In Competition No. 3004 you were invited to submit an extract from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Trumpland. As I was listening to Kellyanne Conway’s alternative-facts interview earlier this year, Humpty Dumpty’s words from Through the Looking-Glass floated into my mind (‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means
In Competition No. 3003 you were invited to supply clerihews about contemporary politicians. In an enormous and excellent entry, popular rhymes included ‘charmer’ and ‘Starmer’; ‘Boris’ and ‘Horace’; ‘Sturgeon’ and ‘burgeon’; ‘Corbyn’ and ‘absorbing’. Putin likes to ‘put the boot in’, apparently, and that David Davis is, by common consent, a ‘rara avis’. There
In Competition No. 3002 you were invited to provide lyrics to the European anthem. The anthem has as its melody the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 but dispenses with Schiller’s words. I wondered if anyone might go back to his 1785 ‘Ode to Joy’ and repurpose the following lines: ‘Yea, if any hold
In Competition No. 3001 you were invited to take inspiration from the recently published Walt Whitman’s Guide to Manly Health and Training and supply an extract from a similar guide penned by another well-known writer. While Whitman extols the benefits of stale bread and fresh air and cautions against eating between meals, Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s John
In Competition No. 3000 you were invited to provide an answer, in verse or prose, to a famous literary question of your choosing. Two admirably pithy responses to Hamlet’s dilemma came courtesy of Carolyn Beckingham: ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question.’ ‘If you’re not certain, wait,’ is my suggestion. The
In Competition No. 2999 you were invited to supply a poem which takes as its first line W.S. Gilbert’s ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ but replaces ‘policeman’ with another trade or profession. Although this line doesn’t come until line eight in Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Policeman’s Song’, it was the opening I prescribed and
In Competition No. 2998 you were invited to submit a set of instructions for an everyday device that have been badly translated into English. Poorly translated menus are more or less guaranteed to raise a holiday snigger (albeit tinged with a guilty awareness of one’s own linguistic shortcomings), but the challenge here was to
In Competition No. 2997 you were invited to submit an obituary for planet Earth. It was a smallish but varied and heartfelt entry. John Whitworth earns the bonus fiver and his fellow winners are rewarded with £25 apiece. Honourable mentions go to C.J. Gleed, D.A. Prince and Duncan Forbes. In an obituary There’s
In Competition No. 2996 you were invited to submit an acrostic sonnet in which the first letters of each line spell AT THE SPECTATOR. You weren’t obliged to make the theme of your sonnet this magazine and its contributors but many of you did, to great effect. (The tone was mainly though not universally affectionate.)
In Competition No. 2995 you were invited to submit ribald limericks as they might have been written by a well-known poet. William Baring-Gould, who wrote a history of the genre, noted that when a limerick appears, sex is not far behind And the writer Norman Douglas considered limericks to be ‘jovial things… a yea-saying to
In Competition No. 2994 you were invited to submit a letter of complaint from a fictional character to his, hers or its creator complaining about their portrayal. There are some long lines this week (blame Poe) and as the standard was high, I’ll step aside to make space for six winners. The excellent entries printed
In Competition No. 2992 you were invited to submit a Dear John letter, in prose or verse, in the style of a well-known author. My, you were good this week — good enough to make being jilted seem quite the thing. Even that most maddening of break-up clichés ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ has
In Competition No. 2991 you were invited to submit ‘The Rime of the Wedding Guest’. There were, naturally, lots of clever nods in the entry to Coleridge’s ballad of sin and atonement, but some were more charitable than others to the gimlet-eyed seadog with verbal diarrhoea. In a hotly contested week, Brian Allgar, Chris
In Competition No. 2991 you were invited to submit an April Fool disguised as a serious news feature that contains a startling revelation about a well-known literary figure. The top-ranked April Fool of all time, according to the Museum of Hoaxes, was Panorama’s 1957 report on how Swiss farmers on the shores of Lake
In Competition No. 2990 you were invited to submit a poem of 16 lines in which the lines begin with the letters of the alphabet from A to P. This one proved to be a real crowd-pleaser, attracting not only the regulars but many welcome new faces too. You were at your witty and
In Competition No. 2989 you were invited to submit a version of the Gettysburg Address as it might have been given by a prominent figure on the world stage. As space is tight, I pause only to commend Frank Upton and Paul Carpenter before handing you over to Messrs Blair, Trump and Wilson, with Charles
In Competition No. 2988 you were invited to compose a poem making the case for a national commemoration day for a person or thing of your choice. While Alanna Blake championed the dandelion, there were also impassioned calls for days that high-five Thomas Crapper, Doris Day and the tent. I, for one, would happily
In Competition No. 2987 you were invited to supply a lesson in the art of seduction in the style of an author of your choice. In a large and stellar field, Ralph Rochester, Noah Heyl, Jennifer Moore, J. Seery, Barry Baldwin, Alan Millard, Sylvia Fairley and John Maddicott shone, but they were pipped to
In Competition No. 2986 you were invited to submit a poem about a deadly foodstuff. My inspiration for this assignment was the appalling news that toast can kill you, which is yet another depressing indication that everything good is bad for you. Or perhaps, as Max Gutmann suggests in the closing couplet of his
In Competition No. 2985 you were invited to provide a poetic preview of the day Article 50 is triggered. There were passionate voices from both sides of the Brexit divide, with many of you recruiting distinguished poets to your cause. D.A. Prince cleverly appropriated ‘Vitaï Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt’s tribute to English patriotism: ‘There’s