Pieces cut out of good quality card and all fairly much of a size. Another very regular puzzle, with four pieces meeting at every interior vertex. Another puzzle without the prong-prong-hole-hole configuration, although there were a number of pieces with either four prongs or four holes and quite a lot with three prongs and one hole, often but not always paired with a one prong and three holes. But shape was more important in solving this puzzle than prong configuration, with one sort of piece having two flat and two convex sides while the other had two flat and two concave (usually the prong) sides.
Started with the edge, as usual, but got stuck on the bottom edge. The pebbles were too much of a muchness to make solution possible. So there was a bit of a pause while I sulked, but some days later I went back to it, to get a solution of sorts. Then went on to do the sky of the top edge, another solution of sorts.
Then the skyline, which on this puzzle with the chimneys covered a lot of ground. Then the distinctively coloured spray of the fountain. Then the strong horizontals of the red rose beds, the clumps of flowers and the parapets of ponds. Then the windows, after which filling in the castle was straightforward, made only slightly less so by the missing piece on the right hand tower, clearly visible in the illustration.
Then the rest of the gardens and the pond, this last having the second missing piece. Then the pebbles, working down so as to get the right solution, second time around, to the bottom edge. The the sky, working up, ditto top edge.
After the slow start, a perfectly satisfactory puzzle. But it will go to carboard recycling (black wheelie bin) as the lady in the Oxfam shop was clear that she did not want incomplete jigsaws, whether they came from her in the first place or not, not however clearly the missing pieces were marked on the image on the cover of the box.
Only the second or third time in the 30 or 40 new-to-me & used (these two categories not being identical) puzzles that I have now done where there was a piece anomaly.
I note in passing that we are now starting to deal with FIL's puzzles, there being little overlap between the sort of puzzles that he used to like to do and the ones that I like to do. After some experimentation, I have decided that the quickest way to count the pieces is to arrange them in rectangular blocks on a large table, each block having 5 columns and 20 rows. One can sort pieces into such blocks a lot faster than one can count them into 20's and one can watch ITV3 at the same time. Furthermore, it is much easier to check the result than is the case with piles, half of which (on average) need to be recounted in the case of parity error, not having come up with a reliable way to test the height of a pile. And even if I had, counting into piles is a lot slower than counting into heaps. But this happy arrangement breaks down with those puzzles which do not have exactly 500 pieces in a 25 by 20 array and where one has to do the edge to determine the dimensions of the array to determine the number of peices. And where the array is not rectangular at all one might be completely stuffed; one might actually have to do the puzzle to check that it is all there for disposal.
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