arising from this incident proved unexpectedly sustaining.’ And J.C.H. Mounsey’s John Prescott, clearly already struggling with anger-management issues, who comes to blows with a donkey.

In Competition No. 2588 you were invited to submit spiced-up children’s stories or poems. In the interests of good taste, I steered you in the direction of sauciness rather than smut, but perhaps I needn’t have bothered. According to a book by the amateur historian Chris Roberts, sexual wickedness and political subversion lurk behind the innocuous façade of many popular playground rhymes. Children trilling ‘Jack and Jill’ are inadvertently singing about the loss of virginity, he claims; while ‘Oranges and Lemons’ is a rude wedding song.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2587 you were invited to submit an opening to an imaginary novel so magnificently bad that it would repel any would-be reader. This is an unashamed rip-off of the hugely popular annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which honours the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel Paul Clifford features the immortal and much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ To parody bad writing successfully takes great skill and I hope that this assignment was as enjoyable to grapple with as it was to judge.

In Competition No. 2586 you were invited to submit a convincing apology, on behalf of the banking industry, for the financial meltdown. Overall, the standard was high. Basil Ransome-Davies went into contrition overdrive, managing to cram no fewer than 16 impressively insincere-sounding instances of the word ‘sorry’ into his entry. By ‘sorry’ number seven I was ready to forgive anything. But while Basil seemed to go on and on, William Danes-Volkov kept it brief, making the point that, as a banker’s apology is bound to be short, if not non-existent, the haiku is the most appropriate form: Money fell like leaves Yours was swept, piled and burned My bonus is safe.

In Competition No. 2585 you were invited to submit the memoirs of ten famous figures from history or ten well-known fictional characters, using only six words. In response to a ten-dollar bet that he couldn’t write a six-word short story, Hemingway came up with the haunting mini-masterpiece ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Which, as well as inspiring this challenge, spawned an enormously successful contest, run by the online magazine Smith, that invites readers to tell their life story in half-a-dozen words. Autobiography is not traditionally associated with brevity but perhaps keeping it concise is the way to go in an age of shrinking attention spans. Which is not to say that the briefest of sketches cannot give the reader hours of speculative fun filling in the gaps.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2584 you were invited to contribute to the wave of Darwin mania sweeping the globe by submitting limericks to mark the bicentenary of the naturalist’s birth. Limerick comps are guaranteed to pull in the punters and this one prompted a flood of biblical proportions, with a lot of unfamiliar names — from the United States, in particular. There is room for only 17, which meant that many worthy contenders didn’t make the cut. So in the interests of making way for as many winners as possible, I’ll put a sock in it. Those printed below are rewarded with a princely £8 apiece.

In Competition No. 2583 you were invited to provide an extract from one of the following chapters which appear in a real work of modern literary criticism: ‘Noddy: Discursive Threads and Intertextuality’; ‘Sexism or Subversion: Querying Gender relations in The Famous Five and Malory Towers’. I was pulled up by one regular competitor (obviously not a member of the Noddy Club) for setting two challenges, within a relatively short space of time, requiring knowledge of Enid Blyton’s oeuvre. While often panned by adults, Blyton’s books are enormously popular with children.

In Competition No. 2582 you were invited to submit proverbs for the 21st century. Reading the entry brought to mind the magnificently mangled proverbs of Patrick O’Brian’s Captain Jack Aubrey (‘There’s a great deal to be said for making hay while the iron is hot’; ‘A bird in the hand waits for no man’). Your nuggets of contemporary folk wisdom made rather more sense, though. It was a large postbag bristling with wit and cynicism. That scourge of the television schedules, the celebrity chef, was a popular target. Brian Murdoch sums it up neatly: ‘Too many cooks. Period’. An equally hot topic was the credit crunch and its related horrors.

In Competition No. 2581 you were invited to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it in Franglais. The challenge was inspired by Miles Kington’s masterly The Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Literary Masterpieces, and the standard was top-tiroir. You inflicted mongrel French and English on the literary classics to great comic effect. Here is G.M. Davis’s version of the opening to Rimbaud’s ‘A Season in Hell’: ‘Il y a yonks, si je remember correctement, j’avais it large, avec beaucoup de bons mates and beaucoup de plonk flowing...’ Formidable! There were some unfamiliar names sprinkled among the seasoned veterans. A commendation goes to Jane Robertson, while the winners, printed below, net £25 each.

In Competition No. 2580 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘New Year Letter’, concluding with the words ‘under the familiar weight of winter, conscience and the state’. This couplet opens Auden’s long and oft-maligned verse epistle ‘New Year Letter’. Writing in the New Statesman in 1941, G.S. Fraser complained that he’d read the poem ‘five times with a mixture of astonishment, boredom, pleasure and increasing scepticism’ and had still been unable to fathom the author’s philosophical position. A large and varied entry puzzled and occasionally bored but overall it made for a pleasing read. There were star turns from William Danes-Volkov, Andrew Mason, Shirley Curran and D.A.

In Competition No. 2579 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of or denouncing the world wide web. In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, thorn in the side of Web 2.0, rails against the calamitous effects of user-generated web content on our culture, bemoaning the emergence of ‘digital narcissism’ and the resulting proliferation of inane and banal content in cyberspace. On the whole, you agree with him, although there are a few fans out there. Brian Murdoch begins: ‘I think I should like to perform a celebratory pirouette/ to honour the w.w.w. aka the internet...’. It was a strong field this week. Mary Holtby and Josh Ekroy deserve a special mention but the winners, printed below, get £25 each. Bill Greenwell nabs the extra fiver.