Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 2574 you were invited to take a poem, or a fragment of a poem, and anagrammatise it to make a new poem. Some of you were unsure exactly what it was I was after. I was asking you to break down a poem, or part of it, into its constituent letters and rearrange those letters to make a new poem. Judging by the unprecedentedly low turnout, and by some of your comments, this was a daunting assignment. ‘If only one had nothing else to do!’ wrote Mary Holtby; while Basil Ransome-Davies expressed the hope that the comp was as hard to adjudicate as it was to do. Well, I was prepared to share your pain, Basil, but was spared, thanks to a technologically able well-wisher, who came up with a computer program for checking anagrams.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2573 you were invited to submit the synopsis of a sequel-that-was-never-written to a well-known novel. Sequels to books and films have a poor reputation, the assumption being that, with the odd exception (The Godfather: Part II, for example), they will almost certainly fall short of the original. I learned this lesson early having looked forward with rabid excitement to Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, which failed to live up to its predecessor. You were all on sparkling form this week. In John O’Byrne’s follow-up to Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s repressed incestuous desire finds its true expression and he marries Phoebe, but lives unhappily ever after.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2572 you were invited to provide a rugby- or football-style song for another sport. After I’d set the assignment, it occurred to me that it runs counter to the spirit of football chants and rugby songs, which seem to arise spontaneously on the terraces and in the pub rather than being laboriously composed at home by dedicated chant-writers. The best are almost always lewd and often downright offensive — as W.J. Webster commented, they make Jonathan Ross sound prim — and while they are undoubtedly funny when heard in context, they look crass on the page.

In Competition No. 2571 you were invited to submit an extract from the life story of a famous figure from history written in the style of a contemporary misery memoir. The seemingly insatiable appetite for tales of other people’s torment and degradation that keeps ‘mis lit’ at the top of the bestseller lists is as depressing as the subject matter of the books themselves, which may be why, overall, you were on less sparkling form than usual this week. As one might expect, the Tudors loomed large, but I was surprised no one chose Job, surely the original misery memoirist.

In Competition No. 2570 you were invited to take any song by the Beatles or by Elvis Presley and rewrite it in the style of the poet of your choice. It’s a long way from Scotty Moore to Middle Scots but that didn’t stop Penelope Mackie, who submitted a fine rendition of ‘All Shook Up’ in the style of William Dunbar. I was also impressed by Chris O’Carroll’s ‘Yellow Submarine’ by Walt Whitman: ‘We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine./ Do I repeat myself? Very well then I repeat myself./ We all live...’ etc. etc.  Well done, too, to Ray Kelley, Michael Cregan, Gerard Benson, Julie Kane, Frank McDonald, W.J. Webster, Martin Parker, John Whitworth, David Silverman and Jill Green.

In Competition No. 2569 you were invited to describe a modern social ill of your choice in the style of Charles Dickens. Ills singled out included bellowing down mobile phones in public, elusive plumbers, and that scourge of the modern age, the potato wedge. Many entries ably demonstrate what George Orwell describes as Dickens’s ‘undisguised repulsion’ at proletarian roughness. Josephine Boyle captures Dickens at his moralising best, while D.A. Prince, on bad language, nimbly slips in a topical slant: ‘Filth even on the answering devices of frail grandfathers...’. Great stuff. Bravo to those narrowly pipped to the post: the above-mentioned, as well as Adrian Fry, Brian Murdoch, Paul Griffin, Frank McDonald and P.C. Parrish.

In Competition No. 2568 you were invited to submit, in verse or prose, a profile of the typical Spectator competitor. The picture that emerges is not all together flattering: a monomaniacal oddbod, almost certainly male (even if he uses a female name) and no longer in the first flush of youth, who nurses a simmering resentment at a] the world’s failure to acknowledge his true literary genius and b] the inexplicable absence of his entry in a given week from the winning line-up. ‘A fusion of deranged conceit and volcanic anxiety verging on paranoia,’ writes Basil Ransome-Davies, and he should know. Some of you put forward the theory that there is only one competitor who enters under a variety of pseudonyms.

In Competition No. 2567 you were invited to submit a letter of application for a job of your choosing written by a character from a novel or poem who would appear to be a very unpromising candidate. Thank you to Michael Cregan — the idea for this comp is one of his, tweaked by me. Keith Norman made a persuasive pitch on behalf of the Pied Piper of Hamelin for the post of Head of Music at Eton: ‘I can, with all confidence, promise to take your entire student body with me in whatever I undertake...’, while Andrew Mason’s Ancient Mariner, applying to be Seabird Conservation Officer — ‘If you do give me the job, I can assure you that I will give it my very best shot...’ — made me groan and smile in equal measure.

In Competition No. 2566 you were invited to submit a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first. Many of your entries struck a grimly topical note with key lines such as ‘Greed driven swine’ and ‘Gordon Brown is mad’. Others turned their attention to the natural world, but here too the tone remained downbeat and melancholic: ‘So autumn closes in’; ‘The falling leaves’; you get the idea. I was cheered, though, by some of the quirkier openings; in particular, Celeste Francis’s intriguing ‘I’d give you a kidney’ and Martin Elster’s ‘Fido chased a doe’.

In Competition No. 2565 you were invited to submit a poem about the minor irritations of life written in heroic couplets. Things that bring out the misanthropist in me include ‘comedy’ stickers on cars (e.g., ‘my other car’s a Porsche!’), the over-enthusiastic use of exclamation marks and strangers who say ‘cheer up, love; it may never happen’, which strikes me as a very risky statement. High on yours were poor grammar, impenetrable packaging and anyone who chirrups ‘have a nice day’. And I now know that those who seek to reassure me with claims that no one minds my baby son’s piercing squawks on public transport are lying. The winners, printed below, get £25 each except Mary Holtby, who gets £30.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2564 you were invited to submit a feature looking back at the Olympic Games written in the overblown style of a sportswriter with literary pretensions. High-brow followers of football are nothing new. And these days, as people flit increasingly freely between high and low culture, there is nothing unusual about the sight of a fan leafing through a volume of Barthes during half-time at Millwall. But the spectre of Pseuds Corner hovers over the sports pages and some writers can’t resist spicing up their prose with wince-inducing metaphors and clunking literary allusions. There are some fine examples from this week’s deserving winners, who are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 2550 you were invited to submit a children’s story or a poem written in the style of an established author who has never published in that genre. The challenge produced a lacklustre response in the main with a few top-notch exceptions. The entry was split evenly between verse and prose, and it’s hats off to the poets, who triumphed this week. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. George Simmers scoops the bonus fiver. I’ve got infants on the brain as I’m having a baby soon. In my absence you’ll be in the capable hands of James Young. Please note the new email address for entries. His boot was fashioned for the spade’s lug.

In Competition No. 2549 you were invited to find a gap in the language and plug it, explaining the etymology of your coinage. There is a word, ‘sniglet’, created by the American comedian and writer Rich Hall, which describes ‘any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary but should’. There were some fine sniglets in the postbag this week. Frank McDonald’s ‘carcophonist’ — ‘a driver, usually a young male, who is keen that everyone should hear the music he’s playing in his car’ — is a useful insult to hurl at offending motorists though it’s unlikely that they’ll hear you.

In Competition No. 2548 you were invited to submit sales particulars for a property well known in literature in your best estate-agent-ese. It was a capacious entry, which benefited from unrivalled clichés and florid, tautological prose. You aped the estate agent’s way of accentuating the positive well. We all know that ‘bijou’ translates as ‘broom cupboard’ and that ‘convenient for motorway access’ would be more accurately rendered as ‘suitable for the hard of hearing’.

No. 2549: New word order The journalist Peter Lubin coined the word ‘sesquilingualist’ to describe people who have a smattering of a foreign language. You are invited to find a gap in the language and plug it, explaining the etymology of your coinage (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2549’ by 12 June or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition No. 2546 you were invited to submit a dialogue between unlikely pairs from real life or fiction who happen to share the same surname. I would pay good money to eavesdrop on an exchange between the truculent Fall frontman Mark E. Smith and the father of economics, Adam Smith; or guardian of moral rectitude Mary Whitehouse and the boundary-pushing comedian Paul Whitehouse.

In Competition No. 2545 you were invited to submit a letter written by a well-known literary character to an insurance company making a personal accident claim. My favourite ludicrous compensation claim — which generated the classic Sun headline ‘Safeway leaflet crippled my dog’ — was made against the unfortunate supermarket chain by a couple after their dachshund injured itself leaping up to grab a store leaflet that had been posted through the letter-box. The standard was cracking —  commendations to Noel Petty, John O’Byrne, Mae Scanlon and Mrs E. Emerk. W.J. Webster’s entry strayed from the brief but was too enjoyable to be left out. The winners get £25 apiece, and the bonus fiver goes to Basil Ransome-Davies.

In Competition No. 2544 you were invited to submit a shopping list in verse form, making the last word of every line a brand name. Although I try to vary the competitions as much as possible, this is the second list-poem assignment in a row. As this was, at least in part, an attempt to respond to the market — consumer demand is high for verse-based comps, which seem to attract a larger entry than prose ones — I thought shopping and brands an appropriate theme. Randall Jarrell uses detergent brand names to great ironic effect in the first line of his poem ‘Next Day’, in which a woman wanders the supermarket aisles mourning the loss of a younger self: ‘Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,/ I take a box/ And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens..

In Competition No. 2543 you were invited to submit a poem about the things people need to live on, in which the first letter of each line spells out the first 16 letters of the alphabet. Martin Parker, self-confessed ‘crawler’, played the flattery card (he was not alone), which had no bearing whatsoever, of course, on his inclusion in the winners’ enclosure. His is a Betjeman-esque nostalgia for a now almost bygone era. It provides a nice counterpoint to Mike Morrison’s grim lament on what makes today’s world go around. He bags the extra fiver, while the other winners, printed below, net £25 each. Honourable mentions to Brian Murdoch, Basil Ransome-Davies and R.S. Gwynn.

In Competition No. 2542 you were invited to submit a ghost story entitled ‘The Face of the Horse’. I read the entries by flickering candlelight in a bid to recreate the atmosphere of the dean’s rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, where M.R. James gave Christmas Eve readings of his stories to a group of friends. By all accounts these were jocular, camp occasions punctuated by laughter, pranks and abstruse jokes, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the comedy — intentional or not — in your entries; G.M. Davis’s speaking horse was a stroke of comic genius.

In Competition No. 2541 you were invited to submit a revealing fragment from an index which is all that remains of the autobiography of someone who has privileged access to the great and good. It might have been a member of the royal household or, as in W.J. Webster’s entry, a hairdresser to the rich, famous and influential. To give you an idea of what I was after, here are a couple of snippets from J.G.