Congratulations to Bazza and Bill for their splendid entries, and thanks, guys, for keeping up the Sphere appearance in The Oldie. I went along to the 20th anniversary celebration of the magazine yesterday, which was great. (At one point I was sitting chatting to Barry Cryer and June Whitfield, just to name-drop for a moment 
)
(Next comp on new thread)
Jayne
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe Oldie Competition
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxby Tessa Castro
COMPETITION No 153 was the annual bouts-rimés, whose rhymes were taken from the third stanza of ‘The Jumblies’. It was not good enough for Julie Edmunds, who baulked at the first rhyme word having no rhyme: ‘Please can I forbid / That awkward word did? / Your list has no other to rhyme. / I’d rather use din / Rhymed with in, spin and pin, / But hang up my pen till next time.’ There were plenty of imaginative leaps, Janet Kenny’s being those of Coppelia, for whom, ‘when she was in / an abandoned percussion-stomp one of her feet / snapped away at the ankle and fell in a neat / little bionic heap which she managed to pin / back in place with a click and a shuddery jar.’
‘Sieve’ proved the hardest word to accommodate. George McGilvray Wilson’s poem began as a love plaint for a broken rendezvous, with a twist in the last two lines: ‘Then two of you arrive out of the blue, / And you, my bus, are caught as in a sieve.’ Dr Andrew Bamji took inspiration from Pasteur: ‘Thanks to Gram’s stain, and Prussian Blue / He found those microbes too fine for a sieve.’
Commiserations to these and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of a Chamber’s Biographical Dictionary going to the verbicrucial B R Wells.
Sordid second half obviously did,
and beheading sin is evidently in.
Just three in a single yard are feet
and stake money confused can be as neat
as conifer, when pruned, producing pin.
So is a door when not a door a jar?
Specific period reversed makes are,
just as belong with no buzzer becomes long.
Incorrect or immoral are they wrong
to rearrange vasectomy for spin?
Some, but not very many, are a few.
Change vile, reject veil and evil, to live!
Navy, royal and sad are prompts for blue.
Amnesiac’s memory’s like a sieve.
B R Wells
They told me ‘don’t go near her’, but I did.
Her simulated passion took me in,
Blinded my judgement, swept me off my feet,
This femme fatale who took her whisky neat
And picked her nightly bedmates with a pin
While I drank sour dregs from obsession’s jar,
Betrayed, as old romantics often are.
She had me cold. I suffered hard and long,
Loving a paramour who did me wrong,
Whose double-dealing put me in a spin.
My pain was deep, my satisfactions few
Until I found a better way to live
And profit from whatever made me blue
With my hit Country song, ‘My Heart’s A Sieve’.
Basil Ransome-Davies
I cannot now remember all we did
Nor how we wandered out, or entered in,
The many miles we walked, with skimming feet
That left the wanton grass so green and neat
Our promises as pointless as the pin
Which picked the horse that cantered to a jar
Defeated at the post, as losers are.
That spring-time then so sweet was never long
But Autumn’s blaze declared all hopes were wrong,
The oldest lies that men can ever spin
Were woven well, with errors all too few
Yet I still know, as long as I shall live
Nothing can dim those brilliant eyes of blue
Entrapped forever in Time’s tender sieve.
Iris Bull
What we do now’s no longer what we did:
They’re different, these lives we’re living in.
I used to listen for your quiet feet,
The way your words were riotous but neat
In that they pricked me. I enjoyed their pin,
And even if our doors aren’t left ajar,
I can’t complain. The days we played in are
The past. I do not want them back, nor long
For what we had, before it all went wrong.
That kind of thinking leaves one in a spin,
And perfect peace is only for the few.
Though I’ll love you as long as I will live,
They must not be allowed to leave us blue,
These years that separate us, like a sieve.
Bill Greenwell
The Oldie 'Bouts-rimés' results. *Wins for Bazza and Bill*
Hybrid Mode
