In Competition No. 2893 you were invited to suggest suitable Desert Island Discs for a historical figure, living or dead. Your choice of castaways was somewhat narrow — Richard III, Henry VIII, Tony Blair and Jeremy Clarkson popped up again and again. This meant a fair amount of repetition: King Richard was the most popular
In Competition No. 2892 you were invited to submit an irregular quatrain in which you bring together two people from the world of the arts and then add a couplet describing the consequences. Two competitors paired Tolkien and Graham Greene, with not dissimilar results. Here’s D.A. Prince: If J.R.R. Tolkien Met Graham Greene Would a
In Competition No. 2891 you were invited to think of the most boring lecture topic possible and submit an extract from that lecture. Christopher Gilbert gamely -submitted an extract from a real lecture he is due to deliver on the impenetrable-sounding topic of heteroscedasticity. But Brian -Murdoch, observing that it was all ‘a bit near
In Competition No. 2890 you were invited to imagine that one of the major newspapers has ceased publication and provide a verse lament for it. In his 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper Philip Meyer predicted that the final hard-copy newspaper will plop through someone’s letterbox in 2043. So who’ll be the first to go? Over
In Competition No. 2889 you were invited to submit an extract from an imaginary novel written from the perspective of a female chauvinist author. There are man-haters everywhere, it seems, from children’s telly to high culture. Charges of sexism have been levelled against the creators of the Daddy Pig character in Peppa Pig. Daddy is
In Competition No. 2888 you were invited to submit a poem in the style of a well-known poet, the first letters of each line spelling out the poet’s name. I liked Jerome Betts’s follow-up to Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ and Bill Greenwell’s Spenserian stanza in the manner of Wendy Cope — a parody within
In Competition No. 2887 you were invited to describe your idea of heaven or hell in verse. Nietzsche famously said that in Heaven ‘all the interesting people are missing’ and most of you seemed to agree that paradise might not be all it’s cracked up to be. There’s just space to commiserate with Peter Goulding
In Competition No. 2886 you were invited to submit a Pepys’-eye view of modern life. Pepys’s candid and minutely observed diary entries hum with a seemingly inexhaustible lust for life and your attempts to capture this spirit were impressive. His perpetual randiness, in particular, loomed large in the entry (as one of Pepys’s biographers Richard
In Competition No. 2885 you were invited to write a sonnet beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a [trisyllable of your choice]’. A competitor emailed to ask if I’d meant a single trisyllabic word or a three-syllable phrase. I meant the former but perhaps that wasn’t clear so I allowed both. Objects of comparison ranged
In Competition No. 2884 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of beards. The beard has been rehabilitated since the dark days of Mr Twit, Jimmy Hill and The Joy of Sex. It will, as Ekow Eshun points out in his insightful essay ‘Welcome to Beardland-ia’, one day stand as ‘the
In Competition No. 2883 you were invited to cast a well-known writer, living or dead, in the role of agony aunt or uncle and provide a problem of your invention and their solution. Mark Shelton’s Ted Hughes begins his reply to the question ‘how can I be more confident with girls?’ thus: ‘Stoat does not
In Competition No. 2882 you were invited to submit a blues song written by a well-known politician contemplating the impending general election. The ghosts of Robert Johnson, B.B. King and Big Bill Broonzy stalked the entry, which was smallish but accomplished. Basil Ransome-Davies’s submission was a clever twist on Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Sunday -Mornin’ Comin’ Down’
In Competition No. 2881 you were invited to do as Carol Ann Duffy has done and provide an amusing poem about a piece of government legislation. The first line of her poem ‘22 Reasons for the Bedroom Tax’, ‘Because the badgers are moving the goalposts’, is, of course, a reference to environment secretary Owen Paterson’s
In Competition No. 2880 you were invited to provide a publicity blurb for the Bible to sell it to a modern audience. Kieran Corcoran presents Jesus as a social media sensation — ‘He used to have 12 followers but now he has TWO -BILLION!’ — and Derek Morgan pitches the Good Book as the go-to
In Competition No. 2879 you were invited to follow in the footsteps of Hilary Mantel and provide a scene that shows a well-known villain from history or literature in an uncharacteristically kindly light. Mantel has said that she was driven by a ‘powerful curiosity’ rather than by any desire to rehabilitate Cromwell. ‘I do not
In Competition No. 2878 you were invited to submit a poem composed of three haikus that looks forward to the year ahead. The traditional Japanese haiku contains 17 syllables in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables (though these rules are not always observed by western poets). It is neatly summed up here
In Competition No. 2877 you were invited to submit a Christmas round robin as it might have been written by a well-known fictional character. Most of the entries were bursting with forced jocularity, but Basil Ransome-Davies, with an unusually frank Jeeves, neatly subverts the round-robin tradition of presenting a relentlessly positive face to the world.
In Competition No. 2876 you were invited to submit an example of an ill-advised foray by a poet laureate, past or present, into rap. Andrew Motion’s ‘rap’, written to mark Prince William’s 21st birthday, featured in a Telegraph piece by Charlotte Runcie on the worst poems by great writers and elicited such withering comments on
In Competition No. 2875 you were invited to submit a poem about an unlikely aphrodisiac. Thanks are due to that legend of the comping world Stanley J. Sharpless, whose ‘In Praise of Cocoa — Cupid’s Nightcap’ gave me the idea for this challenge. How confessional your entries were, who can say, but I liked Adrienne
In Competition No. 2874 you were invited to submit a scene written by a well-known children’s author of the past in which a character grapples with a 21st-century problem. Pamela Dow reimagines Louisa May Alcott’s girls posting selfies and practising mindfulness, while Harriet Elvin’s Eeyore longs for someone to invent antisocial media and Adrian Fry