And then, there's the very new tradition of the cryptic crossword.
Like many families, we have long-standing Christmas traditions: watching White Christmas, felling a (typically very scrawny) tree from our own property, tackling Fraser Simpson's full-page regular crossword puzzle, and leaving out Christmas cake and sherry on the 24th. We have newer ones, too. My husband introduced us to the tradition of listening to The Shepherd on CBC Radio, which we now all do in rapt silence. My brother-in-law (and his culinarily skilled mother) introduced us to feasting on bacalhau on Christmas Eve.
And then, there's the very new tradition of the cryptic crossword.
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Books have always been a big thing in my family at Christmas. When I was young, I would tear away the wrapping on new titles—from Black Beauty to A Wrinkle In Time—then spend the balance of the holiday lost in their magic. One of the highlights of my week—particularly if it's been a week in which we haven't seen much of each other—is to curl up on a Saturday morning with my husband and the Globe and Mail cryptic crossword.
Whenever I visit my parents' house, I spend a few private moments in front of one particular watercolour painting. It is a scene of laundry drying in the backyards of a Montreal suburb in very early spring, sometimes in the 1960s. The artist who painted it was my grandmother and like much of her work, the medium is unassuming and the scene is quietly domestic. And yet, I am transfixed at every viewing. When I stand before that painting, I feel as if, for just a moment, I have stepped back in time and into her life.
She works extremely long hours under difficult conditions and she is often lonely. When she is, there is very little I can do to help and that breaks my heart. When I am lonely, distraction helps and as you know from the contents of this website, I find cryptic crosswords to be a wonderful distraction. I could not give my friend a hug or make her dinner but perhaps I could distract her from her loneliness, I reasoned. Perhaps I could show her the hidden door that leads into the magically complex world of cryptics, and in so doing, give her some respite from the world around her. I wrote her a guide to solving cryptic crosswords. And, to make the process as engaging as possible, I wrote her a personalized puzzle, with clues and answers designed especially for her.
When I write, I am alone. I'm physically alone in a quiet room but I'm also alone in my thoughts. Sometimes I become so absorbed in the text that I literally do not hear anything, including the sound of my husband's voice if he walks in and asks me a question. It's a solitary exercise, writing, from the first sentence I type out on the screen to the moment I hit "send" on the email to my editor. So I'm always a little amazed when an acquaintance calls up to say she stumbled across a piece of mine in a magazine and enjoyed it. It seems magical somehow that a piece I wrote in such solitude has made its way out into the busy, bustling world and has a life of its own, interacting with people that I have never met and probably never will.
From time to time, when I'm solving a puzzle, a word comes to mind that fits the pattern of letters and blanks in the grid, and satisfies the definition portion of the clue. Technically, I've got the answer. But unless I figure out the riddle, I am not satisfied: the rush that comes from cracking the setter's code evades me.
When I'm stuck on a problem and can't think my way to the answer, often the smartest thing I can do is to leave it alone. I put on my runners, or in the winter, my cross-country skies, and I go for a long trek. I don't know if it's the abundance of fresh air, the lack of other voices, the unobstructed views, or the lulling repetition of putting one foot in front of the other but before long the tight knots of the problem loosen and the answer I was seeking floats up into my mind. In the past, I've used this technique to work through creative writing problems -- primarily those that crop up when I'm working on a personal essay -- but I've discovered recently that it applies to solving and setting cryptics, too. I tend to take the English language for granted. It’s hard not to. Because English is my first language, I speak it without thinking. It is my packhorse for the daily grind, carrying me from one exchange to another, and as such I rarely consider the larger meaning behind certain words. I only see English words anew in two situations. The first is when I learn a new French word, which leads me to compare it to its English counterpart. (For example, in French, when a woman goes into labour, you say “elle entre dans le travaille”, she is starting the work. Which is exactly what the word “labour” means: work.) The second time I consider words anew is when I do cryptics. |
About Sarah
I'm a writer, adventurer, amateur setter of cryptic crosswords, lover of "ah-ha!" moments, and exhausted mom. Archives
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