Literary competition

The latest challenge was to submit a poem about puns containing puns. Dryden regarded paronomasia as ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’; Samuel Johnson took an equally dim view. But this most derided form of humour produced a witty and accomplished entry that elicited only the occasional groan. Robert Schechter’s four-liner – ‘Opun and shut’ – caught my eye: As the punster’s puns were reaching a crescendo, I said, ‘Take your puns and stick them innuendo!’ Also displaying considerable punache were Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Sylvia Fairley, Michael Jameson and Joseph Houlihan. They narrowly lost out to the winners, printed below, who pocket £25 apiece. W.J. Webster snaffles

The latest challenge was to compose an updated version of ‘Jerusalem’ starting with the words ‘And did those tweets…’ One of my favourite parodies of Blake’s poem is by Allan M. Laing. In it he describes the wartime blackouts: Bring me my torch of waning power! Bring me my phosphor button bright! Bring me my stick — O dreadful hour! That brings the darkness of the night! Laing was a colossus of literary competitions, who, V.S. Pritchett tells us, ‘has won more first prizes in newspaper competitions than any other man in England. Never has a man enclosed stamped and addressed envelopes for reply with greater effect.’ His 21st-century successors

Your latest challenge was to compose a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’. Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless. Here’s a quick burst: Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside, And Facebook Russian’s sharing what is most classified. Singin’ it’s the day the internet died – Amazon took pure cyanide. John O’Byrne was good too, as was Jim Lawley, but they were just outflanked by the winners below who pocket £25 each. Frank Upton Today we have comforting concepts such as finite-loop learning classifier systems, but in 2019 one could

The call for elegies on the death of the High Street brought in a large entry that was poignant and clever, and transported me back to teenage Saturdays under the spell of Dolcis, Lilly & Skinner and Freeman, Hardy & Willis. John Morrison’s lines ‘Oh Amazon how swift you rise!/ Swamping all before your eyes…’ spoke for many, though J.R. Johnson thinks that the roots of destruction run deeper, to Buchanan’s 1963 Traffic in Town: ‘Blaming online, high rents, might just be wrong/ It was Buchanan perhaps all along’. The winners earn £25 each. Bill Greenwell pockets £30. Bill Greenwell Hear their doors and cash-tills close, Play their dirges, sing their

The latest challenge was to cast a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. Adrian Fry, channelling Emperor Nero, had these nuggets of wisdom for Worried of Dorking, who is concerned about his grandson’s pyromania: ‘I agree that you must act now, preferably in a fully costumed production of The Sack of Troy. I was a tremendous success in just such a production, which entirely eclipsed in impact what I am told was a local conflagration not dissimilar to those your grandson has sought to bring about…’ Other strong performers were Paul Carpenter,

The latest challenge was to compose double dactyls about double acts. I didn’t include the rules about double dactyls this time round as they are rather long-winded and I’ve done it before — and in any case they are easily Googled. Most of you seemed thoroughly at home with the form, and in a large, lively and accomplished entry double dactylic duos from time present (Trump and Melania, Declan and Anthony) and time past (Boney and Josephine) rubbed shoulders with the literary (Regan and Goneril), the musical (Gilbert and Sullivan, Simon and Garfunkel) and the comical (Stanley and Oliver). George Simmers and Mae Scanlan are highly commended. The winners, printed

Anthony Horowitz’s reflections on creating female characters for his latest Bond novel prompted me to invite you to provide an extract from a well-known work that might be considered sexist by today’s standards and rework it for the #MeToo age. Highlights in a thoroughly enjoyable entry included Brian Allgar’s Constance Chatterley instructing Mellors in the importance of foreplay, Paul Freeman’s recasting of Orwell’s antihero as Weinstein Smith and Hugh King addressing the gender stereotyping in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The worthy winners, printed below, earn £20 each. Sylvia Smith/Sonnet 18 ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’; Well, frankly, Will, I’d rather you did NOT. You’ll find some

The latest challenge, to supply an entry by a well-known diarist describing the wedding day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, saw you at your waspish best. Here’s Noël Coward’s verdict on the groom: ‘Massively butch but far too hairy, when he wasn’t even in the Navy. Are beards de rigueur these days?…’ And Alan Clark on Meghan Markle (though he spares us a reference to her ‘juggling globes’): ‘Harry initially appeared to have done equally well with the succulent Miss Markle, but a glance at this morning’s Telegraph informed me not only that she is of below-stairs stock but a bloody yank…’ Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies and

This time round, competitors were asked to provide poems about a bromance. Pairings including Friedrich and Karl, Laurel and Hardy, Nigel and Donald lit up an entry that was witty, touching and generally pleasingly varied. I liked Chris O’Carroll’s ‘Boris and Donnie’, a twist on Jimmie Rodgers’s ‘Frankie and Johnny’. And Bill Greenwell had the same idea, only with David and Jonathan from the Book of Samuel as the loved-up duo. Commendations also go to Shirley Curran, Jonathan Pettman, A.C. Smith and John Morrison. Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry transported me back to the 1970s, when real men wore chunky cream-and-brown hand-knit cardigans. He and his fellow winners, printed below, are rewarded

Inspiration for the latest challenge came from across the pond, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Style Invitational column, whose regular neologism-themed contests are always a blast. You were asked to take an existing word and alter it by a) adding a letter, b) changing a letter, and c) deleting a letter — and to supply definitions for all three new words. Though many entries were partially successful, few competitors managed to score a bull’s-eye in all three sections of the challenge. A fiver per definition goes to those below who hit the spot with just one or two. Hugh King Brectitude: an exaggerated display of moral seriousness in discussion of

The latest challenge asked competitors to supply an imaginary testimonial for a high-profile figure that is superficially positive but contains hidden warnings to a potential employer. This was an exercise in the artful deployment of ambiguity, as displayed in Robert J. Thornton’s L.I.A.R. The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations, a handbook for those who, whether out of kindness or fear of litigation, wish the precise meaning of their ‘recommendations’ to remain opaque. One-liners suggested by Professor Thornton include ‘In my opinion you will be very fortunate to get this person to work for you’, to describe a slacker, and ‘I most enthusiastically recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever’, which

The latest challenge asked you to compose a poem beginning with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first line, the new poem being on a different subject from the original. This was a wildly popular comp, which elicited a witty and wide-ranging entry. The effort of extracting six winners from such a palmary bunch meant that I felt more than usually sorry for those who narrowly missed out. Step forward and take a bow, Paul Freeman, Jan Snook, Joseph Conlon, D.A. Prince and James Bench-Capon, who used both ends of the Divine Comedy for a poem about the hell of traffic jams. The winners below,

The latest challenge asked for poems about euphemisms. You avoided politics and sex (mostly), preferring, like Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, to focus on the language of dying and the words and expressions we call on to avoid the D-word. And there are plenty of them — David Crystal has written that there are more than 1,000 words for death categorised in the Historical Thesaurus. I much admired Alanna Blake’s twist on Keats’s sonnet (‘Much have I dabbled in linguistic lore/ And many inexactitudes have used…’) and Max Ross’s neat acrostic. Hamish Wilson, Max Gutmann, Ann Drysdale and David Silverman also deserve a special mention. The prizewinners printed below earn

The latest competition asked for a short story inspired by the Salisbury poisonings. Ian McEwan, a writer who is fascinated by spying, was asked recently on the Today programme how he would begin a novel inspired by the current confrontation with Russia. The image that comes to mind, he said, was of a lion hunting a pack of deer-like creatures in a herd. ‘There’s one that’s trailing behind – too old, too young, perhaps, or has just left the EU…’ We find ourselves, McEwan said, back in that strange Cold War world of brazen lies. Many of you clearly agreed with him, judging by the regular appearances of George Smiley

For the latest challenge, inspired by the American parodist Frank Jacobs’s 1975 version of ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘As If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties’, you were asked to come up with a Holly-wood-themed ‘Jabberwocky’ for our times. Jacobs begins: ”Twas Bogart and the Franchot Tones/ Did Greer and Garson in the Wayne;/ All Muni were the Lewis Stones,/And Rooneyed with Fontaine…’. Most (though not all) of you closely followed that tem-plate – to dazzling effect. Except Clive Norris, who veered off-piste with his Brexit-inspired ‘Junckerwocky’ (‘Twas Brexit, and the fishy Goves/ Did twist and tumble ‘neath the waves…’), which I enjoyed but disqualified on the grounds that