So we have a management decision to move onto series 2 with this first jigsaw having once been sold under the trade mark of 'Good Companion', said to be the sixth of a series of six. This is my first puzzle from these people, but a quick peek at Google suggests that they were a serious player in the jigsaw scene in the 50's and 60's of the last century. See for example the list at http://www.mycollections.me.uk/jigsawcompanion.html - which does not, as it happens, include this particular one, probably rather more recent than those listed and certainly, at 500, the wrong number of pieces.
The most unusual feature of this jigsaw was the dust which came with it. Normally, jigsaw dust is fine and blue and is left behind when one breaks up the completed jigsaw for rebagging. The dust from this jigsaw was in the form of short curly fibres, up to perhaps a centimeter in length. Colour right but shape entirely wrong. Thinking about it, maybe the dust is a by product of the cutting process, with the cutter punching out very thin lines of card along the lines of cut. A cutter which does a bit more than cut through the material; it is taking a bit of the material with it.
That apart, a pleasant, easy going jigsaw, one which I was content to work at at a very relaxed pace. No pressure to finish this or that section by this or that time. Rather lackadaisical about it all, with little clear direction of attack, other than features like masts and boats - which were easy but which did not, as things turned out, greatly aid solution. Flashes in the pan.
Started with the edge. Then tried for the boat line, doing about half of it. Tried the red roof line and did about half of that. Did rather better on the white roof line and on the building underneath. Then moved onto the people. Then the mast, then the tree growing out of the edge of the pond.
Then the left hand slabbed path, with the waterline being harder than one might have thought. Some of the pieces needed did not stand out of the heap at all. Having been filling in here and there as I went along, this left a couple of islands in the top half of the picture and the watery swans occupying the bottom right. This last turned out to be quite easy, with good colour & texture coding of the water between and around the swans.
One mistake in the edge turned up while completing the puzzle, with the cygnet to the right of the image being placed two pieces further down the puzzle than it should have been.
On a culinary note, I would like to record the first boiled chicken this household has seen since the days when one could buy boiling fowl from butchers. This chicken was a happy woodland reared bird from Lidl of Chessington and was boiled for an hour and a half along with onions, carrots and celery, the idea being to maximise production of health giving, gut friendly soup.
A little overcooked, so damaged during extraction from the boilpan, but when cold looked a lot more like a cold roast chicken than you might expect.
First outing was cold boiled chicken with hot mashed potato and warm white sauce. OK, but the texture of the chicken was a bit odd, a bit clingy in the mouth. Would have been quite hard going without the sauce.
Second outing was stirred into some lentil soup made with some of the liquor from the boiling. Not having butter, onion or bacon, the soup was a little bland but was entirely eatable. I might add in passing that the white bloomer sold by this Lidl and taken with this soup, while only a distant relation of the proper bloomers sold by proper bakers, was rather better than those sold by the mainline supermarkets.
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