Columnist Joe Bennett has found himself flummoxed by a quick crossword, despite years of crossword wizardry
Gradually reduce. 5 letters. Blank A blank E blank.
Some of you will have the answer already. It’s obvious, you’ll say, which of course it is, if you’ve got it.
But if you haven’t, it isn’t. And I haven’t.
I’ve done crosswords all my life. My preference these days is for the ones I used to sneer at, the so-called quick crosswords, rather than the cryptic ones.
With cryptic crosswords there are two routes to the answer. Thwarted by one, you try the other.
But with quick crosswords the clues are simple synonyms, so if you’re thwarted you’re thwarted.
And I am thwarted by ‘gradually reduce.’
Over the years I must have solved a million crossword clues and of that million I can remember one.
It was the first cryptic clue I solved by myself at the age of perhaps 10.
‘What the alert night owl does (4,2)’. The answer: ‘sits up’.
I greatly admired the neatness of the double meaning and my own skill at getting it. That admiration has worn off a bit over the years but I haven’t lost the crossword bug.
So almost every morning I apply my giant throbbing brain to a problem that is entirely synthetic, that has been created indeed for the sole purpose of having giant throbbing brains applied to it.
And to what purpose? To complete it.
A half completed crossword is like an itch. It has to be scratched.
Scratching it precludes all other activity.
But just as when an itch is successfully scratched it is forgotten and life resumes as if had never been, so when a crossword is completed it too is forgotten.
What seemed to matter becomes nothing on the instant, litter, oblivion-fodder. So why start it in the first place?
Well, partly to feel clever. I have been presented with a problem and I have solved it. It is reason to think well of myself, to pat myself on the back.
And filling in the final clue to complete the grid, climbing the intellectual mountain and standing briefly on its summit brings a momentary surge of pleasure, a tiny hit of dopamine, an orgasm of sorts - a dry and bookish one, perhaps, but still an orgasm.
And who does not want one of those to start the day off right and send you whistling on your way?
There’s also a neatness to crosswords. By far the best of all my English teachers was John A Smithies, known to one and all as Jack.
He kept a tidy classroom. On a shelf beside the blackboard stood 30 copies of The Albatross Book of Verse, all side by side and the same way up.
Sometimes before a class we’d turn one copy upside down.
And always at some stage of the lesson Jack would notice and without saying a word would go to the shelf and re-establish uniformity. I doubt he even knew that he was doing it, but rather was responding to a subliminal urge for order.
And there is something of the same quality in completing a crossword. An unfilled grid is an offence against order. We are tidy little monkeys who like patterns and control and a crossword offers us both.
I have mentioned my giant and throbbing brain.
I haven’t mentioned yours, or everybody else’s. For a giant and throbbing brain is the signature feature of our species, just as, say, a massive wingspan is the signature feature of an albatross.
The primary function of the giant and throbbing brain is to solve problems, and thus enable us to prosper and proliferate.
And so successful has our brainwork been over the years that for those of us in the wealthy west our immediate problems have been solved.
The supermarket’s full of food. Our caves are electrically heated.
Life is easy, peaceful and long. So our brains lack the work that they’re genetically wired to do.
Out on Taeri Head right now there are albatross chicks that will soon take off for the southern ocean on wings that let them fly for months on end or even years with almost no expenditure of effort.
But as of now the chicks just hop and flap those new-grown wings, learning their power, sensing their strength, gearing them up to be the mighty things they are. Which is like us doing crosswords.
Taper. (It came to me three paragraphs ago. The trick is to think about something else.)