No. 541: The winners
Trevor Grove reports: Competitors were invited to compose an octet, using rhymes taken from a well-known poem, on one of the following sub- jects: thoughts on the motorway box; a novel holiday brochure; Mrs Wilson on Hamlet at the Roundhouse. As one competitor puts it, rather bluntly, 'This week's setter benighted/ On a poser alighted,' though I hesitate to take the credit for his (and his colleagues') ensuing con- tortigns. It should, more justly, go to Thomas Hardy, whose 'At Castle Boterel' was the source for this week's rather unamenable collection of rhyme-words—one guinea to J. V. Cornwall whose entry identifying the poem was the first opened. The general response was to drop into Gilbertian measure like the jingling Mr Jethro B. Tuckett, who wins five guineas:
Our Holidays for the Overweight are select and often talked of: A spot for each on the Gobi Beach where few have been before. For fourteen days you will fast away from the calories you're balked of, And round the camp, a pneumatic ramp ensures you're not footsore.
Chorus So
Come, come, away with us and watch your waistline shrinking Chuck away those dreams of jellied creams into which your teeth are sinking. Come, come, away with us; be freed from festive rigour Let our courier be the one to care for the outline of your figure. Close on Mr Tuckett's tail, several other bro- chtnists of note: Andrew Duncan-Jones, H. A. C. Evans, Nicholas Holbrook and the publicity-shunning 'Pm.' But runners-up are, in fact, Dr R. L. Sadler, of the anti-motorway lobby (three guineas): The Romans came to Britain—at Londinium alighted, And they reached Eboracum long before they were footsore, Then marched to Uriconium; the Celtic tribes 'benighted, Were pressed to straighten winding roads that went those ways before.
Their Fosse Way yet is on the map, their Watling Street still talked of. Obsession for straight roads remains: for now, with Roman rigour, Our Planners move on London Town—road- straightening won't be balked of 'Till they have carved, with motorways, a rectilineal figure.
. and J. M. Crooks, in the person of the famous diarist, who also wins three guineas:- z
Methinks I see an old and ghostly figure, Who o'er the Danish castle has alighted, To sternly give commandments of such rigour That poor Prince Hamlet seem in sooth benighted.
Methinks, I muse, he, too, had dreams and talked of His country's great expansion, ne'er its shrinking, Till all his plans by one old man he's balked of— Then, like Ophelia, I feel my heart's sinking.
Previous page
