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Competition No 3747

Set by John Crick on 2 September

Philip Kerr wrote in the NS that there was "no poetry to be found in our metric coinage". We asked you to prove him wrong.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Tankas, haikus, triolets, odes, sonnets - they all poured in. I looked a little askance at the vicious denigrations of our metric coinage that preferred the old florins and shillings. Hate poems are poetry of a sort, but I felt these departed from the spirit of the comp. £15 to the winners. The overall champion, Basil Ransome-Davies, also gets the vouchers.

Heptagonal, you fill my palm,

More tactile than your ten bob note.

How often, like a lucky charm,

Heptagonal, you fill my palm,

So that I spend with half a qualm

Your minted silver. How I gloat!

Heptagonal, you fill my palm,

More tactile than your ten bob! Note!

Will Bellenger

Oh, pretty, dainty, cute little 5p

Is there anything I can buy with just one of you?

Even though you're a silver coin, you are so wee,

Oh, pretty, dainty, cute little 5p,

That I must seek out four of you to pay for a pee

In the gents at King's Cross, or Euston, or Waterloo.

Oh, pretty, dainty, cute little 5p

Is there anything I can buy with just one of you?

John Nye

O my once shiny 20p

Seven sides encasing royalty.

How do I spend you?

Let me count the ways

On reflection not so many

Alas, in my pocket you stay.

O my twenty-pence piece

Longing for your might to increase

Metrically I'm yours eternal

You came and decimated the imperial.

Jeremy Moorhead

Dragged up like a blinking gopher,

From a crevice in the sofa

Where it burrowed in a panic,

Seven-sided, talismanic,

Fashioned like a spanner's bevel,

Thumbnail-compact, light and level,

Low in value but congenial,

Pocket-friendly, humdrum, menial:

Such are the divertimenti

Of a rediscovered twenty.

Basil Ransome-Davies

(After Spike Milligan's "The Flea")

How teeny teeny wee

Is the little 20p.

One would think that one so small

Could be no bloody use at all.

But just last night in my hotel

It helped me get as drunk as hell.

For though my boss would not permit

One drink upon the company chit,

That tiny coin became a star

When it unlocked the minibar.

R Ewing

Oh! I spent them all

And oh! What a time I had -

Fifty silver pence!

John O'Byrne

No 3750 Set by George Cowley
Assuming - just assuming - that Tony Blair and George Dubbya got blind drunk after their recent meeting, could we eavesdrop on the results. Dialogue, please, to scare the living daylights out of the rest of the world.
Max 150 words by 4 October (to appear in issue dated 14 October) E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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