Lucy Vickery

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.

In Competition 2522 you were asked to submit a right-wing protest song. There are some fine examples of this underexploited genre in Tim Robbins’s mock-documentary film Bob Roberts which features a guitar-playing senatorial candidate who appropriates the language of the Sixties protest movement to peddle his ultra-conservative message. The campaign trail is peppered with numbers such as ‘Times Are Changin’ Back’ and ‘My Land’, which rail against drugs and lazy people. The standard was disappointing this week, with only four of you making the cut. Most went for the anthemic model of Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger, but this is hard to pull off from a right-wing perspective that lacks the righteous indignation of a mass movement feeling oppressed.

No. 2524: Condensing Jane You are invited to condense a Jane Austen novel into a limerick (maximum three entries each). Entries to ‘Competition 2524’ by 6 December or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2521 you were invited to submit an anecdote by a dinner-party bore that culminates in the dubious claim, ‘And that is how I came to eat a cucumber sandwich with the King of Norway.’ When Jaspistos was in hospital earlier this year one of his fellow inmates liked to ensnare nurses in a vice-like grip and subject them to dull and lengthy anecdotes, one of which culminated in this triumphant final flourish.

In Competition 2520 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’. In Competition 2520 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’. Betjeman’s portrayal of road rage in ‘Meditation on the A30’ — ‘You’re barmy or plastered, I’ll pass you, you bastard/ I will overtake you, I will — set me thinking about the misery inflicted by the London Orbital; those hours spent in a state of toddler-like fury with no discernible end in sight. I’m very fond of the A30, for all its faults, and wondered if perhaps the M25 has redeeming features I’ve failed to notice. Not as far as the comping contingent is concerned. Here’s G.

Competition No. 2522: Right on You are invited to submit a right-wing protest song (16 lines maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2522’ by 22 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2519 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘A Song from under the Floorboards’. There is a track of the same name by the post-punk band Magazine whose cheerless first line, ‘I am angry, I am ill and I’m as ugly as sin’, is delivered such relish by frontman Howard Devoto that it almost makes you wish you were him; equally mesmerising is James Mason’s performance as the narrator in the 1953 animated adaptation of the spine-tingling Edgar Allen Poe short story ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, which some of you alluded to.

Competition No. 2521: Tall tale You are invited to submit an anecdote by a dinner-party bore that culminates in the dubious claim: ‘And that is how I came to eat a cucumber sandwich with the King of Norway’. (150 words maximum.) Entries to ‘Competition 2521’ by 15 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2518 you were invited to provide an extract from the adolescent diary of a famous historical figure. Teenagers today publish their diaries online as blogs. How they can bring themselves to do this is beyond me — my own adolescent outpourings, a predictably toecurling blend of tormented introspection and pretentious pseudo-philosophy punct­uated by quotations from Nietzsche and Leonard Cohen — were kept firmly under lock and key.

Competition No. 2520: On the road You are invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Meditation on the M25’ (maximum 16 lines). Entries to ‘Competition 2520’ by 8 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk. In Competition 2517 you were invited to submit a nonsense poem with the first line ‘They went to see in a Sieve, they did...’, the opening to Edward Lear’s ‘The Jumblies’. This was an opportunity to leave reason behind and to make merry with verbal inventiveness, incongruous juxtapositions and distorted spelling. One of appealing things about nonsense verse is that the surreal, topsy-turvy worlds conjured up have their own internal logic, and I especially liked entries that managed to get this across.

Who has not stared blankly at a bewildering installation and wondered what the blazes it was all about? Given that ideas are so fundamental to this sort of art, what we clueless punters need is clarification, not obfuscation. Which makes it all the more annoying when critics write in what seems to be a willfully abstruse way. The topic obviously struck a chord. There were some hilariously impenetrable entries and commendations go to Bill Greenwell and David Blaber. John O’Byrne invited failure and, in an act of subversion (and because it’s good), I have included him among the winners below, who get £25 each. Simon Machin pockets this week’s bonus fiver.  We Modern Art prophets were right!

In Competition 2515 you were invited to supply Ten Commandments for a belief system, real or invented, of your choice. As traditional authority figures and sources of identity crumble round our ears, people (who, when it comes down to it, quite like to be told what to do) are casting around for new rule books. Take, for example, Pastafarianism, or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was drawn to my attention by Brian Murdoch. Founded in the US by physics graduate Bobby Henderson in protest at the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools (religion masquerading as science, as Henderson saw it), it has eight ‘I’d really rather you didn’ts’, known as the Loose Canon. Or maybe one of this week’s winning entries ‘speaks to you’.

Twenty years ago when I worked at Our Price Records the thing we shop assistants dreaded most were customers who would march up to the counter and announce that they’d heard this song on the radio by [insert artist’s name] before launching into a toe-curling rendition which we were expected to identify. Today’s Virgin Megastore employees are presumably spared such agonising encounters thanks to Web 2.0, which has spawned countless resources for tracking down a snippet of music that has tickled your fancy. My favourite is foxytunes.com which allows you to search for an artist and brings together, on a single page, relevant elements from all corners of the web: videos from YouTube, Google search results, similar artists from last.

In Competition No. 2514 you were invited to recast a fairy tale as a rap. I thought that fairy tales might translate well into the language of rap. After all, violence is a dominant theme in both genres (especially in the Grimms’ original x-rated versions, which featured scenes of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest that would make Stephen King blanch). The winners this week, printed below, were outstanding. Convincing raps, like successful Mills & Boon romances, are not easy to pull off. So it’s a well-deserved £30 each. Natural-born rapper Bill Greenwell nets the bonus fiver.

In Competition No. 2513 you were invited to submit a Spectator Love Bug ad for a well-known literary character. I was hoping for such comic gems as grace the compellingly quirky lonely-hearts column in the London Review of Books: ‘Eager-to-please woman, 36, seeks domineering man to take advantage of her flagging confidence. Tell me I’m pretty and watch me cling’. This potentially suicidal self-deprecation produces ads that are both hilarious and touching — and apparently successful from time to time. What woman could fail to be won over by Quasimodo’s honesty, courtesy of John Plowman: ‘You say personality matters more than looks? Well, I’m your man.

In Competition No. 2512 you were invited to submit a description of a hangover in heroic couplets. I judged the comp after a night’s carousing and your couplets, which were clearly informed by bitter experience, elicited shudders of queasy recognition and the inevitable doomed resolution never again to touch a drop. Simon Machin’s reference to being beaten up by secret police recalls Kingsley Amis’s unforgettable, wince-inducing description of Jim Dixon’s hangover: ‘And body sprawled as if in pained release,/ From being beaten by the secret police’. And thanks to Virginia Price Evans for a vivid description of drunkenness rather than its consequences. The winners, printed below, get £25 each and the extra fiver goes to Basil Ransome-Davies.

If you ever roll your eyes to heaven in despair at the pretentious nonsense spouted by some rock journalists you might enjoy Graeme’s Thomson’s post on Guardian Unlimited’s music blog, where he calls for an immediate ban on the use of ‘brave’, ‘dark’ and ‘edgy’ in any album review. Although I’m 100% with Graeme on this one I should point out that this link was sent to me by a well-wisher after I’d used the d-word with reference to Serafina Steer, the foul-mouthed harpist from Hackney who we’d just seen in action (I did grapple briefly for an alternative adjective, honest, but I couldn’t think of one).

In Competition No. 2511 you were invited to describe, in prose or verse, Christopher Robin’s first day at a comprehensive school. In Competition No. 2511 you were invited to describe, in prose or verse, Christopher Robin’s first day at a comprehensive school. The idea was to wrench Pooh’s chum from a cosy world of Nanny, Hornby train-sets and bedtime prayers and plunge him into the lawless pandemonium of an inner-city comprehensive, where presumably the only ‘hoppity hopping’ he’d be doing would be to dodge the bullets, and his fellow pupils would more likely have a dose of the clap than sneezles and wheezles. How did he fare? Over to you. The comp was a pleasure to judge; commendations to Mike Morrison and Paul Griffin.

In Competition No. 2510 you were asked to submit a scene from The Archers written in the style of D.H. Lawrence. Entries were thin on the ground this week. Perhaps you just couldn’t face Lawrence and his much-mocked florid excesses — or maybe it was The Archers that put you off. Fewer didn’t mean worse, though, and there were some fine Lawrentian flourishes. Alanna Blake exploits parallels between Clarrie Grundy’s current tight-lipped disapproval of William’s new girlfriend Nic, and Paul Morel’s mother’s smouldering resentment towards Miriam Leivers in Sons and Lovers. A normally affable Eddie metamorphoses into the volatile and violent Walter Morel.

In Competition No. 2509 you were asked to provide an extract from a Victorian self-help book. Self-help by Samuel Smiles was a hit when it was published in 1859. Almost 150 years later it is described on Amazon.com as ‘the precursor of today’s motivational and self-help literature’. This strikes me as a rather desperate attempt by marketing people to tap into the seemingly insatiable appetite of modern self-help addicts. They may be in for disappointment, though. There are no quick fixes from Smiles, who preaches hard work, thrift and perseverance, a message that won’t go down well with today’s debt-laden, I-want-it-and-I-want-it-now generation.