In Comp. 3402 you were invited to submit a poem or passage about an unusual predilection. The quirks ranged from wildly fantastical to having the ring of truth. Mike Morrison, Paddy Mullin, David Shields, Elizabeth Kay, Adrian Fry and Nick Syrett were close contenders, but the vouchers go to those below. In supermarket checkout queues,
For Comp. 3401 you were invited to submit a poem that included the line ‘My vegetable love should grow’ from Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. There were lots of entries, some of them quite fruity (sorry). There are too many worthy runners-up to name names, but the£25 vouchers go to the winners below. My vegetable,
Competition 3400 invited you to write poems to mark YouTube’s 20th birthday. This challenge drew a large, accomplished entry which was both amusing and informative. Alex Steelsmith’s double dactylic submission was a strong contender for a place in the winning line-up, as were Bill Greenwell, Mike Morrison, Frank McDonald, David Silverman, Elizabeth Kay and Janine
Competition 3399 called for a traditional bedtime story updated for the 21st century.We’re tight on space, so I’ll pause just to give a special mention to Ross Haggart before awarding the £25 vouchers to those below. ‘The sky is falling!’ cried Chicken-Licken. Ducky-Lucky, thinking this might be fake news, waddled off to do some fact-checking.
Competition 3398 invited you to submit a poem about snooker as the world champion-ship was under way. The entries poured in! There were many excellent poems in both camps (snooker being either the best or the most boring thing ever). Among others, Anna Cox, D.A. Prince, Nick Syrett, Kavanagh Millard, Ralph Goldswain and Helen Baty
For Competition 3397 you were invited to recast the ‘Hokey-Cokey’ in the style of a poet of your choice. An appreciative nod to Tracy Davidson’s William McGonagall: ‘And the whole body should feel the vibration/ As your waggling appendage commits oscillation.’ High fives also go to David Blakey, Max Gutmann, J.S. White, Peter Smalley, Tom
Comp. 3396 invited you to write a poem that endeavoured to romanticise tariffs. There was a fine haul, though a few had to be disallowed for straying from the brief. Praise to George Simmers, Frank McDonald, Janine Beacham, Sylvia Fairley, Tom Adam, Sue Pickard and Elizabeth Kay, among others, and a special mention to Tracy
Comp. 3395 yielded many fine entries in which Animal Farm became a satire on office politics. Deserving of a mention: David Silverman for his White House version featuring a ‘prize wild boar, one E. Long-Tusk’ and ‘two American XL Bullies, Don and Shady’; and Sue Pickard’s scenario in which two workers, Pinko and Porky, ‘inspired
For Competition 3394 you were invited to submit a vernal triolet. In 1894, the poet Banjo Paterson wrote a heartfelt triolet in dispraise of the triolet and Brian Allgar did the same this week: I really hate the triolet, And, Spring or not, I find them hell. ‘Oh, tra-la-la, it’s cold and wet.’ I really
Competition 3393 went in search of – and found – basic laughs by inviting you to submit a passage of historical fiction sprinkled with anachronistic detail. I was thinking along the lines of the grey squirrel in Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour (set during the War of the Roses), but it was generally
Comp. 3392 invited you to write ‘The Curse of King Thut’ (in poetry or prose) in response to the discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Thutmose II, the first such since Tutankhamun’s. There were many imaginative curses, from the archaeologist Artemis Spendlove Jr’s tinnitus (Mark Ambrose) to the contents of the tomb turning out
For Competition 3391 you were invited to submit one of Keats’s odes rewritten as a sonnet or a limerick. Four out of the five odes composed by Keats in the spring of 1819 feature in the winning line-up, as does ‘To Autumn’, written in September of that year. Once again there were many more winners
For Competition 3390 you were invited to come up with your own version of the Groucho Marx song ‘I’m Against It’, from the film Horse Feathers: Your proposition may be good But let’s have one thing understood: Whatever it is, I’m against it. Hats off to David Silverman, who got into specifics: (‘Conniving, skiving; Mo
Comp. 3389 invited you to submit an estate agent’s blurb advertising a property development on Mars. There were many excellent entries, not all of them enticing. Sean Smith’s seemed potentially the most realistic, offering for £4.5 billion a 12 sq m dwelling with private sleeping quarters: ‘private on a rotational basis with other residents’. Nicholas Lee advertised
For Competition 3388 you were invited to submit a poem written from the point of view of a prepper. While the topic of this challenge was a bit of a downer, the standard of your poems – inventive, sad and funny – was cheering. I was sorry not to be able to fit in Chris
In Comp. 3387, for the centenary of the publication of The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway, you were invited to submit a passage in which one goes to the other’s party. It was especially hard to whittle this one down. Deserving a mention: Mrs D.’s West Egg dream by Brian Murdoch (‘“Sod the temporal perspective
Competition 3386 invited you to submit poems about the domestic arrangements at the White House. The idea was to inspire some visions of what goes on behind the official scenes – oh to be a fly on the East Wing wall. MAGA hats off to Frank McDonald, Elizabeth Kay, Daniel Pukkila, Nicholas Lee, Tom Adam,
For Competition 3385, with Valentine’s Day looming, you were invited to submit a passage in which one well-known character from literature goes on a date with another. There was a very full inbox, with enough excellent entries to fill weeks’ worth of competitions. It’s tempting to think that some of these imaginative pairings would have
For Competition 3384, since this issue appears on the first of the month, you were invited to submit a short story featuring someone who is a slave to superstition. Every corner of the country used to have its own folkloric behaviours that have now been forgotten (one wonders why salt and mirrors and magpies etc stuck).
In Competition 3383 you were invited to submit a Tripadvisor-type review by an alien who has visited Earth for the first time. Frank Upton pointed out that it could have been titled ‘Mostly Harmless’, Ford Prefect’s entire entry for Earth in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The submissions were full of inventive detail and
