[John Whitworth]

Basil Ransome-Davies kept up the honour of the sphere with his splendid and exasperated effort. Full results below in Competition. Here is this week's insomnia inducing problem.

No. 2638: Wakey, wakey
You are invited to submit a poem singing the praises of insomnia (16 lines maximum). Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 10 March.

[John Whitworth]

Now somebody tell me I've got the wrong end of the stick.

Wakey Wakey

Wakey wakey. Half past three.
Make yourself a cup of tea.
A cup of tea will clear your head.
The cat is waiting to be fed.
You feed the cat. The cat is stout
And stouter now. You put him out.
The moon is silver in the sky.
You cut yourself a slice of pie.
The moon is silver like a sickle.
You add a dash of onion pickle.
You put a tray across your knees
And tune to the Antipodes
Where mighty men are playing cricket
And England have another wicket.
Ponting is taken in the deep.
What a night to waste on sleep!

[Jayne Osborn]

Ok, my very dear friend John,

I hope you won't think I'm being hypercritical but only the last line is actually singing the praises of insomnia. I think it calls for much more of a 'Whoopeee, I can't sleep!' sort of thing - but it's early days yet; look how 'New word order' first started, compared with how it ended when we'd all got the hang of what was actually called for.

You always kick-start it for us, which is great, but I'm sure you can improve on this. That's my initial response, anyway. Onwards and upwards!

[Roger Slater]

I'm hoping to do better before the deadline, but just to break the ice:



Sleep one third of every day?
That means before you're dead
you'll piss away some twenty years
unconscious in your bed!

Insomnia's the way to go,
a blessing in disguise.
Don't fight it. There'll be time enough
someday to close your eyes.

[basil ransome-davies]

The middle lines are terrific, John – cadences, repetitions & euphonics that even in this light piece have a hypnotic, Wallace Stevens-like quality (I'm probably thinking of 'The Idea of Order at Key West', to my mind about as good as verse gets), giving the reader a sense of enjoyment from objective correlatives & vibes rather than overt celebration. So for me – even setting aside my personal view that cricket, as Joe Smith the old Bolton player & Blackpool manager put it, is 'like watching celery grow' – the final ones are comparatively dilute & pedestrian.

I wonder how many eratonauts will recognise Billy Cotton's old heads-up call.

[John Whitworth]

Cripes, Bazza, Wallace Stevens- America's greatest poet. I bloody wish. Your cricket blind spot I quite forgive. I have NEVER watched a football match. My father once took me to a Hearts and Hibs derby but all I could see was grown men pissing into beer bottles and throwing them on the pitch. Hearts won 4-3 so I am told. The ball goes from one end to the other with no sense or reason to it. One day I will sit you down to watch Virinder Sehwag bat. Celery indeed!

Wallace Stevens though!

[Roger Slater]

Insomnia

I really love insomnia
and so today I rue it:
last night I had insomnia
but sadly slept right through it.

The next time that insomnia
arrives to overtake me,
would someone please be good enough
to take the time and wake me?

[Gail White]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

Now somebody tell me I've got the wrong end of the stick.

Wakey Wakey

Wakey wakey. Half past three.
Make yourself a cup of tea.
A cup of tea will clear your head.
The cat is waiting to be fed.
You feed the cat. The cat is stout
And stouter now. You put him out.

John, I just had to say the stout cat made me laugh out loud.

[John Whitworth]

Why thank you, Gail. Drawn from life, I have to say. And putting him out doesn't have the required effect, I have to say. An old fool. Ah well, that makes two of us.

Baz - cricket at the Saint Lawrence Ground - and in the days of the tree! (I bet only Holly, thee and me get the allusion.) I wonder which school. Kent College - alma mater of Godfrey Evans?

[basil ransome-davies]

Simon bloody Langton. But Evans – there was a fella, usually half-pissed.