New beginnings
In Competition No. 3008 you were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the…
Cat call
In Competition No. 3007 you were invited to submit a poem about Larry, the Downing Street cat. Larry came to…
Laughing matter
In Competition No. 3006 you were invited to submit a sonnet that takes as its opening line Keats’s ‘Why did…
Brought to book
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
In Competition No. 3004 you were invited to submit an extract from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Trumpland. As I was…
Political clerihew
In Competition No. 3003 you were invited to supply clerihews about contemporary politicians. In an enormous and excellent entry, popular…
Song for Europe
In Competition No. 3002 you were invited to provide lyrics to the European anthem. The anthem has as its…
Health matters
In Competition No. 3001 you were invited to take inspiration from the recently published Walt Whitman’s Guide to Manly Health…
Question time
In Competition No. 3000 you were invited to provide an answer, in verse or prose, to a famous literary question…
A bad lot
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
In Competition No. 2998 you were invited to submit a set of instructions for an everyday device that have been…
Global mourning
In Competition No. 2997 you were invited to submit an obituary for planet Earth. It was a smallish but…
Acrostic spectator
In Competition No. 2996 you were invited to submit an acrostic sonnet in which the first letters of each line…
Ribaldry
In Competition No. 2995 you were invited to submit ribald limericks as they might have been written by a well-known…
Cross lines
In Competition No. 2994 you were invited to submit a letter of complaint from a fictional character to his, hers…
Dear John
In Competition No. 2992 you were invited to submit a Dear John letter, in prose or verse, in the style…
Answering back
In Competition No. 2991 you were invited to submit ‘The Rime of the Wedding Guest’. There were, naturally, lots…
These foolish things
In Competition No. 2991 you were invited to submit an April Fool disguised as a serious news feature that contains…
A to P
In Competition No. 2990 you were invited to submit a poem of 16 lines in which the lines begin with…
Gettysburg revisited
In Competition No. 2989 you were invited to submit a version of the Gettysburg Address as it might have been…
Mark making
In Competition No. 2988 you were invited to compose a poem making the case for a national commemoration day for…
Mark making
In Competition No. 2988 you were invited to compose a poem making the case for a national commemoration day for…
The art of loving
In Competition No. 2987 you were invited to supply a lesson in the art of seduction in the style of…
The art of loving
In Competition No. 2987 you were invited to supply a lesson in the art of seduction in the style of…
You’re toast
In Competition No. 2986 you were invited to submit a poem about a deadly foodstuff. My inspiration for this…
