Jigsaw 10, Series 2

My first jigsaw from an outfit called 'Puzzle World', 500 pieces of quality heritage at £2.99 from the Epsom branch of 'The Works', an outfit which I gather started out up north and is now franchised all over the UK. For me, a useful occasional source of quality books and jigsaws at quality prices.

Not sure about 'Puzzle World; though. The box is completely uninformative about who they might be, only going so far as to say that the jigsaw was imported by 'The Works' into their Sutton Coalfield hub. Even Professor Google fails on this occasion: he comes up with 92 million hits in a third of a second, but nothing on the first couple of pages looks right.

The puzzle was a bit different from my usual. The pieces were cut from thick, quality cardboard, but in such a way that you were not always sure whether you had a fit or not. All the interior pieces were of prong-hole-prong-hole formation. All very much of a size and no exotics. Four pieces always met at a corner. But after a while one tuned into the subtle variations of prong shape, orientation and position, important when I came to the swathe of unhelpfully clouded sky. Strong colour and content coding in the rest of the image so one could get on, not needing to wait to be tuned in. Apart from the sky, one almost always knew which way up a piece went, something one could not say when doing, for example, the fabric part of a quattrocento annunciation.

Started with the edge in the usual way. Then the sky line. Then most of the Victoria Memorial on the left. Then the railing line, spreading out into the people and the top line of red tulips. Then the bed of strong yellows (tulips). So far a very horizontal puzzle, working with the strong horizontals of the image.

Then the palace itself, again working horizontally on the various layers. Then the bottom line of red tulips, then pushing down into the pale yellows (daffodils).

Lastly, ground through the sky. The handholds afforded by the subtle variations mentioned above mostly enough, only have to resort to trial and error occasionally. Plus, I admit to a very modest amount of sorting. There were also a couple of errors, luckily of a one piece variety, soon sorted out.

A more interesting puzzle than I had first thought. Some evidence of the sort of interaction between unconscious and conscious processing discussed by Koch (see 10th February). For example, the hand moving to place a piece in the right place before the conscious part of the brain had signaled that it had found the right piece for that right place.