I tried to become a professional competition winner, but I lost - Ian McMillan

The magazine was also stuffed with articles by people who won houses and cruises and cars and cash.

They made it seem easy and it was true that a number of the competitions just required you to send in your name and address and then it seemed that after a few weeks someone would knock at the door and present you with the keys to a brand new sports car that was wrapped up in ribbon and parked on the pavement outside your house.

I decided on a two-pronged plan of attack: I noticed that there were a number of writing competitions around, alongside the ones that were also called Consumer Competitions and so I decided to enter both, partly because a number of the consumer competitions were more complicated than filling in your name and address and involved writing slogans and I figured that as a poet I could enter both kinds.

A writer I knew in Harrogate told me she’d won several thousand pounds by coming up with a slogan for a pan cleaner that went ‘I can’t see myself using anything else!’ which I think you’ll admit is very clever; I convinced myself that I could come up with something just as sparkling and that once I’d constructed that bit of word-magic I would be warmed up to try a writing competition.

I felt my bank balance almost expanding in anticipation.

I found a writing competition that was looking for a poem about that beautiful bird the robin, and I found a consumer competition that wanted to promote tins of tomato soup via a slogan of ten words or fewer.

I sat down with a pad of paper in front of me; the deadline for both competitions was the end of the week so I knew I had to work quickly because the entries had to be sent in by post

After two hours my paper was covered with scribble and corrections and little else. The first prize for the writing competition was £300 and the prize for the soup competition was a year’s supply of tomato soup so there was a lot at stake.

I tried all sorts: I tried a sonnet about a robin but I ran out of rhymes. I tried an imagistic verse but the lines just flew away.

I wrote: ‘This soup turns me into souperman!’ and I wrote ‘I like to go go go for tomato to to!’ neither of which felt like winners, to be honest, but I sent them off just in case.

I carried on sending poems and slogans off for what felt like months and I’m sorry to report that I won absolutely nothing. Not a single car of soup or a book token.

Then there was a clatter from the letterbox and I saw a parcel on the carpet and I knew instinctively that I was a winner. I’d rewritten my ‘souperman’ line for a different competition and the parcel had the name of the soup company on it. I opened it and gazed at my prize: a Superman calendar for the following year.

Oh well, I can’t see myself using anything else.