Now that I am retired, weekends don’t mean as much to me as they
once did. I don’t have good or bad
weekends. If I meet someone who asks,
“Have a good weekend?” I have to pause, think what day it is and then work out how
long ago the weekend was before giving an answer which is always, “Pretty good,
thanks.” I don’t have bad weekends -
until last weekend.
Before I relate the horrors
that made last Saturday so bad, it is important that you know a little about
OFSTED school inspections. When observing
a lesson, an inspector has to be satisfied that the material is pitched at the
right level. Remember that.
At nine o’clock on Saturday morning, I opened this email from Dave
Kerr. Dave and I were at Durham
University together and we’ve been friends for more than fifty years.
Terry.
Perhaps you will
be able to solve this for me. It’s been
given to my grandson as a homework task.
GRAMIL, GRAMIL, EDDCHA ALEHIG, CLITHO,
PERMAN - who comes next?
I’ve no idea
where to begin, or possibly, no inclination to do so.
Hope you are
well,
Dave
I got a coffee and went to my thinking chair to
do some serious thinking.
The letter ‘A’ appeared most often but just four times and there were only 17 different letters anyway. So, it probably wasn’t a letter substitution
puzzle.
Some features struck me:
1. “Who comes next?”
They were names and so I was searching for a name list.
2. GRAMIL appeared twice at the start.
3. EDDCHA CLITHO was not separated by a comma and so it was
possibly someone’s first and last name, or two people who are always said
together and would be familiar to children, like Ant and Dec.
4. Each group was six letters but it was
very unlikely that five different names are all exactly six letters long.
It was a puzzle for young children and so
Caroline suggested I tried to think like a 10-year-old. She told me I was good at that.
I sent the puzzle to my daughter, Lucy, who
is the mother of William, my 8-year-old grandson. Maybe he could do it.
Monarchs?
Perhaps it had been asked by a history teacher and they are a list of
regnal names. Maybe EDDCHA ALEHIG was “William and Mary”. If they were preceded by two monarchs with
the same name like ‘George’ or ‘Henry’, I would have cracked it. I went to Google. They weren’t.
Nursery rhymes? Maybe GRAMIL, GRAMIL was “Baa, baa” and
EDDCHA ALEHIG is “black-sheep” but that meant that the unknown word in the
sequence was “any”. How would I code
“any” into six letters and anyway, I was looking for a name.
If it were “twinkle, twinkle little-star”.
The missing word is ‘wonder’ but it can’t be.
Come on Terry! Think like a
ten-year-old.
I put ‘GRAMIL’ into Google. It is Spanish for “gauge” but none of the
other words produced anything.
Then, I thought I had it: PUGH, PUGH, BARNEY McGREW, CUTHBERT, DIBBLE
…. GRUB. It had to be the roll call of the firemen
in Trumpton.
It must be, but how do I put GRUB into a six-letter code
format? Now that I was sure I had the
answer, I spent most of the afternoon trying to work that out.
Caroline tried to throw a spanner in the
works. “How would a ten-year-old kid in
2017 know about Trumpton, a programme that was shown 50 years ago?”
I rang William to test that by asking him
to complete the sequence.
“Grub,” he said without hesitation.
“How do you know that?” I asked, astonished.
“You gave me the Trumpton DVD for my birthday.”
“Yes, of course we did. I remember now,” I lied.
Lucy took the phone. “Could ‘GRA’ be Graham?” she asked me.
“I doubt it,” I said, realising that she was
probably on to something.
When I was at school, one of the teachers
always called me “Terton” which was the first three letters of my first name
and the last three letters of my surname.
Could it be ‘Graham Emil’ or ‘Graham Tamil' perhaps? Unlikely.
But if ‘MIL’ were the first three letters
of the surname, there were many possibilities: Milner, Miller, Milburn, Miles
etc.
How about the others? ALE could be the start of ‘Alec’,
‘Alexander’, 'Aled' or ‘Alexis’. Then, at
last it became clear - ALEHIG was Alex Higgins, the snooker player. CLIFTHO was Cliff Thorburn another snooker
player and I soon had them all - except for GRAMIL.
I put ‘Graham Miller’ into Google. Please let him be a snooker player. He wasn’t but Graham Miles was. Cracked it!
So, the sequence was: Graham Miles, Graham
Miles, Eddie Charlton, Alex Higgins, Cliff Thorburn, Perrie Mans. But who comes next?
The fact that Graham Miles appeared twice
at the start should have helped but didn’t.
The only thing I could find that Graham Miles had done twice, was to win
the television programme “Pot Black” two years running in 1974 and ’75. In 1976 it was won by John Spencer and so it
was not a sequence of those winners.
Eventually, thanks again to Google, I found
the answer to the sequence: these snooker players were the runners-up (not even
the winners) in the Snooker World Championship from 1974 until 1978. The runner-up in 1979 was Denis Taylor and so
the next name in the list in DENTAY.
Dave’s grandson and his classmates will
have had the same chance of getting the answer to that question as I and other
colleagues had of working out the answer in a game of Botticelli some forty
years ago.
In Botticelli, one person thinks of a famous
character (real or fictional) and then answers up to 20 yes/no questions to
allow the other players to guess the identity.
There were about twenty of us - ten teachers and
partners. It was the turn of Boring
Carol’s boyfriend to think of a character (She was known as Boring Carol to
distinguish her from another Carol on the staff who was certainly not boring.)
After five questions, we had established that the
character was a footballer. After 10
questions, we knew he played for a club outside and south of London.
After 20 questions, BC’s boyfriend had won a point
for his team and he had to tell us the answer:
Jim Someone Or Other, Exeter City’s reserve goalkeeper! I haven’t played Botticelli since.
The more I think about Dave’s
question, the angrier I become with the absolute twat who gave it to a group of
primary school children.
To solve it, certain steps had to be taken:
1. To understand the format of the code - first
three letters of the first name followed by the first three letters of the last
name.
2. To identify at least two of the names
correctly.
3. To appreciate the link between those
names.
3. To identify the other names.
4. To isolate a unique connection between
those names in the order they appear.
5. To discover the next name in the sequence.
6. To transform that name into the
code.
How ridiculous was it to give this puzzle
to schoolchildren today? Those snooker
players were all in their prime more than forty years ago and three of the five
in the list are dead. The teacher is a twat.
Unless I am very wrong (which I
never am), the question was mistakenly composed and set out:
1.
Why GRAMIL, GRAMIL at the start when Graham Miles only lost in the final once.
2. Why no comma after
EDDCHA? For about four hours I was looking for a two-word name, hence,
"PUGH, PUGH, BARNEY MCGREW ….
I suspect that this question originated in a
pub quiz in about 1980 as a specialist round on “Snooker” and then some
idiot has given it to a group of kids in 2017.
In the opinion of One Who Knows,
that teacher is an ABSOLUTE TWAT.
