In Competition No 2563 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose whose lines or sentences end with twelve given words in any order. This is my last week minding the Comp Shop while Lucy Vickery has been on maternity leave. It has been a pleasure and a privilege doing business
In Competition No 2562 you were invited to write a soliloquy by someone prone to malapropisms or misquotations, or a dialogue between them. The trouble with this comp, as I realised when the entries started to come in, is that the two categories overlap; a misquotation often is a malapropism. Happily this didn’t put too
In Competition No. 2561 you were invited to continue in verse or prose the statement ‘The gentleman in Whitehall knows better…’ Another exercise in spleen-venting, this attracted a weighty postbag. The quotation is from Douglas Jay’s The Socialist Case written in 1939. In full it reads, ‘In the case of nutrition, just as in the
In Competition No 2560 you were invited to describe a visit to Glyndebourne or Glastonbury in the style of an author of your choice. But first a memo from Doctor Johnson re. his recent Competition 2558 (Harmless drudgery) in which he let through a contribution that confused a ‘roadie’ with a ‘groupie’. To the lady
In Competition No 2559 you were invited to complete a poem starting ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on …!’ with the target of your choice. In a huge entry, Gordon Brown and his crew were by far the most popular destination for your WMDs (you may as well pack your bags now, mate). Other favourite
James Young presents the latest competition In Competition No 2558 you were invited to submit entries to Dr Johnson for inclusion in a 21st-century supplement to his dictionary. At first the Doctor feared that too many of you were confining your definitions to the five examples he gave of the sort of thing he wanted.
In Competition No. 2557 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose with each line or sentence beginning with the letters A S D F G H J K L Z X C V B N M in that order. I discovered while setting this comp that the longest word you can
In Competition No 2556 you were invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of either P.G. Wodehouse or Ian Fleming. They are two of the most popular characters in English fiction, but it’s hard to think of two more disparate ones; Bertie, the chump, always in some sort
In Competition No 2555 you were invited to write a poem, short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. The line, which I altered slightly to make versification easier, was uttered by General John Sedgwick, a Union general who was shot dead in the American civil war battle
In Competition No. 2554 you were invited to write an extract from George Orwell’s Twenty Eighty. One or two entrants queried the seemingly odd choice of year. I arrived at this by following Orwell, who chose 1984 by reversing the last two digits of 1948, the year he completed his book on the Isle of
You are invited to describe an encounter between Bertie Wooster and James Bond in the style of either P.G. Wodehouse or Ian Fleming. Maximum 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2556’ by 31 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net. In Competition No. 2553 you were invited to write a sonnet by the Mistress in reply to the author
No. 2555: Last words You are invited to write a poem or short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. Maximum 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2555’ by 24 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net. In Competition 2552 you were invited to follow Bernard Levin (who liked
In Competition No. 2551 you were invited to complete in verse or prose a letter by Noël Coward, ‘Dear 338171 (may I call you 338?)’, to Aircraftman Ross (aka T.E. Lawrence) and Lawrence’s reply. First an apology. Bill Greenwell points out that Lawrence, though originally Aircraftman Ross, was serving as Aircraftman Shaw in a second
In Competition No 2547 you were invited to write a poem or some prose ending with ‘The pen [or pun] is mightier than the sword’. The tag comes from a play, Richelieu, by Lord Lytton, the 19th-century politician and writer remembered today, if at all, for The Last Days of Pompeii. The idea for the
In a large entry you divided almost exactly equally between Pepyses and Pooters. I suppose that one of the differences between the two diarists was that Pepys was a ‘somebody’ who generally got things right while Pooter wasn’t and didn’t. Basil Ransome-Davies was spot-on — with Pooter flattered by lots of letters inviting him to
In Competition No. 2500 you were invited to describe a modern-day Test match in the style of Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘breathless hush’ poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’.Summoned by the holidaying Dr Lucy to provide columnar cover, your locum tenens was initially worried that his prescription would not tick the right boxes, float enough boats. It was a