Lucy Vickery

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

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,

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,

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

In Competition No. 2508 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem in support of Boris Johnson’s bid to become Mayor of London, in which the first letters of each line spell out BORIS FOR MAYOR. In Competition No. 2508 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem in support of Boris Johnson’s bid to

My selection of words was harsh in that there wasn’t much in the way of alternative meanings to play with. You rose to the challenge admirably, though, and submissions were impressively varied and convincing. As Jaspistos has observed before, this type of comp tends to produce a bumper crop of entries, and this week was

In Competition No. 2506 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘A Life With a Hole In It’. In Competition No. 2506 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘A Life With a Hole In It’.This is the title of a poem written by Philip Larkin in 1974, shortly after a

When I set this assignment I was thinking of Pablo Neruda and his odes to subjects as apparently mundane as a lemon, a tomato and ‘a large tuna in the market’.You didn’t go in for food, but animals featured strongly in the entry, as did buildings — Sixties architecture, in particular. Some strayed into unsavoury

In Competition No. 2504 you were invited to invent nine muses for the 21st century.It was left to you to decide which form to use, so variety was the order of the day. Some went for straightforward lists; others for verse. D.A. Prince kindly provided her line-up with symbols, but most didn’t. While the lion’s

In Competition No. 2502 you were invited to submit a review by a critic identifying the literary precursor(s) to a popular music star of your choice. I was originally going to stipulate that the entry be in the style of a rock critic to winkle out the hipsters among you (although Christopher Ricks, whom I

In Competition No. 2499 you were invited to submit a poem eulogising a pet.It was not only Dr Johnson’s Hodge who inspired this assignment; credit, too, goes to Jeoffry, immortalised by Christopher Smart in ‘For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry’ from ‘Jubilate Agno’: ‘…For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature./

In Competition No. 2498 you were invited to submit a speech by one of our newly ‘emotional literate’ politicians unveiling a piece of legislation and incorporating the following words: ‘dysfunctional’, ‘narrative’, ‘empower’, ‘co-dependent’, ‘holistic’, ‘self-actualisation’, ‘closure’. The traditional ministerial waffle of government policy documents now has a new ingredient as politicians vie with each other

As a teenager I devoured, in private and with a tinge of shame, my local library’s entire collection of Mills & Boon, so it was a relief to discover that, according to a recent survey conducted on behalf of the Costa Book Awards, 85 per cent of us have a guilty-secret author whose work we

In Competition no. 2496 you were invited to submit a short story whose final line is ‘Sir, when I heard of him last he was running about town shooting cats.’ The challenge was to make this extract — from a passage in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson about the Doctor’s beloved cat Hodge — follow

In Competition 2495 you were invited to submit a poem establishing the principles of a new religion. This competition was inspired by Larkin’s ‘Water’: My liturgy would employImages of sousing,A furious devout drench… A lot of entries were slightly gloomy satire recommending the twin creeds of selfishness and shopping. Commendations to Barbara Smoker and G.M.

In competition no. 2494 you were invited to submit a poem written by a hypochondriac about a minor ailment.Many of you alluded to the fact that the internet is fertile hunting-ground for the hypochondriac, providing limitless scope for self-diagnosis. Cyberchondria sends hordes of the worried well to their GPs brandishing wads of incontrovertible downloaded ‘evidence’.

In Competition no. 2493 you were invited to take a famous scene from literature and retell it from the point of view of one of its minor characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were plucked by Tom Stoppard from the chorus line and catapulted into the limelight with dazzling results. A lot of you followed Stoppard down

Last Friday, flanked by rows of books and the Blutack-flecked walls of the children’s section of Brixton Library, against a backdrop of wailing sirens, the brilliant Phillip Jeays played to a packed house, although he had mentally prepared himself for an audience of three, he told us. Jeays is a singer-songwriter but don’t let that

In competition No. 2492 you were invited to write a piece of prose entitled ‘Irritable Vowel Syndrome’, without using the letter ‘u’. This assignment should have been a piece of cake. After all, the wild and woolly Frenchman Georges Perec wrote a whopping 300-page novel, La Disparition, without using a single ‘e’. What’s more, Gilbert

In Competition No. 2491 you were invited to submit a piece of prose describing what happens when you wake up one morning to find yourself transformed into an insect but not a beetle. Beetles were outlawed so that you weren’t scribbling quite so much in Kafka’s shadow. But in fact, the correct translation of Ungeziefer