Lucy Vickery

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.

In Competition No. 2540 you were invited to take a historical event and submit a newspaper leader on it in the style of either the Guardian, the Daily Mail or the Sun. There are some richly comic examples of the art of red-top headline writing in John Perry’s and Neil Roberts’s Hold Ye Front Page, a Sun-style romp through two millennia of history which features some spectacular punning. Highlights include: ‘Nazi Piece of Work’; ‘The Joy of Six’ (Henry VIII); ‘Napoleon Blown Apart’; and ‘You Canute be Serious’. And as far as share of entry was concerned it was the Sun wot won it, outnumbering the Mail and Guardian by two to one submissions. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. Brian Murdoch pockets the extra fiver.

In Competition No. 2538 you were invited to submit an extract from one of the following books: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself; Nuclear War: What’s in it For You; The Joys of Cataloguing. These are all genuine titles taken from the hugely entertaining Bizarre Books by Russell Ash and Brian Lake. I’m with W.J. Webster, who accompanied his entry about talking to yourself with a heartfelt note: ‘This is all horribly close to home!’. As many of you acknowledged, the advent of mobile phones has been a godsend to those of us who are in the habit of chatting animatedly to ourselves in public.

In Competition No. 2537 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘The Song of the Chartered Accountant’. You were allowed to substitute an alternative profession. I interpreted the word ‘profession’ loosely and was tempted by Mike Morrison’s personal shopper and touched by Martin Parker’s sexually frustrated retired flea-circus trainer, though they didn’t make the final line-up in the end. Chartered accountants are traditionally described in shades of grey, and many of you went down that route. But leading the field this week is Basil Ransome-Davies, who gets the bonus fiver. I was won over by his portrayal of a pin-striped-suited wage slave’s hot-blooded alter ego. D.A.

In Competition No. 2536 you were invited to take an apparently unpromising holiday location, or a superficially unappealing activity holiday, and give it the hard sell in prose or verse form. One of my favourite spots is Dungeness in Kent. A nuclear power station might not be everyone’s cup of tea but its brooding presence adds considerably to the haunting charm of this eerie wilderness. I wasn’t convinced, though, by Sue Cain’s utilitarian case for a holiday spent cleaning her house: ‘...you can take all your newly learned skills back home and put them to good use’. Hmm.

In Competition No. 2535 you were invited to submit a version of a Bible story recast for the atheist/agnostic market. This assignment, inspired by initiatives such as the Manga comic Bible and the Australian Bible Society’s text-message version of the Good Book, takes efforts to improve the accessibility of the Christian message to an absurd extreme in the interests of testing your powers of wit and ingenuity. It was a strong field and difficult to whittle down to six. Alanna Blake, Gerard Benson, Josh Ekroy, Virginia Price-Evans and Mrs E. Emerk were pipped at the post by the winners, printed below, who each get £25. The bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty’s rationalist Job.

In Competition No. 2534 you were invited to submit an extract from a speech given by the presenter of a Lifetime Achievement award at the Oscars in which the discerning listener can detect that the speaker is not as ‘delighted’ for the recipient as they purport to be. The film industry is clearly a cut-throat business and it is safe to assume that beneath the veneer of back-slapping and mutual congratulation at awards ceremonies runs an undercurrent of bitter rivalry. We can only imagine the outrage and vitriol that lurks behind the rictus smiles and brave applause of the losers. Hats off, then, to Bill Murray who, at the 2004 Oscars, turned his back on this collective hypocrisy and sat stony-faced, resolutely refusing to clap as fellow nominee Sean Penn collected his award.

If you are in awe of the wit and skill of those who appear regularly on the Spectator’s weekly competition pages, and are looking for an antidote to doom and gloom, do visit www.lightenup-online.co.uk, a new quarterly online magazine showcasing the best of contemporary light verse. It is edited by Martin Parker, a veteran competitor, and the first edition features comic gems by familiar names such as Bill Greenwell and D.A. Prince.

In Competition No. 2533 you were invited to submit an obituary of a well-known fictional character, which gave you the opportunity to try your hand at what is an often underrated art. The only fictional character that I am aware of who has been honoured with an obituary in the real world is Hercule Poirot, whose death was marked by a front-page splash on 6 August 1975 — in the New York Times, no less. There was a record postbag this week, with a welcome influx of newcomers. Popular subjects included William Brown, Sherlock Holmes and various members of the cast of the Pooh stories. While some of you stuck fairly closely to the fictional facts, others indulged in flights of fancy.

In Competition No. 2532 you were invited to take a recent news item and compress it into 25 words. I am grateful to Eric Smith in the West Indies who suggested the idea and drew my attention to the shadowy figure of Félix Fénéon, art critic and anarchist, among other things. His fait divers, or news in brief, published over the course of 1906 in Le Matin newspaper, are the work of a supreme stylist. Fénéon gravitated towards material that was violent, bloody and macabre, which he distilled into elegant, deadpan three-liners. Les Nouvelles en Trois Lignes was published last year as Novels in Three Lines in a translation by Luc Santé.

A couple of years ago there was a programme on the BBC in which well-known public figures gamely revealed the contents of their school reports. We learnt that Margaret Thatcher was a ray of sunshine in the classroom: ‘Her cheeriness makes her a very pleasant member of her form’. And if David Beckham (‘makes good cakes’) is looking for a career change he could always give Mr Kipling a call. There was a bumper crop of entries this week. Commendations to Barry Baldwin and Lynn Haken for entertaining glimpses of the schoolboy Jesus. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece. Top of the form is Bill Greenwell, who scoops the extra fiver.

In Competition No. 2529 you were invited to submit a poem describing what women are like. It was Wendy Cope’s funny and poignant poem ‘Bloody Men’ that prompted the comp. There was no obligation to mimic her style, though several did. A disturbing if familiar image emerged from some, though by no means all, of your entries of women as gossipy, ball-breaking, capricious shopaholics obsessed with the size of their bottoms — with increasingly good reason as the years pass.  Those who steered clear of cliché, or who leavened the unpalatable picture with an added twist of some kind, stood out. There were wise words from W.J.

Lucy Vickery presents the winners of Competition No. 2528 In Competition No. 2528 you were invited to submit an extract from an imaginary story in the Famous Five series written in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction. So it’s Blyton meets Hammett; the upper-middle-class crime-busting quintet, whose adventures are played out in a 1950s rural idyll punctuated by picnics and bicycle rides, filtered through the prism of gritty 1930s urban America, what Raymond Chandler calls ‘a world gone wrong’. Your entries bore many hard-boiled hallmarks: sharp repartee, staccato delivery, economy of expression, psychological drama, black humour and liberal use of simile; though there was a tendency to overdo it. The winners, printed below, get £25 each.

No. 2530: Show me the child You are invited to submit an extract from the school report of a well-known public figure, past or present (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2530’ by 31 January or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition No. 2527 you were invited to submit an extract from a Christmas round robin sent by a well-known historical figure. Dr Hugh de Glanville and Mrs E. Emerk pulled me up on the use of ‘round robin’ to mean a circular letter but my edition of Chambers allows it, as does Wikipedia, which is not everyone’s idea of an authoritative source.

In Competition No. 2525 you were invited to submit a poem in which the opening of Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’ was adapted so that ‘two thousand and seven’ was substituted for ‘nineteen sixty-three’ and ‘sexual intercourse’ replaced by whatever you considered appropriate. Many of your entries had a Larkin-esque bleakness and grim humour. Here’s William Danes-Volkov, man of few words: My writing career began/ In two thousand and seven/ And ended.

In Competition No. 2524 you were invited to condense a Jane Austen novel into a limerick. You rose admirably to the challenge, and, as befits a competition based on the Austen oeuvre, your entries displayed sparkling wit, pithy observation and, in the main, metrical accuracy. (Although some of you are clearly not members of the J.A. appreciation society.) There was an absence of the ribaldry and innuendo traditionally associated with the limerick form, but the smutty possibilities of ‘Knightley’ proved irresistible to some. Gerard Benson’s final line, ‘And Emma gets her Mister, nightly’, was typical. There were entertaining contributions from Penelope Mackie, V.

Competition No. 2526: Mixed messages   You are invited to submit a newspaper article from the health pages which reveals that something previously thought to be bad for you has been found to boost longevity. Maximum 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2526’ by 2 January or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition No. 2523 you were invited to submit a review of one of Charles Dickens’s novels written by a character from another Dickens novel. The most frequently occurring bylines by far were those of Ebenezer Scrooge, Gradgrind, Wilkins Micawber and Alfred Jingle.