In Competition No. 2568 you were invited to submit, in verse or prose, a profile of the typical Spectator competitor.
The picture that emerges is not all together flattering: a monomaniacal oddbod, almost certainly male (even if he uses a female name) and no longer in the first flush of youth, who nurses a simmering resentment at a] the world’s failure to acknowledge his true literary genius and b] the inexplicable absence of his entry in a given week from the winning line-up. ‘A fusion of deranged conceit and volcanic anxiety verging on paranoia,’ writes Basil Ransome-Davies, and he should know. Some of you put forward the theory that there is only one competitor who enters under a variety of pseudonyms. ‘Who has ever seen David Silverman and Bill Greenwell or Basil Ransome-Davies and Alanna Blake together or at all?’ asks J. Seery. And here’s Mary Holtby spilling the beans: ‘For some were anagrammatised — we knew who fitted the Bill —/ And some would reinvent themselves and change their names at will.’ But it is probably Paul Griffin who gets closest to the truth: ‘No profile could do justice to/ All features of this varied crew…’
The winners, printed below, get £30 each and the extra fiver goes to David Silverman who made me laugh loudest.
When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache
And your love life’s becoming monastic;
You’re caressing her less, the more you’re obsessing
On making constructions chiastic.
And you feel you could scream as your terza rima’s
Beginning to scan like an amateur’s;
You’re tossing and turning, your brain’s even learning
To dream in iambic pentameters.
Next night, and she’s said ‘The computer or bed
Is’t not time that thou mad’st a decision?’
But you answer instead: ‘Ha! I see what you did:
A rhetoric archaic elision!’
In the words of your wife, you’re in want of a life:
She says ‘Come, let’s go out on the razzle.’
If you say ‘Ask me later, I’m doin’ the Spectator,’
Then you’ll either be Bill or be Basil.
David Silverman
He is the very model Spectatorial competitor;
His heap of erudition makes Ben Nevis look a petty tor.
In verse or prose his talent will be hindered by no limiter;
His left hand writes a sonnet while the other pens a
trimeter.
His word-hoard is enormous, and he has the skill to
Bostik all
The best into a pattern most delightfully acrostical.
Then should his humour lead him to a joke about a
testicle,
He makes it seem more classy with a metre anapestical.
In gloomy times he offers what the bookish should feel
better for —
A clever pun, a rhyme or an exhilarating metaphor.
Set him a wordy challenge, and you won’t see him
refusing it.
(He knows a rhyme for orange and he’s not afraid of
using it.)
On literary matters he pontificates impressively,
Expressively, digressively and (says his wife) obsessively.
She and his friends may weary of his expertise prosodical,
Thank God it finds an outlet in his favourite periodical.
George Simmers
He (a word which encompasses ‘she’, for our subject abhors the use of ‘they’ as a singular pronoun) is a minimalist, in life as in art. He cooks, but not flamboyantly. He gardens, but not learnedly. His conversation is modest and polite, though he is inclined to panic in the face of an oncoming cliché. He composes letters to the editor which are polished and cutting, but which are never sent, nor even committed to paper. He has many books, numbers of which he has read, and a mild distaste for anything deemed fashionable. His voice is raised only to correct the syntax of television newsreaders and presenters. He considers the most highly developed prose form to be the sentence, and when attempting to write a short story tends to become lost in the wide open spaces. He favours cats rather than dogs. His favourite food is marmalade.
Noel Petty
He sits in parks, like Larkin, glum,
And knocks back shots or moonshine gins,
And scratches punk-pink hair — yes, chum,
He also wears old safety pins.
He trawls anthologies, disdainful
(‘This does not scan!’). He’s unemployed.
His conversation, rare and painful,
Reveals him to be paranoid.
He’s grown too old to spit or pogo,
Or rush the stage (no inhibitions),
And since the late-night clubs are no-go,
He turns instead to competitions.
There’s only two of him, of course. Is
That not clear? Unsunny Jims,
They pawn each prize on hopeless horses,
And share two hundred pseudonyms.
Bill Greenwell
I enjoy their cracking humour, but I only know the
rumour
Where their lives as individuals are concerned.
Sure, the tales are always wacky — in some cases rather
tacky —
But they’re all the comper lore I’ve ever learned.
They say Greenwell found his level when he bargained
with the devil
For a minimum of twenty wins a year,
And that Frank ‘The Priest’ McDonald is a relative of
Ronald —
The very one who markets minced-up steer.
I hear Silverman serves curry in a greasy spoon in Surrey,
While Anne du Croz pronounces on Magritte.
There are those who claim that Norman is the
Docklands Hilton doorman
And that Basil Ransome-Davies works the street.
They are famed for their variety (though far less so for
sobriety),
For their wit, originality and dash,
And the sole thing that unites them is the motive that
incites them:
They want the kudos and they want the cash.
G.M. Davis
No. 2571: Woe is me
Waterstones now has a ‘painful lives’ section to accommodate those seemingly ubiquitous accounts of drunken mothers, abusive fathers, etc., etc. You are invited to submit an extract from the life story of a famous figure from history written in the style of a contemporary misery memoir (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2571’ by 13 November or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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