[John Whitworth]

We had two winners this week, Bill G and Frank O, both submitting real poems rather then verses - in my opinion anyway. In fact the entry level was very high (which is doubtless why my effort didn't find a place). You doubters take note of Frank's achievement. You don't have to be Brit to write about the tube.

Here is the next competition. Robert Graves did one of these, about Majorca, I think.

NO. 2713: allegory on the nile
You are invited to supply an example of a spiel Mrs Malaprop might give in her capacity as a tour guide to a capital city or famous monument of your choice (150 words max.). Please email entries, if possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 7 September.

[basil ransome-davies]

My heart sinks.

[John Whitworth]

Well, here's a thing. Not strictly according to the rubric but, hell, it goes with a swing.


Albert Memorial

Antique and frantic and antediluvian,
Monument massive, impassive, magnificent,
Rich as the Inca, the golden Peruvian,
Omnidirectional, omnibenificent,

Fashioned with passion, a festival sculptural,
Multiform, vermiform, multidimensional,
Menhir memorious, mass-multicultural,
Scorning the classical strictly conventional,

Sweetly sepulchural, sombre funereal
Garden of grief for the Empress of India,
Dateless as sorrow and weightless as Ariel,
Strong as an ox where the weather wears windier.

Work is the theme and the dream is sensational,
Honour imperial, manner laborious,
Heavenward soaring in mode inspirational,
Votive Victorian, happy and glorious.

[basil ransome-davies]

Not remotely according to the rubric. But then the rubric sucks. There's no real exercise of wit involved. It's on a par with parodying McGonagall. So well done, John. A swing indeed.

[George Simmers]

I had the same reaction as Bazza when I first saw this comp - but then amused myself on a bus journey to Oxford today by producing this one:

On your left is St James’s Palace, the officious residue of Prince Charles, our heir transparent who one day will achieve monocle status, as decreed by the British Constipation. While eagerly awaiting his mother’s demise he has made a name as a noteworthy campaigner on the environment, camping with special vigour on architectural affairs, where he has expressed severe depilation of the modernistic and a strong prevarication for eructations in the antediluvian style, such as those he has desecrated for the communists of Poundland, in Dorset. He is also active in the promotion of homophobic medicine, and his Prince’s Truss gives noteworthy support to young people from depraved areas. Just visible on your right now is Diana’s Fountain, designated to onanise Prince Charles’s first wife, the ‛Queen of Hearts’, who died in an automatic accident when in Paris with a Dodo.

[FOsen]

I tryst you had suffusive time in your peroration of St. Paul’s to thoroughly expel that implacable catheter and its andirons. Our next depredation will be the British Libratory in St. Pancreas, an insuparable treachery that has simulated numinous readers and re-surges. Its increditable nimbus of volumetry is literately unparalyzed; we’d need photogenic mammaries to absolve its mullioned collations and derangements in their entreaty.

Malapropos of which, allot me to import that we’re here on suffrage, so hurtle around me and listen slowly. Moralize your voices and whimper among yourselves. If you can’t reprehend my every syllabus, ask me for an interregnum to repeal myself and I’ll happily debride you. This gallimaufry alone constrains such manumissives as the Kodak Sinusitis, Linda’s Farm Gospels, and, of course, the Magnet-car, (duh). So, laterally, remand yourselves: this is the largest legal suppository in Britain; we must chasten if we’re to fit everything in.

Frank

[John Whitworth]

Thyose are nice and according to the rubric.

[Jayne Osborn]

Congratulations on your well-deserved wins Bill and Frank, and pass the tissues please, George and Frank, for these two offerings - I'm just crying with laughter!

'Homophobic medicine' and 'photogenic mammaries' - these will make me laugh for a very long time! Absolutely brilliant.