In Competition No. 2945 you were invited to suggest remarks guaranteed to get rid of a guest who is outstaying his or her welcome. Leading the pack as surefire ways to get lingering guests reaching for their coats were birth videos, Estonian whisky, Stockhausen, didgeridoo recitals and Rolf Harris’s greatest hits. Also popular were suggestions
In Competition No. 2944 you were invited to imagine what characters from Shakespeare’s plays would have made of this year’s fulsome celebrations of the 400th anniversary of his death and supply a verdict on behalf of one of them. How would the Bard himself have reacted to all the fuss, I wonder. In the expert
In Competition No. 2943 you were invited to submit a review of a well-known work of literature that has been written by a comically inappropriate reviewer. Honourable mentions go to Nicholas Stone and John O’Byrne, who let Donald Trump loose on The Odyssey and Brave New World. Jane Moth and Frank Upton also caught my
In Competition No. 2942 you were invited to submit a rhyme incorporating the lines ‘What are little girls made of?’ and ‘What are little boys made of?’ This challenge was a potential minefield, given how high feelings run nowadays when it comes to the thorny issue of gender identity. Still, those brave souls that took
In Competition No. 2941 you were invited to supply a short story entitled ‘Diary of a Superfluous Man’. Turgenev’s Tchulkaturin; Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin; Goncharov’s Oblomov: these ‘superfluous men’ are not simply literary types, says the critic David Patterson, but represent a ‘paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, a presence in
In Competition No. 2940 you were invited to supply Dr Seuss’s take on the US presidential race. Given his taste for taking down bullies, tyrants and hypocrites, it seems unlikely that Theodor Geisel would have been a fan of the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, who, as might be expected, loomed large in your submissions.
In Competition No. 2939 you were invited to submit a poem about a famous person and an unlikely pet. There’s plenty of inspiration out there in the real world. A photograph from 1969 shows Salvador Dalí emerging from the subway, his rather dejected-looking pet anteater in tow. And then there is Gérard de Nerval, who
In Competition No. 2938, to mark the tercentenary of Thomas Gray’s birth, you were invited to submit an ‘Elegy on a Country Churchyard’ written in the metre of his famous and enduringly popular poem. Every-one was a winner this week, but frustratingly we have room for only six. Those printed below take £25. The bonus
In Competition No. 2937 you were invited to submit extracts from the diaries of the famous that their writers did not wish the world to see. Josh Ekroy impressed, lifting the lid on F.R. Leavis’s and C.P. Snow’s chummy trysts; Alan Millard wasn’t alone in outing God-botherer Richard Dawkins; and here’s a snippet from Sylvia
In Competition No. 2936 you were invited to propose lyrics for a new British national anthem. Tom Shakespeare recently suggested that now might be a good time to ditch ‘God Save the Queen’ — ‘terrible tune, with banal lyrics’ — and replace it with something that more accurately reflects contemporary Britain. My favourite, in an
In Competition No. 2935 you were invited to submit a Valentine’s triolet. A famous example of the triolet is Frances Cornford’s catty ‘To a Fat Lady seen from the Train’ (‘O fat white woman whom nobody loves/ Why do you walk through the field in gloves’), but it was that ace trioleteer Wendy Cope’s rather
In Competition No. 2934 you were invited to submit a poem suitable for inclusion in Now We are Rich. You weren’t obliged to write in the style of A.A. Milne, but most of you did. Long lines mean that there is space for only five winners this week; D.A. Prince, Warren Clements, Max Gutmann, Martin
In Competition No. 2933 you were invited to submit a blurb for a misery memoir. Thanks to Tom Dulake for suggesting this excellent challenge. The winners would be worthy occupants of what some bookshops call the ‘Painful Lives’ section, which service the reading public’s appetite for ever more harrowing accounts of extreme suffering. Unsure whether
In Competition No. 2932 you were invited to submit up to 16 lines of verse that are the fruit of a collaboration between two poets. This week’s brief was open to interpretation. Some of you submitted centos (poems comprised of lines from existing poems); others imagined a pair of poets co-writing a new work incorporating
In Competition No. 2931 you were invited to submit a psychiatric report on a well-known figure in literature. Shakespearean characters featured strongly in the entry, but it was children’s books that provided the most fertile hunting ground. Pretty much all of the inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood — and of Wonderland — found themselves on
In Competition No. 2930 you were invited to submit up to 16 lines of macaronic verse. A dictionary of poetic terms will tell you that macaronic is a verse form popularised by Teofilo Folengo, a Mantuan monk, which uses a mixture of languages, normally with a comic or satirical intent. I prefer E.O. Parrott’s elegant
In Competition No. 2929 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem containing some predictions for the next decade, in which the first letters of the lines read NOSTRADAMUS. Although the forecast was bleak — no surprise there — a welcome smattering of more left-field prophecies made me sit up and take notice: Richard Dawkins
In Competition No. 2928 you were invited to submit a thank-you letter for a particularly unenjoyable Christmas visit to relatives that manages to be diplomatic but deters them from ever inviting you again. You produced a catalogue of seasonal torture that had me squirming in my judging throne: uncomfortable blow-up beds; minimal central heating; lecherous
In Competition No. 2927 you were invited to submit a Christmas carol written in the style of a writer of your choice. Albert Black’s ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ by way of Will Self raised a seasonal smile: ‘Erstwhile in posh Dave’s municipality/ Upraised a plebeian bovid shack…’ As did George Simmers, who imagined Allen
In Competition No. 2926 you were invited to submit a poem about HS2. The idea for this challenge came to me as I was listening on YouTube to W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Night Mail’, which he wrote to accompany a section of the terrific 1936 documentary about the London to Glasgow Postal Special directed by Basil