It's a puzzler...

I've always enjoyed all sorts of puzzles - from jigsaws to crosswords, word searches, logic problems. When I was young, before family holidays my sister and I would each get a new puzzle book to take with us to keep us occupied, so I've been a keen word-puzzle-person for many years now. At university I got introduced to the fun of cryptic crosswords, and for a few years would spend Saturday evenings working on one newspaper's cryptic first by myself, then over the phone with a couple of friends. We didn't often adtually manage to complete it, but enjoyed trying - and it was very clear that we each had our own strengths in deciphering particular types of clues.

Since then, life has of course become busier and more complicated, and for many years I barely looked at any of the puzzle books which were still sitting patiently in the rack. But finally in the past few years I've had rather a lot of forced downtime, so have come back to this hobby. My best friend even managed to find a bilingual wordsearch book, in which each puzzle has a list of words in both languages (e.g. numbers, colours, foods, animals etc.) to find in a single grid. Absolutely brilliant!

A colleague also introduced me last year to the wonder of the Guardian's weekly online 'quiptic' crossword - designed to be a slightly quicker and easier cryptic. I don't manage to look at it every week by any stretch of the imagination, but have found that I'm definitely on the same wavelength as some setters, and definitely NOT in tune with others!

More recently, over the past couple of months I've started doing nonograms - also called hanjie - online (using www.griddlers.net) and have enjoyed trying some of their larger puzzles as well as the quick daily puzzle most days. 'Triddlers' were new to me - the same sort of thing, but with triangles instead of squares to add an extra layer of complexity to the fun.

I've also rediscovered a long-neglected book (Puzzle Ninja by Alex Bellos) which had been given to Teen Child a number of years ago, but which was virtually untouched. That's given me the opportunity to try several new puzzles which are new to me. None of them look like becoming firm favourites, but it's always good to try new things, just to see what they're like. There are also some familiar but less common puzzles in there, so that was a good find and will be used over the coming weeks and months, I'm sure.

Speaking of firm favourites, though - jigsaws! Oh yes! Teen and I work through a whole load over Christmas and New Year annually, and occasionally at other times. Our favourites are definitely 1,000-2,000 piece maps - world or sky, we're not fussy! I think we have two contemporary world maps, at least 3 antique or antique-style ones, one star map - and one 4,000 piece world map which we haven't yet managed to do due to lack of a suitable table! We've been eyeing up the dining room at my parents' house for that one, so if it fits there that could be a summer project...

Sadly, this year's new Christmas puzzle which I bought us had 3 pieces missing, and three duplicate pieces included, so I had to contact the manufacturers. Fortunately they let us choose an alternative to replace it, so we had fun doing that over a couple of days last week. It's a different style to anything we've done before, and while it was definitely more challenging than our good old world maps it was very enjoyable and is certainly on the 'do again' list. I'd like to say it's helped me learn a few more bird calls, but sadly I'm not sure that's really happened. But maybe if I do it often enough?? (Apologies for the terrible quality of the picture!)

My older daughter seems to want to join in the jigsaw fun now - she's got the London Underground puzzle out. About two thirds of it is great - the lines and station names are easily identifiable, and can be done fairly easily. But the rest of it is white. Nothing but plain white. We've done this one once in the past and vowed never to try and complete it again - it's so tedious just trying pieces in every possible place and slowly, painstakingly putting it together. Maybe this time won't be quite so bad...