Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3211 you were invited to submit a nursery rhyme inspired by the pandemic. When I set this challenge, I had in mind ‘Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses’, the rhyme that is said by some to date from the Great Plague of 1665 (though its origins are a subject of hot scholarly dispute). In a medium-sized entry, Brian Murdoch, Nicholas Lee, Leslie Bresnen, David Shields and Barbara Jones caught my eye and earn honourable mentions. Equally impressive was Tom Singleton’s clever twist on the ‘Hokey-Cokey’: ‘Keep the public in, let the public out,/ In, out, in, out, you mess them all about,/ You make a slow decision, then you turn around, that’s what it’s all about… Oh, the jokey blokey! Oh, the jokey blokey!

In Competition No. 3210, you were invited to provide a poem or a piece of prose containing words from the phonetic alphabet. The brief didn’t stipulate that you incorporate all 26 words, but hats off to those who shoehorned them in. In a whopping, wide-ranging entry, with echoes of Keats and MacNeice, and ‘Papa’ Hemingway looming large, Nick Syrett, Nick MacKinnon and Frank Upton shone, but it was a terrific performance all round. The winners earn £30 each. Why on earth in ’56 did someone rearrange The old phonetic alphabet of 1943, While leaving just four letters of its twenty-six unchanged As Charlie X-ray Mike remained and Victor kept his V? Quebec has now replaced the Queen and Love’s gone down the pan.

In Competition No. 3209, you were invited to provide Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of a Tory MP. Inspiration for this challenge came from a parody of Jaques’s monologue from As You Like It by the writer and politician — and Shakespearean scholar — Horace Twiss (1787–1849). The closing lines of his ‘The Patriot’s Progress’ …Scene the last, That ends this comfortable history, Is a fat pension and a pompous peerage, With cash, with coronet — with all but conscience. found a strong echo in this week’s entry, whose tone was mostly, if not unanimously, scathing. The winners earn £25 each and an honourable mention goes to Fiona Clark.

In Competition No. 3208, you were invited to submit a recipe for marital bliss on behalf of an author of your choice. Pausing only to give an honourable mention to Simon Hunter, I pass you over to this week’s terrific winners who each nab £25. I am the very model of a guide to conjugality Advising every blushing bride to face up to reality. If you can follow my advice and act with due humility You’re guaranteed a life that’s spent in unalloyed tranquillity. While testing your endurance when he uses the ‘facilities’, The seat’s still raised, but don’t complain; it might invoke hostilities. Be sure he always has his way and don’t be argumentative, Massage his ego every day, you know he’s hyper sensitive.

In Competition No. 3207, you were invited to supply an extract from a thriller, written by a well-known politician, that contains clues to the identity of its author. This challenge drew a moderate-sized entry in which there was much to admire, including Janine Beacham’s fusion of Daphne du Maurier and Winston Churchill: ‘I might have called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, but I would not fail or falter. Victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror…’ And David Harris’s channelling of Alan Clark, thriller-writer: ‘He liked powerful women. He liked all women.

In Competition No. 3206, you were invited to supply a sonnet on the universe. The late Frank Kermode reckoned that the sonnet form is just too easy — try a double sestina, if you’re after a challenge, he said — and comps such as this one certainly draw the crowds. A bumper crop of deftly wrought entries showed great wit and imagination, though some stumbled at that tricky final couplet. I was very much taken with several excellent twists on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: Joe Houlihan, John O’Byrne, Tim Raikes and Tony Harris take a bow. Others who shone brightly were Roy Ballard, Martin Parker, Nick MacKinnon, Frank Upton, Nick Syrett, Dorothy Pope, Matt Quinn and Richard Spencer. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £20 each.

In Competition No. 3205, you were invited to supply a rigorous literary-critical analysis of a well-known pop song. Thanks to Oliver Hawkins, who drew to my attention J. Temperance’s real-life analysis of Boney M’s ‘Daddy Cool’ (The New Inquiry, 2015): ‘We may paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari and state that “it is within capitalist society that the critique of ‘Daddy Cool’ must always resume its point of departure and find again its point of arrival.”’ Which gives a sense of what you were aiming for.

In Competition No. 3204, you were invited to supply a rondeau with a summery theme. The best-known English rondeau is the Canadian poet and doctor John McRae’s first world war poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (which inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance). But the form has it roots in medieval and Renaissance French poetry and perhaps it was this that prompted David Silverman to submit his jaunty, mischievous offering, celebrating the prospect of a lack of British tourists in that country this year, in French: Les Anglais ne viennent pas cet été.Ah! Dansons donc et chantons rondelays! Other strong performers, in a pleasingly wide-ranging entry, included Susan McLean, Paul Freeman, David Shields and Frank McDonald.

In Competition No. 3203, you were invited to supply an extract from the newly discovered Shakespeare play Charles III. I haven’t seen Mike Bartlett’s 2014 King Charles III but the theatre critic of this magazine wasn’t impressed: ‘A script that breezily defames the royals ought to be great fun, but this cheerless, overblown little play seems to have been created by political numbskulls for those of similar calibre.’ So it was pleasing to receive such a varied and accomplished entry. Martin Parker, Simon Hunter, Nigel Stuart and Alaric Evans earn honourable mentions. The winners take £25. HARRY DUKE OF SUSSEX Well, well, a king at last. All hail for now. But this succession crowns no true success.

In Competition No. 3202, you were invited to replace the word ‘love’ in a well-known book title of your choice with a word of your choosing, and submit a short story of that title. This challenge was prompted by Christopher Hitchens’s description, in his memoir Hitch-22, of an after-dinner game he used to play with Salman Rushdie and other friends that involved replacing the word ‘love’ in famous book titles with the phrase ‘hysterical sex’. In a medium-sized entry of a patchy standard, Nick Syrett, Rosemary Sayer, Anthony Whitehead, Catherine Edmunds and Madeleine McDonald stood out. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each.

In Competition No. 3201, a contest inspired by Salman ‘naughty but nice’ Rushdie, you were invited to submit advertising copy for the product of your choice in the style of a well-known author. In a huge and hotly contested entry, unlucky losers Bill Greenwell, Brian Murdoch, Ann Drysdale, Tom Adam and Nick MacKinnon were only narrowly outflanked by those below who take £25 each. Congratulations, all round. Once upon the throne I squatted, almost bursting a carotid Till my bowels were unclotted and my mind was free once more. Then I found the toilet paper smelled of germicidal vapour And, like a potato scraper, left my bottom rough and sore. Be it Izal, be it Bronco, shall I ever know for sure? But, I swear it, nevermore!

In Competition No. 3200, you were invited to retell one of Chaucer’s tales in the style of another author. The voices that dominated, in a medium--sized entry, were those of the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Miller and the Nun’s Priest. Chaucer’s pilgrims were offered a free dinner for the best yarn, but this week’s winners will have to make do with a prize of £25 each. Nick MacKinnon, Frank McDonald, David Shields, Janine Beacham, Rosemary Sayer and Victoria Owens earn honourable mentions. Wilt thou forgive those sins whereby, misled, A wonton wife, betroth’d four times before, Did, at the fourth one’s funeral, choose to wed A clerk possessed of vigour and allure?

In Competition No. 3199, you were invited to supply a poem in which an inanimate object comments on its owner’s behaviour. Shoshana Zuboff’s recent book about the growth of surveillance capitalism gave me the idea for this competition. In it she warns of a future in which, to satisfy big tech’s insatiable appetite for data, the internet of things — our heating thermostat, vacuum cleaner, mattress — takes over our homes, robbing us of our ability to be invisible in those places where, Zuboff writes, we ‘first learn to be human… where our spirits spread and take root…’.

In Competition No. 3198, you were invited to supply an extract from a children’s book that is designed to explain economics to youngsters. The seed for this challenge was former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism in which he uses the device of answering questions put by his young daughter to explain economics in a clear and engaging way. While his references ranged from The Matrix and Blade Runner to Sophocles and Frankenstein, you harnessed, among others, Dr Seuss, Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc (who also wrote a primer on economics, Economics for Helen) and Eric Carle.

In Competition No. 3197, you were invited to supply a poem to mark the death of Prince Philip. I wondered if anyone, inspired by his touching lines on the death of his beloved Queen Victoria, might channel the poet and tragedian William McGonagall: Alas! our noble and generous Queen Victoria is dead,And I hope her soul to Heaven has fled,To sing and rejoice with saints above,Where ah is joy, peace, and love. But you mostly steered clear of forelock-tugging, instead striking a tone closer to that of poet laureate Simon Armitage, whose poem ‘The Patriarchs — An Elegy’ expressly avoided the kowtowing the Duke of Edinburgh hated: ‘I didn’t want the poem to be part of a chorus of sycophancy.

In Competition No. 3196, you were invited to supply a reply to the poet from Frances Cornford’s fat woman or Shakespeare’s dark lady. Philip Roe and George Simmers both reminded me that G.K. Chesterton set the bar high with ‘The Fat White Woman Speaks’, his response to Cornford’s triolet (which was also parodied by A.E. Housman). The fat woman clearly moved competitors too (‘It’s always a welcome opportunity to have a go at one of the most unpleasant but mind-worm poems in the English language,’ writes Brian Murdoch; and here’s G.M. Southgate: ‘This poem haunted me… when I was young. It seemed to me so very sad, and cruel too.’) Replies to Cornford significantly outnumbered those to the Bard.

In Competition No. 3195, you were invited to submit an extract from the racier, mass-market version of a well-known literary novel. Speaking at Bath Literature festival in 2015, the author Fay Weldon suggested that writers should write two versions of their books, a high-minded one for print, and a more accessible page-turner for e-readers: ‘Writers have to write now for a world where readers are busy, on the move and have little time for contemplation and reflection…’ Those whose hectic lives and shot attention spans preclude hours devoted to ploughing through the meaty originals can enjoy instead your alternative versions.

In Competition No. 3194, inspired by Tony Harrison’s poem ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, you were invited to write a poem of that title but substituting your choice of poet and a piece of fruit. It was a palmary entry, so I’ve made space for an extra winner.  Hats off, all round, and £20 each to those printed below. On Wenlock Edge you stand distraught, Your brow compressed, your features taut,And weep to contemplate the fate Of creatures in a fallen state.  To you the lover’s solemn vowIs frail as blossoms on the bough,While tunes that stir the patriot’s blood Leave young men perished in the mud.  Because your verses tip the scaleUnevenly to hopes that failOr ruined dreams, may I upliftYour sad heart with a special gift?

In Competition No. 3193 you were invited to submit clerihews (two couplets, AABB, metrically clunky, humorous in tone) on members of the royal family, past or present. This one was a crowd-pleaser and drew a whopping entry. An inevitable element of repetition didn’t detract from the overall excellence, so congratulations, all round. I was sorry to hear that Noel Petty, a king among competitors, has died. His stellar contributions, spanning many decades, are summed up well by fellow competitor Frank McDonald in this winning entry from another clerihew competition: Noel PettyHad the grace of a gazelle on the Serengeti.Again and again he dominated competitionsWith brilliant submissions Pausing only to tip my hat to unlucky runners-up M.F.

In Competition No. 3192 you were invited to submit a short story that features an animal (or animals) taking revenge on humankind. The spur for this challenge was John Gray’s engaging and insightful book Feline Philosophy, which alerted me to Patricia Highsmith’s short story ‘Ming’s Biggest Prey’, about a Siamese cat who eliminates a human rival for his mistress’s affections. An inventive and lively entry included tales of vengeful snails, beavers and silverfish. Honourable mentions go to Moray McGowan, Timothy Clegg, Chris Ray, Nick Syrett and J. Harries. The winners are printed below and earn their authors £30. Bill Greenwell pockets a bonus fiver.