Lucy Vickery

For Competition 3451 you were invited to supply an acrostic poem praising or dispraising a public figure in which the word/s spelled out by the first letter of each line directly contradicts what the poem is saying.Messages that lurked, in a smallish but accomplished entry, included ‘Ursine delinquent’, ‘Tory turncoat’ and ‘Tit whisperer’. I’ll leave you to guess who they are skewering. Honourable mentions go to Shirley Curran, Richard Spencer and Sylvia Fairley.

For Competition 3450 you were invited to submit a short story written in words of one syllable. This challenge produced a pleasingly diverse entry, with echoes of Bulgakov, Orwell and Hemingway. It was especially tricky to whittle down a larger-than-usual post-bag to just six winners and I very much regretted not having room for Andy Simpson, Andy Myers, Peter Mullen and Mark Boullé.

For Competition 3448 you were invited to supply a joke in verse form.Apologies for an ambiguous brief; I was actually after an existing joke retold in verse form rather than expecting you to invent a new joke, but either approach was permissible. The challenge was a popular one and yielded a large and jolly entry. I appreciated Bob Turvey’s accompanying note – ‘Do you think my work stanza chance? – and David Shields’s Longfellowesque submission.