Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3254, you were invited to tweak a well-known book title to reflect the straitened times we live in and provide an extract. Honourable mentions, in a closely contested week, go to Mark Ambrose’s To Grill a Mockingbird, David Silverman’s The Great Gas Bill and to a trio of Alice’s Adventures in Poundlands (John O’Byrne, Celia Jordan and Richard Spencer). The prize-winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each. Here it was, Guesthouse du Lac, an unexpectedly wearying half-hour walk from the Lowestoft seafront.

In Competition No. 3253, you were invited to write a poem entitled ‘Song of Myself’ in the style of the poet of your choice. High fives all round for a terrific entry, and an honourable mention to Martin Parker/Ogden Nash: From spermery to wormery  via germery and infirmery.   Looking back,  life has been mostly alas and alack. The winners pocket £30 each.

In Competition No. 3252, you were invited to write a letter of condolence on the mis-fortune of an acquaintance which, intentionally or not, would have the effect of lowering rather than raising the spirits. An example of how not to write a condolence letter, according to New York-based funeral director Amy Cunningham, was Nancy Mitford’s upbeat ending to a letter to her cousin, who had just lost her husband: ‘It’s nice that Decca is coming over for a long visit. Why don’t you come to Versailles with her – I would put her in a hotel and you could stay with me. Think of it.

In Competition No. 3251, you were invited to submit a poem to mark the Queen’s platinum jubilee in the style of a poet present or past. Perhaps inspired by the lines written by William McGonagall to mark the death of his beloved Queen Victoria – Alas! our noble and generous Queen Victoria is dead,/And I hope her soul to Heaven has fled… – several competitors, including G.M. Southgate, Jerry Emery and Ewan Brown, imagined the Bard of Dundee paying tribute to Her Majesty. And top of the pops among the poets laureate was John Betjeman. In a smallish but well-made and jolly entry, Mark Bellis, Ian Barker and Janine Beacham earn honourable mentions. The winners snaffle £25 each.

In Competition No. 3250, you were invited to submit a sonnet to Mammon. It was ‘Epigram for Wall Street’, attributed to the oft-impoverished Edgar Allan Poe, that prompted me to set this moolah-themed challenge. In a large, thoughtful and winningly varied entry, there were echoes ranging from Keats, Milton and Barrett Browning to Gordon Gekko. Katie Mallett, Janine Beacham, George Simmers, David Silverman, Bob Trewin and Ralph Bateman earn honourable mentions. The winners, printed below, pocket £20 each. Mammon, I love you. Let me count the ways, Although that’s strictly my accountant’s chore. I live delights and scorn laborious days Thanks to my wealth, while hungering for more. I build portfolios, by love possessed.

In Competition No. 3249, you were invited to submit an extract from a Mills & Boon novel whose central character is a contemporary politician. The much-mocked pictures of a proudly hirsute, manspreading Macron, looking every inch the M&B hero, gave me the idea for this challenge. But he was nudged aside – in a truly top-notch entry – by the lotharios below. It’s £25 each to the winners. She thought about him now almost all the time.   Pink moon, dry gin, the delicious drawl, the thin pinstripe. He was all of these, and more, and she knew she was being gradually sucked further into the vortex, the very elegant vortex of his being. Yes, he was old-fashioned, but love, wasn’t that old-fashioned, too?

In Competition No. 3248, you were asked to submit the last will and testament of a fictional character. In a smallish entry, Frank McDonald’s Ancient Mariner made a splash: To make amends with my last breath I must give more than words, So my small fortune I bequeath To a charity for birds.

In Competition No. 3247, you were asked to submit the reflections of a well-known writer on a career path they might have taken. Most famous writers have had day jobs – Kurt Vonnegut sold Saabs, Harper Lee worked as an airline ticket agent, and Joseph Heller was a blacksmith’s apprentice. But what about those missed vocations? Take a bow, Robert Frost, map-maker; Emily Dickinson, undertaker; Raymond Chandler, shrink. The winners earn £25. I think I could have been a model censor of obscenity Admonishing the naughty and not ever granting lenity To crudity or nudity or any kind of rudery, Far bossier than Bowdler in my monumental prudery.

In Competition No. 3246, you were invited to submit a poem in the style of the poet of your choice about a problematic appendage. Taking pride of place alongside Philip Larkin’s troublesome penis were Heaney’s big toe, Shelley’s belly, and a series of noses, among them Mike Morrison/Ogden Nash: This nose/conk/beak/hooter/schnozzle Has brought me nothing but anguish and schemozzle... An honourable mention also goes to Alex Steelsmith/Edward FitzGerald: The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on – and there’s the Rub; it doesn’t quit.       It probes a Naris, Concha and anon Explores a Sphincter, Orifice and Pit... The winners, below, earn £20 each.

In Competition No. 3245, you were asked to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it in Franglais. This challenge invited you to engage in the parlour game popularised by the late Miles Kington, whose much-loved ‘Let’s Parler Franglais’ columns in Punch were described by Michael Bywater as a ‘macaronic jeu d’esprit’. Chapeau! to Richard Spencer, and £25 each to those printed below. Laurent a visité la local morgue, à le recherche du les remains de Camille, qu’il a tué only le jour before. Ou-est-il? Dans le section, ‘Submergé’?

In Competition No. 3244, you were invited to submit a poem to mark St George’s Day that rivals in awfulness the one Bono recently penned for St Paddy. As Sam Leith wrote, in a terrifically funny and instructive piece, Bono’s offering was ‘technically incompetent to a degree that constituted an insult to the very craft of verse’. So that was what you were aiming for. In a large and mischievous entry, there were nods aplenty to the U2 front man, both in content (‘snakes’) and form (limerick). Dishonourable mentions go to Jenny Pearson, R.M. Goddard, Brian Murdoch, Basil Ransome-Davies, Carolyn Beckingham and Roger Rengold. The winners, printed below, pocket £25 each.

In Competition No. 3243, you were invited to submit a poem about the recent discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance. This comp, suggested by a kind reader who thought a chink of good cheer amid the general bleakness worth celebrating, elicited a smallish entry in which echoes ranged from Keats to Benny Hill. An honourable mention to David Silverman’s haiku: Fuss over a boat Goes to show the importance Of being Ernest The winners, printed below, net their authors £25 each. Chill polar sirens wooed Ernest H. Shackleton, Singing him southward with Wintry allure. Ice trapped and sank him, then Hypergelidity Deep undersea helped his Ship to endure.   Weddell Sea life forms are Contra-xylophagous.

In Competition No. 3242, you were asked to submit a short story that is a mash-up of cli-fi with a genre of your choice. In his 2016 book The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh questioned why ‘climate change cast a much smaller shadow on literature than it does on the world’. Six years on, though, cli-fi, like the thermometer, is inexorably on the rise and you were invited to jump on the bandwagon. I was taken with J.C.H. Mounsey’s Conan Doyle-inflected ‘The Swedish Cassandra’, and with Joe Houlihan’s poignant tale of Pooh and friends in the Hundred Acre Desert: ‘We need honey. Piglet, did you bring the honey jar?… Piglet shuffled his little feet. “All the bees are dead,” he said.

In Competition No. 3241, you were invited to submit a spring triolet. Banjo Paterson, the bard of the bush, had this to say about the triolet in 1894: Of all the sickly forms of verse, Commend me to the triolet.It makes bad writers somewhat worse: Of all the sickly forms of verse… But this challenge produced a funny, poignant and thoroughly robust entry full of unforced artistry. The winners take £12. Now is the time to glorify What will not break the human heart. As Flora’s ethos lights the sky, Now is the time to glorify What’s truthful, suffocate the lie. All wars and tragedies apart, Now is the time to glorify What will not break the human heart.

In Competition No. 3240, you were invited to tell the life story of a well-known figure in three limericks. In the excellent How to Be Well-Versed in Poetry, E.O. Parrott summed up the charms of the form neatly: With a shape of its own it’s imbued – That’s the limerick, witty or lewd;       Two lines, then you oughter       Have two more, much shorter Then one longer that’s funny or rude. Though there was wit aplenty in the entry, you there was little appetite for bawdiness. Brian Murdoch, Sylvia Fairley, Frank Upton, Carolyn Beckingham and David Silverman earn honourable mentions. The prize winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 3239, you were invited to submit political manifestos inspired by literary heroes. Sajid Javid loves Ayn Rand: twice a year, he reads the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead. Justin Trudeau is a Stephen King super-fan, Boris Johnson reckons Flashman is ‘the greatest’ and Macron is mad for Molière (he can recite chunks of the French dramatist’s plays from memory). Honourable mentions, in what was a terrific entry, go to Frank McDonald, Bill Greenwell, Max Ross, Richard Spencer, Frank Upton and Nick MacKinnon (‘John McDonnell reclaiming The Tiger Who Came to Tea for the hard left’). The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each.

In Competition No. 3238, you were invited to submit a poem about a literary feud. Wallace Stevens’s 1936 fisticuffs with Ernest Hemingway cropped up several times in what was a modestly sized but entertaining entry. The insurance executive-poet broke his hand, in two places, in the course of an unedifying punch-up in Key West (‘Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that…’). Norman Mailer headbutting Gore Vidal backstage at the Dick Cavett talk show also loomed large, but it was a war of words between two female writers that caught the imagination of Sylvia Fairley.

In Competition No. 3237, you were invited to submit a short story using words of only one syllable. This challenge produced a delightfully diverse entry with echoes of Dr Seuss, Hemingway, Kafka, Shakespeare and Beckett. The winning slots were keenly contested and I regretted not having space for Frank McDonald’s meditation on St Paul and the nature of love or David Shields on Kant and sense perception. Other strong performers included Richard Spencer, Gail White, Peter Mullen and Gillian Gammon, but it’s high fives all round and especially to the winners below who nab £20. To hear a rare tale, weird yet true as I stand here, just take a drive out to our inn on the moor. We keep a good pint and, in the snug by the fire, you will meet Old Seth.

In Competition No. 3236, you were invited to submit a poem that begins ‘Oh my love is like…’ . From the funny and sweet to the waspish and jaundiced, the entry ranged pleasingly far and wide; as the poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his sonnet ‘The Hospital’ (‘A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward/ Of a chest hospital…), ‘But nothing whatever is by love debarred…’ Commendations go to Nicholas Hodgson, Adrian Fry, Mary McLean and Richard Spencer. The winners, printed below, earn their authors £25 each. O My Love is like a sad old lag That’s newly sprung from jail. My love is like a jiffy bag Recycled in the mail.

In Competition No. 3235, you were invited to invent a prequel to a well-known work of literature and supply an extract from it. In a stellar entry, Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Max Ross, Bob Trewin and Lorna Wood all shone, but the £25 prizes go to the following: Believing it never to be my Fortune to travel in future Years, my Profession holding me fast in Respectability, I betook myself to London to discover what Strangenesses I might encounter in the Manners and Dispositions of People. Finding them of indifferent Stature and unwholesome Airs, yet was I minded to visit their Great Parliament, both for my Private Education but also thereby in hope of acquiring a great Tale as Souvenir, one to make my Name.