A Fragment of The Larger Scene

Oh dear! I’ve discovered yet another activity that I am not very good at.  

It is not important and the fact that I find it more difficult and takes me longer to do than most people, is of no consequence or importance whatsoever.  It’s only my pride that has taken a kicking and I stopped caring about that many years ago.

The effect this has had on me is nothing compared with the disappointment I felt when it dawned on me that I was never going to be any good at playing golf or when I realised I couldn’t sing.  

I have discovered that I am absolutely terrible at is solving interlocking picture mosaics - or jigsaw puzzles as we know them.

It must be 65 years since I last tackled a jigsaw but in the past month, they have had quite an impact on me.  It began when Joshua and Alex, my grandchildren came down from Yorkshire to stay with us.

“Have you seen the boys?” Caroline, my wife, asked me late one afternoon.  “I haven’t  seen them for a couple of hours.”

I looked around and found Alex, who is nine, sitting at the dining room table, intently studying the pieces of a 1500 piece jigsaw that he was solving.  He seemed to be getting on well but then I had a thought.

“Will you be finished soon?” I asked him.  “We need the table for dinner.”

He was obviously going to take a lot more time and so we all went to a restaurant at a cost of more than £200, all thanks to some pieces of cardboard!

A week ago, I spoke on the phone to Carolyn, a woman I was at school with.  I’ve known Carolyn since I was 8 years old and so I’ve known her longer than anyone in the world other than my brother.  She told me that she had recently started doing online jigsaws.

That sounded like a good idea and so I downloaded an app and began playing.  The way it works is that you select an image and then choose how many pieces you would like the puzzle to consist of.  The options are 35, 70, 90, 140, 266, 450 or 660 pieces.

I chose a 35 piece puzzle the first time and completed it in just under 4 minutes.  A second puzzle of 70 pieces took me 9 minutes and I worked out that there seemed to be a pattern that was approximately 6 or 7 pieces a minute.  

For my third attempt, I chose the Lauch River in the town of Colmar in the Alsace region of France and I went full on with a 660 piece puzzle.  Two hours should do it, I thought.

I began at 7:00 pm on Tuesday evening.  This is the puzzle: 

I managed to complete the borders of the puzzle in about 30 minutes.  That was straightforward but then, the real problems began.  I could magnify the picture I was trying to complete on the screen but I could not enlarge the unused pieces which were annoyingly small.

Jigsaw piece terminology:

I might realise that a piece I needed has a red stripe halfway across the lower tab but the tabs were so small that I could not make out that detail.  

Consequently, I resorted to going through all the tabs that could possibly be correct which was more than 400 and trying every one until I found the piece that fitted.

After three hours, I gave up for the day to watch the news on television.

“How are you getting on?” asked Caroline.  

“Slow,” I replied.

“I finished mine,” she said.  “A forest scene.  One hour twenty nine minutes.”

“Yes, but how many pieces?”

“Four hundred and fifty.”

“Six-sixty is a lot harder,” I assured her.

On Wednesday, I started again at about 1:00 p.m. and carried on until six in the evening without a break.  I felt the way that people who work from home these days must feel at the end of their working day.  The puzzle was maybe half finished.  It was sometimes taking me as long as 20 minutes to put a new piece in the correct place.  

That evening, Caroline asked me to show her the puzzle with which I was having such problems with and was making slow progress.  I told her that it was very difficult and she would find it to be very frustrating.  After telling me that she liked a challenge, she downloaded the Colmar river puzzle and began solving it.

For the next two hours we sat about 10 feet apart in complete silence.  At 10:00 p.m. I stopped puzzling and watched the news.  At 11:10 p.m. I closed my laptop, stood up and announced to Caroline that I was off to bed.  I had spent more than 6 hours on the damned thing that day.

“Finished?”

“Not yet.  I’ve done about three quarters,” I told her.  “How are you doing?”

“All right. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

She was.  The expression on her face was so illuminating that I didn’t need to ask but I did:

“How long?”

“Three hours twelve minutes,” she smirked.

Jigsaws are different from virtually all other games and that includes all sport, in that as far as I can tell, it is impossible to cheat when doing a jigsaw.  The only other games that shares that characteristic is “Connect 4” and noughts and crosses.

Chess is a game that is possibly unique in that “luck” cannot be a factor in the result but it has been hit by cheating scandals at the top levels.  They have always involved external computer programs that calculate the best moves that are then conveyed to the player via hidden electronic receivers.

I don’t know what an ability to complete a jigsaw faster than someone else is a measure of, but whatever it is, Caroline has four times as much of it as me.  It certainly can’t be intelligence and I think it must be something like oestrogen levels.  Yes, that would certainly explain it.

I found sleep difficult on Wednesday night and on Thursday morning, I set to work again and eventually, just after noon, I completed the effin thing.

Twelve hours, one minute and thirty seven seconds and the bloody app had the nerve to say “CONGRATULATIONS…”

If you want to gloat, download the app “Puzzle Crown”.  Put your time in “Comments”.  

You will certainly beat me.