In Competition 2627 you were invited to submit a rhyming prophecy for 2010. The entry was short on optimism but bursting with wit and ingenuity. Hats off to Mae Scanlan, a more-or-less lone Pollyanna in a sea of Cassandras, who foresees global peace and economic prosperity. She narrowly missed out on joining the winners, printed below. It’s £25 each and an extra £5 to Noel Petty. Happy New Year!
January opens sunny,
Bankers vote for parsimony,
BBC sacks Ross (‘not funny’),
Burmese colonels all resign.
Waving fields of green shoots sighted,
City overtake United,
Ferguson says ‘Great! Delighted!’,
Climate change declared benign.
GDP continues palmy,
Scientists turn back tsunami,
Afghans form a model army,
Taleban apologise.
World Cup won by Rooney thunder,
Brown takes blame for Labour blunder,
England four-nil up down under,
Pigs observed in southern skies.
Noel Petty
Three men in a vote,
Out on the stump,
Whatever one offers
The others gazump.
A flowering of flags,
Red and white in profusion,
The quadrennial dream
Another-four-gone conclusion.
A beknighted inquiry
Fires off its report:
Little bang for the bucks,
It’s what most people thought.
A sporting star somewhere
Bares feet made of clay:
It never quite works
Playing god and away.
W.J. Webster
British troops are in retreat,
Korea, North and South, unite.
Gordon Brown vacates his seat,
Mandelson again takes flight.
Soldiers leave Afghanistan,
Crisis strikes the Middle East:
Israel attacks Iran.
Tony Blair becomes a priest.
Rioting in Birmingham,
Lootings in Trafalgar Square,
Cameron appeals for calm,
Gets support from Father Blair.
Cyclones, floods and hurricanes
Batter Britain without cease.
BNP makes massive gains.
MPs get a pay increase.
Frank McDonald
Capello’s lot won’t light up grounds
Yet make it to the knockout rounds
Where, trounced in extra time, dog-weary,
They’ll blame the second Hand of Thierry.
Long after spring has been and sprung
The House of Commons will be hung
And Brown and Cameron will beg,
To save their skins, the Hand of Clegg.
The roof at Wimbledon will pass
Two weeks shut tight to save the grass
While outside, in the wet and mist,
Umbrellas shield a Hand of Whist.
Test Matches too will be a pain
When shrunk to one day due to rain
And as the light is offered — Boo! Hiss! —
We’ll curse the Hand of Duckworth-Lewis.
Jerome Betts
Winter — polar bears are stalking through the
streets of Aberdeen.
Scottish Terror blames the English, firebombs
Windsor, shoots the Queen.
Her Britannic Majesty restored, our second
Good Queen Bess
Leads invading English armies to the walls of
Inverness.
Spring — the Caledonian chancer, Brown with
all his pirate crew,
Rogues and fools and tarts and gangsters,
staggers to his Waterloo.
Rampant Ukip sweeps the country, vows to
ban all minarets,
Then to halve the hellish tax on petrol, booze
and cigarettes.
Summer — and the doughty English, in their
raincoats and galoshes,
Vote to shun the Evil Empire of the Frenchies
and the Boches.
At the Oval, an XI of our brave and stalwart sons
Whacks the Pakistani tourists, wins by seven
hundred runs.
Autumn — see the caped crusader, Boris
Johnson on his bike,
Rescue four and twenty virgins from a London
Spud-U-Like.
Then our Mighty London Mayor, connoisseur
of wit and drama,
Flogs the Twenty-Twelve Olympics off to
President Obama.
John Whitworth
The coming year, I understand,
Will be a future Wonderland.
Reality will be in doubt,
Turned upside down and inside out,
And everything we take for granted
Will be increasingly supplanted
By nightmare scenes that would defeat
The surreal vision of Magritte.
Indeed, the world will be awash
With grisly creatures à la Bosch,
While Dennis Hopper or Bin Laden
May turn up, grinning, in your garden,
Prepared to terminate your life
With bomb, Kalashnikov or knife.
A modern Hades — that’s the glad news.
I’ll now prognosticate the bad news…
G.M. Davis
No. 2630: Haute critique
A literary giant of the pre-telly age is guest TV critic on The Spectator. You are invited to submit an extract from his or her column (150 words max). Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 January.
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