Lucy Vickery

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 territory, musing on pubic hair and other unmentionables. Martin Parker made me smile with his meditation on the marvels of the she-baboon’s bum, which might not be everybody’s cup of tea but is clearly a thing of beauty to the amorous male of the species: ‘So, here’s to the she-baboon’s Technicolor bum,/ and its promise of the amatory action that’s to come...

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 share of entrants had fun coming up with 21st-century names, William Danes-Volkov went out on a limb, sticking to the designations of the original nine but giving them new jobs, more fitting to the modern age.Bill Greenwell hit the spot with ‘Proactiviope, the muse of business memoranda and blue sky thinking’ as did Michael Saxby’s ‘Portia, the muse of fast motoring’. A commendation goes to Frank McDonald.

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 pegged the comp. to, was coming at Dylan from the perspective of an academic). But unsure how much of a crossover there would be between the readership of The Spectator and that of the NME, I lost my nerve and plumped instead for ‘critic’, which seemed to cover all bases.

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./ For he is tenacious of his point./ For he is a misture of gravity and waggery./...’A rather more unusual pet, belonging to the bohemian poet Gérard de Nerval, was brought to life by Bill Greenwell.

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 to feel our pain, threatening to drown us in an ocean of empathy. David Cameron’s much-mocked ‘Hug a hoodie’ slogan is but one example.

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 read avidly but never in public. Perhaps there are some closet Jilly Cooper fans out there; some of you made a mightily convincing stab at taking off the queen of the racy romp. I liked Tom Durrheim’s Violet Elizabeth swooning over William’s ‘hard magnetism: the square shoulders, the tousled hair, the glittering eyes that twinkled with eternal mischief’, and J. Seery’s saucy Romeo. The winners, printed below, get £25 each. W.J.

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 on convincingly from the rest of the story rather than appearing to be tacked awkwardly on to the end. The standard was disappointing; a lot of entries stormed along promisingly only to falter badly at the final hurdle. Liz Childs played a blinder, though, and is a worthy recipient of the bonus fiver. I’m reliably informed that her story is packed with in-jokes for physicists. The other prizewinners, printed below, get £30 each.

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. Davis, and to Moyra Blyth for her paean to the carrot, but the winning poems are printed below. The prizewinners each receive £30, and the bonus fiver goes to D.A. Prince. My faithful ones, our principles must beBoth carbon-neutral and pure, GM-free.No living creature should be harmed (though germsMay be exempted, as any gastric worms).

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’. What hypochon-driacs crave above all else, of course, is vindication. To doubting doctors, spouses, friends and family, the message rang out loud and clear: ‘You’ll be sorry...’ — or, as the epitaph on Spike Milligan’s gravestone reads, ‘I told you I was ill’.The winners, printed below, get £30 each. The bonus fiver goes to a restrained W.J.

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 the Hamlet route, but tended to veer uneasily into dodgy cod-Shakespearean territory. While many went for pastiche, others, like Adrian Fry with his account of Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party filtered through the covetous eyes of Otho Sackville-Baggins, steered clear of the voice of the original author. Brian Murdoch’s take on Lucky Jim Dixon’s ‘Merrie England’ speech was impressive but the extra fiver goes to Bill Greenwell.

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 put you off. He bears no resemblance to James Blunt. Think more Jacques Brel meets a young David Bowie then throw in a dash of Sondheim and a touch of Satan (but in a good way) — and still you wouldn’t quite have it. The man defies description. It’s amazing that his combination of barbed yet self-deprecatory lyrics and impassioned delivery hasn’t catapulted him into the big time. Then again, perhaps it’s not.

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 Adair translated it into ‘e’-free English — an heroic feat. There was no getting away from Nancy Mitford this week, who popped up in lots of entries, including that of bonus-fiver recipient W.J. Webster. The other winners, printed below, net £25 apiece. ‘Open wide and say “Ah”.’‘I don’t have a problem with my R’s, Doctor. It’s the old I.O.

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 is vigorously disputed. In his lecture on The Metamorphosis Nabokov insisted that Gregor Samsa’s new incarnation was not as a cockroach, as it is sometimes rendered, but as a ‘big beetle’ with wings, capable of flight had he but known it. The more generous than usual wordcount means fewer winners. G.

In Competition No. 2490 you were invited to give an account of the life of a historical figure condensed into seven days. The assignment was inspired by a 19th-century nursery rhyme which tells the bleak tale of Solomon Grundy, who was born on a Monday and apparently dead by Sunday. It struck terror into me as a child, having the tone of a cautionary tale but giving no discernible clue as to what SG might have done to deserve such a grim fate. Of course I know now that it’s a riddle, stupid. The standard was exceptionally high, and it was a struggle to whittle it down to just six. The bonus fiver, though, goes to Basil Ransome-Davies. The other prizewinners, printed below, get a well-deserved £25 each. Friday, April 13, 1906. Born astride the grave in Foxrock. Why Foxrock?

Perhaps it’s the association with The Goodies and with Dennis Nilsen, serial killer, but people are reluctant to admit that they live in Cricklewood. ‘Well, it’s sort of on the Hampstead border,’ they mutter sheepishly, when quizzed on their new home. But they’ll be hollering it from the top of Brent Cross shopping centre before long if Cricklewood Redevelopment Ltd has anything to do with it. ‘It was a place a man came in order to go to other places via the A41’ is how Zadie Smith describes the area in her novel White Teeth. But though roads dominate this unglamorous suburb — the A406 North Circular, the A5, the A41 and the mighty M1 — Cricklewood was a traffic-free backwater for centuries.

E17 may seem an unlikely candidate to be gracing the glossy pages of style magazines, but the area — birthplace of William Morris and home to the ‘greyhound racing stadium of the millennium’ — is blossoming. These days the association between Walthamstow and going to the dogs is, in one sense at least, an unfair one. At present, the new space-age bus station stands out like a self-conscious teenager amid the jumble of fast-food shops, discount stores and estate agents, but change is afoot. The 450-stall street market, which dates from 1885 (and where some years, apparently, you can see fire-eating daredevils breaking world records), is more Leather Lane than Broadway Market. It is in line for some serious smartening-up, though, as is the town centre in general.

These days the most conspicuous presence on the gritty streets of King’s Cross is not call girls and crack dealers but buttercup-yellow huddles of hard hats. Through the clouds of cement dust you can just about make out signs explaining that the hat-wearers are ‘considerate constructors’, motto: ‘Improving the image of construction’. This attempt at what psychiatrists like to call ‘impression-management’ has echoes in the project on which the men are engaged — to liberate the area from its sordid past and transform it from a place where people don’t linger if they can help it into somewhere they choose to settle.

Looking out at you smugly from the pages of Get a Lifestyle, You Sad, Unstylish Person are lofters Rajiv and Zoe. The fashionable pair inhabit a loft-style apartment (please don’t call it a ‘flat’), which is probably in Bermondsey — the new Hoxton or the new Clerkenwell, depending on which property supplement you pore over with a pang of guilt-tinged longing. Once the province of spivs, gangsters and noxious tanneries, this tangle of warehouses, wharves and printworks, Victorian railway arches and council housing has, since the mid-Nineties, emerged as a hip and thriving artists’ quarter.

If Australia, as a nation, is negotiating late adolescence, cocksure but fragile, striving to establish its identity, then New Zealand is a child: clear-eyed, blemish-free, with a steady, candid gaze. My introduction to this gigantic adult playground came by way of a promotional video, shown by Air New Zealand on the flight from London to Auckland and starring the country's Prime Minister, gutsy, trouser-clad Helen Clark. The no-nonsense name suits Ms Clark, who has the aura of a strict but fair headmistress.