Lucy Vickery

New beginnings

29 July 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3008 you were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the…

Cat call

22 July 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3007 you were invited to submit a poem about Larry, the Downing Street cat. Larry came to…

Laughing matter

15 July 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3006 you were invited to submit a sonnet that takes as its opening line Keats’s ‘Why did…

Brought to book

8 July 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3005 you were invited to take your inspiration from Anthony Lane’s terrific ‘The Book of Jeremy Corbyn’,…

What Alice did next

1 July 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3004 you were invited to submit an extract from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Trumpland. As I was…

Political clerihew

24 June 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3003 you were invited to supply clerihews about contemporary politicians. In an enormous and excellent entry, popular…

Song for Europe

17 June 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3002 you were invited to provide lyrics to the European anthem.   The anthem has as its…

Health matters

10 June 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3001 you were invited to take inspiration from the recently published Walt Whitman’s Guide to Manly Health…

Question time

3 June 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 3000 you were invited to provide an answer, in verse or prose, to a famous literary question…

A bad lot

27 May 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2999 you were invited to supply a poem which takes as its first line W.S. Gilbert’s ‘A policeman’s…

Lost in translation

20 May 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2998 you were invited to submit a set of instructions for an everyday device that have been…

Global mourning

13 May 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2997 you were invited to submit an obituary for planet Earth.   It was a smallish but…

Acrostic spectator

6 May 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2996 you were invited to submit an acrostic sonnet in which the first letters of each line…

Ribaldry

29 April 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2995 you were invited to submit ribald limericks as they might have been written by a well-known…

Cross lines

22 April 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2994 you were invited to submit a letter of complaint from a fictional character to his, hers…

Dear John

14 April 2017 11:00 pm

In Competition No. 2992 you were invited to submit a Dear John letter, in prose or verse, in the style…

Answering back

8 April 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2991 you were invited to submit ‘The Rime of the Wedding Guest’.   There were, naturally, lots…

These foolish things

1 April 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2991 you were invited to submit an April Fool disguised as a serious news feature that contains…

A to P

25 March 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2990 you were invited to submit a poem of 16 lines in which the lines begin with…

Gettysburg revisited

18 March 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2989 you were invited to submit a version of the Gettysburg Address as it might have been…

Mark making

11 March 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2988 you were invited to compose a poem making the case for a national commemoration day for…

Mark making

9 March 2017 3:00 pm

In Competition No. 2988 you were invited to compose a poem making the case for a national commemoration day for…

The art of loving

4 March 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2987 you were invited to supply a lesson in the art of seduction in the style of…

The art of loving

2 March 2017 3:00 pm

In Competition No. 2987 you were invited to supply a lesson in the art of seduction in the style of…

You’re toast

25 February 2017 9:00 am

In Competition No. 2986 you were invited to submit a poem about a deadly foodstuff.   My inspiration for this…