It's a Puzzle

The Golden Wasp Game

Back in the Dark Analogue Age of two-TV-channel Christmas, one way – in fact pretty much the only way – of alleviating the tedium of long nights confined with your extended family was to play games. Have you ever had to pin the tail on the donkey, race cut-out paper fish across the living-room by whacking the carpet with a rolled up newspaper, or tried to play hide-and-seek in a house with no hiding places worthy of the name? Have you ever sat round a table, quietly astonished at the deep need of certain relatives to win a completely pointless board game? If so, you too will probably have discovered the solitary joy of reading a book or, as an adult, quietly getting drunk and pretending to be unconscious.

Personally – and I realise this marks me as a party-pooping introvert – I've never really been turned on by games. Even as a child, the idea of a round of Monopoly or snakes and ladders was never my idea of a fun way to spend the evening. I was always more interested in the design of the board and the gaming pieces than the game itself, and have certainly spent rather more time studying the curves, planes, and moulding of a box of chessmen than actually playing chess, a pursuit which, frankly, I find utterly baffling. The very idea of thinking several moves ahead, including the anticipation of your opponent's counter-moves, gives me a headache. It's not something I'm proud of, it's just that I know my limits. Oh, look, you win again: I'll put the kettle on. Do we have any paracetamol?

In the past I have attempted to master a few card games more complex than snap (which is difficult enough, if your attention is constantly snagged by the elegantly symmetrical intricacies of playing card design). Poker, for example, simply because it seems antisocial to spoil the fun of others by refusing to play, however badly, and there's nothing a decent card player enjoys more than to point out the idiotic way you have just lost a winning hand to their fistful of rubbish. You're welcome, Mr. Hickok! I recall once spending a memorable holiday in the late 1970s touring France and Spain trapped in a car with three keen bridge players. Rarely has anyone filled the role of "dummy" so well. Listen, you play out the hand, I'll get the drinks in [1].

Solitary pastimes of the game or puzzle variety don't generally hit the spot for me, either. The challenge of, say, a crossword was never one to which I had ever felt the need to rise. However, one of my oldest friends is a participant in one of those vibrant communities of interest that go completely unnoticed by outsiders: he is (whisper it) an active cruciverbalist (as comedian Eric Morecambe used to say, they can't touch you for it). To feed his habit, some while ago I started sending him the weekly Times Literary Supplement crossword, and this has drawn me, somewhat reluctantly, into this curious netherworld, as he sometimes asks me to help out with some of the TLS clues, under the mistaken impression that I have advanced knowledge of literary matters. Well, I suppose I do have some literary knowledge, but what I really know, after 35 years working in university libraries, is where and how to look for more. As Samuel Johnson put it, "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries."[2] 

Now, the TLS crossword is not your simple "guess the word from the clue" type of crossword:  none of your "Author of Bleak House (7 letters)" sort of thing. No; it is a full-on cryptic crossword, which – with its traditions, explicit and implicit rules, and austere satisfactions – is a peculiarly British institution, not unlike our unwritten constitution, or the game of cricket. The civil servant who can finish the Times crossword during the morning commute, casually leaving the paper with its pencilled-in solutions on the train seat, is a figure of legend. But, as with chess, the mindset required to solve a cryptic clue is deeply alien to me. To reduce words to assemblages of letters, to be chopped up and re-arranged to form other words, is like regarding a person as a fascinating but interchangeable assemblage of organs. Which, I suppose, is precisely how a surgeon must come to see people. In Eliot's memorable words about John Webster, he sees the skull beneath the skin (an unapologetic little flash of literary knowledge there).

In a cryptic crossword a lot can depend on the personality of the crossword setter, who will change from week to week in the TLS. Some are like benign uncles, leading you on to some pleasing "aha!" moment, while others are more like malevolent misanthropes, delighting in the perverse difficulties they have placed in your path. This one has been recommended to me as a particularly pleasing beginner's cryptic puzzle, suitably equipped with training wheels, for example. But then consider, by contrast, this (to my mind) fiendish TLS clue:

"Service area crossed by Follett's drunken agent (6)".

As a sentence, it makes superficial sense. We know what a "service area" is, we can guess that thriller writer Ken Follett is being invoked, and that one of his books may well include an agent who is a drinker. Much googling ensues, but with little result. There are no obvious Follett novels with an alcoholic protagonist, no useful synonyms for "service area".

But the experienced solver will have been alerted by the words "crossed by". Such innocent formulations often indicate a mashup of some kind; an anagram, a concatenation, a topping and tailing, or some other piece of word butchery. So, now let me reveal the answer. It is: KERNAN. Your considered response to this may be WTF?, as was mine. But here's how it works:

"service" = RN (abbreviation for the Royal Navy, the Senior Service);
"area" = A (a standard algebraic abbreviation);
"Follett" = KEN.
Now apply scissors and paste.

Now, I have read every word written by James Joyce (although, to quote Eric Morecambe again, not necessarily in the right order) but have no memory at all now of anyone named "Kernan", who, as you probably don't recall, is the drunk who falls down the stairs in "Grace", one of the short stories in Joyce's Dubliners, and who also features in Ulysses. He is a salesman, thus an "agent"; well, kinda sorta, maybe. So it seems there is no "service area", and the "agent" is not Ken Follett's at all. [3] Which, despite its sheer cleverness, and unassailable logic – at least within the conventions of cryptic clues – I find, shall we say, less than satisfying. Indeed, what baffles me most about this kind of puzzle is that the treasure chest – after the map-reading, the hacking through the undergrowth, and all that strenuous digging – is always empty, apart from a note saying, "Congratulations, you found it!". I suppose true cruciverbalists consider it sufficient reward for the time and effort expended to have successfully reverse-engineered the clue and demonstrated that their ingenuity is commensurate with that of the setter.

However, over Christmas – immobilised by a flu-ey cold and terrible weather – I came across another sort of crossword which, to my surprise, I do actually enjoy. As well as regular crosswords, both simple and cryptic, sudokus, and various other harmless ways of engaging the brain, The Guardian publishes a so-called Codeword in its Saturday edition. This is a typical crossword grid, but there are no clues, and instead all the squares are numbered: "Each letter of the alphabet makes at least one appearance in the grid and is represented by the same number wherever it appears. A number of letters have been decoded to help with the identification of other letters and words in the grid". You generally get three letters to start you off, and the whole thing then depends on your capacity to recognise words from patterns of letters – double letters, vowel-consonant combinations, etc. As a word-loving person, this works for me as it plays to my strengths, and is actually fun [4].

The example below took me about an hour to finish, and it seems like an ideal way to get the little grey cells fired up from a standing start first thing on a weekend. So my new Sunday morning ritual has become: get up, make a pot of tea, check out the new cartoons by Tom Gauld and Stephen Collins in the Saturday Guardian, tear off the last page, fold over the upside-down "answers" column to avoid the temptation to cheat, and settle down to breakfast with a pencil and the Codeword. It certainly beats reading the book review pages, which continue to shrink to make room for ever more absurd "lifestyle" features, and seem anyway only to feature the sort of books I am never likely to read. So, let's get down to it: first fill in all the Rs, Os, and Ms. Now think of six-letter words containing ROM and two of the same letter... Easy one! Probably... Tentatively, fill in the Ps and Ts. Actually, I could use a pee, and more tea might help... (Heh... Sorry about that).

1. A task I enjoyed, as a large part of that holiday was spent in the Basque Country, where I found – to my unaccustomed pleasure – that I was often the tallest man in the bar.

2. That quotation (from Boswell's Life)  has an oddly anachronistic feel, doesn't it, as if Johnson is talking about popping into the local public library and scanning the summaries and blurbs printed on the back of the books, but of course by "back" he means "spine" and by "library" he means either someone's personal collection of books or that of some private institution like a club.

3. Here is an expert's account: The surface of  this clue suggests a story about the author Ken Follett and his inebriated (and/or hopefully non-litigious) literary agent on a motorway journey, perhaps. Cryptically, however, it is a charade within a container, with the clear definition, "drunken agent" – a reference to Joyce's character, KERNAN, the answer. The charade is RN = Royal Navy ("service") + A ("area" -- maths) and that is contained within KEN, the author Follett's forename. The containment is indicated by the word "crossed". RNA is 'crossed' by KEN. The "'s" at the end of Follett is the link word between wordplay and definition. Cryptically, it stands for 'is': [this wordplay] is (the same thing as) [this clear definition], while in the surface it is a possessive marker. So the structure of this clue is: contained charade / link word / definition.

4. A very long time ago I sat the British Civil Service "fast stream" exam, which I passed. In principle, the papers test for outstanding linguistic, logical, and mathematical ability, but I was told that, although my scores in the logical and mathematical aspects were merely average, my linguistic scores were so high they had decided to give me a pass, anyway, and call me up for the interview stage. However, I came to my senses and decided to decline the opportunity to become "an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country" (Henry Wotton, 1604). Wotton's use of that ambiguous "lie" has something of the cruciverbalist spirit about it, I think.