From "The Mind Will Always Find Something To Do"
This is how I proposed to my late wife.
On the morning of our second anniversary I woke early. I slipped from beneath the covers, leaving her to sleep, and ran out to the newsagents to get the morning's paper. Standing by the counter, still in my pyjamas and slippers, I unfolded a copy and turned it over. There, on the back page, was my puzzle.
I rushed back to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Eggs Benedict on toasted muffins with freshly made Hollandaise sauce; hot, ground coffee; hand-squeezed orange juice and a small bowl of plump, juicy strawberries, stalked and cut into halves.
I filled in a few of the clues myself, and then folded the paper back up in such a way that my puzzle was left facing up and wedged it under the plate on the breakfast tray.
She stirred as I entered the room. I told her to relax, that I was bringing her breakfast in bed. I placed the tray down beside her and she sat up dozily as I went to open the curtains. It was a beautiful spring morning, I remember. The ground outside was speckled with dew and the sun shone bright in the clear blue sky making each drop sparkle white.
While my back was turned I could hear her rearranging the items on the tray. The paper had been momentarily pushed to the side, but I knew that she would pick it up again. She always read the headlines as she had breakfast.
That day though, the day I proposed to my late wife, she didn't even make it to the front page. As she shook the paper open, with the back page facing her, she was confused to see that someone had already filled in a few of the answers on the crossword grid.
She opened her mouth to speak - to ask me what had happened to the paper, I imagine - but stopped when she realised what the words spelled out.
YOUR, HAND, IN, MARRIAGE, PLEASE
Were she in the frame of mind to pore over the puzzle sat in front of her then she would have noticed that the words written were indeed the correct answers to the spaces' corresponding clues.
8 Down: Collectively: carpals, metacarpals, phalanges (4);
23 Across: A grim era? Surely confused (8) and so on.
Initially I had wanted to go for the more traditional WILL, YOU, MARRY, ME but my editor had insisted that I not use any two lettered answers. He was happy for me to use the puzzle to propose - I had been a regular contributor for years, and he was always glad to have a light-hearted, quirky puzzle to end the week - only so long as I didn’t use any two lettered answers. Not only did he feel that they make a grid look too stumpy but, in all of his twelve years as puzzle editor for The Telegraph, he had never allowed a two lettered answer to be used. Even in this case, he wasn't prepared to make an exception.
He was right not to, of course. After all, if not for the rules, what is a crossword but just a mess of letters?
Had I resorted to using a two lettered answer, not only would there doubtless have been letters from irked readers, but I also would have felt as if I'd cheated in compiling the puzzle - something I have never knowingly done in my entire career. So it forced me into thinking of a different proposal.
By using YOUR, HAND, IN, MARRIAGE, PLEASE I was able to lock the two lettered IN on to HAND by the D to give the clue for 13 Across: Sounds like a trashcan being hammered (3) - which, while it may not be not my finest or my cleverest clue, got me out of that particular fix.
Now, in hindsight, I think I prefer that it was YOUR, HAND, IN, MARRIAGE, PLEASE. It sounds like it could be a clue itself. I can imagine people - commuters, housewives, university professors - completing the crossword that day and half making out the words of this slightly cryptic message for themselves. They will wonder if it is merely coincidence that these words have appeared before their eyes, or if perhaps that this was a message meant for someone.
A couple of days later as they wait for a train, or as they are cooking their supper, they will think about it again. They will think about that strange message and they will wonder if the person it was meant for ever got to see it, if the person that wrote it ever got their answer.
I smiled back at her, nodding my head towards the paper. She looked again at the grid again and saw the circled clue.
26 Across: What do you say? (3)
She looked back at me, blinked and then looked at the grid one final time before, slowly, picking up the biro.
Her hand shaking, she filled in her answer.
Y-E-S.
21 December 2008
7 Down: Possible Shakespeare (4)
From "The Mind Will Always Find Something To Do"
I compiled my first crossword at the age of eleven.
When my mother received the call from the hospital that my father had been attacked she felt, quite rightly, that she could not leave me alone in the house. Consequently, I was dragged along with her.
No sooner had we stepped through the doors of the reception than my mother was telling me to stay put and rushing off to find my father. At the time I remember thinking how strange it was that she didn't consider me old enough to be left alone in our family home - a building I knew well, and was relatively safe in - but that I was old enough to be left alone in a strange and vast hospital.
Of course, I know now that it was because I was far too young to have seen what had happened to my father and my mother, so desperate to be by his side, had momentarily lost all sense of rational thought.
Left to pace the corridors of the hospital by myself, I ended up chancing upon the gift shop. Immediately I scouted out the puzzle books but, as far as I could see, it appeared that there were none of the children's editions that I was used to on the shelves. Yet even if they had been heaving with them it would have made little difference, as the pocket money I had would not have stretched to a printed crossword compendium, so I bought a reporter's notepad and a pencil instead and went and sat down in the reception to write.
It started out just being page after page of interlocked words - no spacing, no clues, no real order. But then, as I started to run out of words, I started trying to imitate the sorts of clues that I had seen before in my own puzzle books.
They were basic. AMBULANCE, for example, would be Car for sick people (10).
I was left alone for maybe six or seven hours before my mother found me again. When she sat down next to me she looked pale and tired, but she smiled when she told me that the doctors had said that he was going to be all right.
I didn't find out until much later, after both of my parents had died, that my father had been very critically injured that day in a bank robbery. He had been waiting in a queue to make a withdrawal when four masked thieves staged a hold-up. Incapable of merely being a bystander to the proceedings, my father tried to make a grab for one of them as they made their escape - unaware that he had a five-inch knife tucked away up his trouser leg. As they tussled to the floor, the thief retrieved his blade and thrust it into my father's ribcage, rendering him immobile.
I'm told that paramedics made it to the scene with barely a minute to spare. He had lost a great deal of blood and was rushed to the emergency room operating theatre with his life hanging in the balance.
In the weeks of his recovery I once caught my father walking around shirtless. His chest was swathed in bandage and, right where his heart would have been in a biological diagram, there was a browning red soak-stain. Everybody had been describing the incident as my father's 'attack', and I, unaware at the time that he had been stabbed, therefore assumed that they were referring to a heart attack. Seeing the graphic evidence of this wound, coupled with my mistaken assumption, I had visions of his angry little heart thrashing around inside his body, trying to fight its way out of his chest. I saw his heart attack him.
It would be years and years before I was called upon to re-evaluate what I thought I knew about heart attacks. I was telling Claire about one of the board members of the security firm that I worked for who had had a heart attack, and I articulated in such a way that I ended up saying that he had been attacked in his lunch break. She looked shocked and sympathetic at just that, but she was utterly horrified when I told her not to worry, that it was only a mild attack and that it hadn't really come as a surprise to anyone at the office, though they were all understandably concerned.
When she finally realised what it was that I was trying to intimate, she set me straight. She told me that you suffer a heart attack, you aren't attacked by one. Immediately I racked my brain to think of any times that I might have spoken to anyone else about heart attacks, and whether I had maybe confused them with the same mistake.
Aside from the heart attack that my father had never actually had, I couldn't think of any other instance where I would have needed to discuss them with anyone - presumably why my eleven year old logic had gone unchallenged up to that point.
It's strange how these sorts of mistakes can lay dormant for so long.
Perhaps in passing I have told someone about some other person being attacked. I have visions of me saying to other people, “Yes, he was attacked on his way home from work.”
"How terrible!" they would exclaim, and I would nod.
"I know," I would say. "It looks like no-one is safe," referring to myocardial infarctions.
They would shake their head, muttering something like "What a world!" to themselves and then, instead of cutting red meat from their diet and taking regular exercise, they would get new locks fitted on their doors and think about setting up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.
There are so many mistakes throughout the body my work. I see things now that I didn't see then. A mistaken use of "less" where I should have written "fewer"; attributing a paraphrased quote to Shakespeare when it was actually one of Mark Twain's; a complete misunderstanding of the word "contrition". To the non-cruciverbalist, to someone who doesn't work in crosswords, these may seem trivial and unimportant and, in the grand scheme of things, I suppose that they are. What irks me about them is that they are indicative of a much larger problem, namely that I've always been a bit of a pompous know-it-all.
At noticeably frequent intervals throughout my life it has been necessary for me to take stock of what I have known to be true, and what is in fact true, and each and every time it has hit me like a ton of bricks. I find that, actually, I know nothing. I know absolutely nothing. And yet each time I recover from this shock, the shock of realising that I know absolutely nothing, I think to myself "This time it's different." I think, "Now I'm wise."
The lesson has finally taken hold.
No more.
I compiled my first crossword at the age of eleven.
When my mother received the call from the hospital that my father had been attacked she felt, quite rightly, that she could not leave me alone in the house. Consequently, I was dragged along with her.
No sooner had we stepped through the doors of the reception than my mother was telling me to stay put and rushing off to find my father. At the time I remember thinking how strange it was that she didn't consider me old enough to be left alone in our family home - a building I knew well, and was relatively safe in - but that I was old enough to be left alone in a strange and vast hospital.
Of course, I know now that it was because I was far too young to have seen what had happened to my father and my mother, so desperate to be by his side, had momentarily lost all sense of rational thought.
Left to pace the corridors of the hospital by myself, I ended up chancing upon the gift shop. Immediately I scouted out the puzzle books but, as far as I could see, it appeared that there were none of the children's editions that I was used to on the shelves. Yet even if they had been heaving with them it would have made little difference, as the pocket money I had would not have stretched to a printed crossword compendium, so I bought a reporter's notepad and a pencil instead and went and sat down in the reception to write.
It started out just being page after page of interlocked words - no spacing, no clues, no real order. But then, as I started to run out of words, I started trying to imitate the sorts of clues that I had seen before in my own puzzle books.
They were basic. AMBULANCE, for example, would be Car for sick people (10).
I was left alone for maybe six or seven hours before my mother found me again. When she sat down next to me she looked pale and tired, but she smiled when she told me that the doctors had said that he was going to be all right.
I didn't find out until much later, after both of my parents had died, that my father had been very critically injured that day in a bank robbery. He had been waiting in a queue to make a withdrawal when four masked thieves staged a hold-up. Incapable of merely being a bystander to the proceedings, my father tried to make a grab for one of them as they made their escape - unaware that he had a five-inch knife tucked away up his trouser leg. As they tussled to the floor, the thief retrieved his blade and thrust it into my father's ribcage, rendering him immobile.
I'm told that paramedics made it to the scene with barely a minute to spare. He had lost a great deal of blood and was rushed to the emergency room operating theatre with his life hanging in the balance.
In the weeks of his recovery I once caught my father walking around shirtless. His chest was swathed in bandage and, right where his heart would have been in a biological diagram, there was a browning red soak-stain. Everybody had been describing the incident as my father's 'attack', and I, unaware at the time that he had been stabbed, therefore assumed that they were referring to a heart attack. Seeing the graphic evidence of this wound, coupled with my mistaken assumption, I had visions of his angry little heart thrashing around inside his body, trying to fight its way out of his chest. I saw his heart attack him.
It would be years and years before I was called upon to re-evaluate what I thought I knew about heart attacks. I was telling Claire about one of the board members of the security firm that I worked for who had had a heart attack, and I articulated in such a way that I ended up saying that he had been attacked in his lunch break. She looked shocked and sympathetic at just that, but she was utterly horrified when I told her not to worry, that it was only a mild attack and that it hadn't really come as a surprise to anyone at the office, though they were all understandably concerned.
When she finally realised what it was that I was trying to intimate, she set me straight. She told me that you suffer a heart attack, you aren't attacked by one. Immediately I racked my brain to think of any times that I might have spoken to anyone else about heart attacks, and whether I had maybe confused them with the same mistake.
Aside from the heart attack that my father had never actually had, I couldn't think of any other instance where I would have needed to discuss them with anyone - presumably why my eleven year old logic had gone unchallenged up to that point.
It's strange how these sorts of mistakes can lay dormant for so long.
Perhaps in passing I have told someone about some other person being attacked. I have visions of me saying to other people, “Yes, he was attacked on his way home from work.”
"How terrible!" they would exclaim, and I would nod.
"I know," I would say. "It looks like no-one is safe," referring to myocardial infarctions.
They would shake their head, muttering something like "What a world!" to themselves and then, instead of cutting red meat from their diet and taking regular exercise, they would get new locks fitted on their doors and think about setting up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.
There are so many mistakes throughout the body my work. I see things now that I didn't see then. A mistaken use of "less" where I should have written "fewer"; attributing a paraphrased quote to Shakespeare when it was actually one of Mark Twain's; a complete misunderstanding of the word "contrition". To the non-cruciverbalist, to someone who doesn't work in crosswords, these may seem trivial and unimportant and, in the grand scheme of things, I suppose that they are. What irks me about them is that they are indicative of a much larger problem, namely that I've always been a bit of a pompous know-it-all.
At noticeably frequent intervals throughout my life it has been necessary for me to take stock of what I have known to be true, and what is in fact true, and each and every time it has hit me like a ton of bricks. I find that, actually, I know nothing. I know absolutely nothing. And yet each time I recover from this shock, the shock of realising that I know absolutely nothing, I think to myself "This time it's different." I think, "Now I'm wise."
The lesson has finally taken hold.
No more.
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