Jigsaw 20, Series 2

Back to the Falcon de luxe brand of puzzle, this one a very modest 75p from a charity shop in King's Lynn, I think a charity to do with hospices.

A rather ugly painting but an easy going and pleasant jigsaw. Perhaps the artist can be excused on the grounds that he paints for the jigsaw market, making sure that his pictures have an appropriate density of jigsaw solving cues and features, be they of shape, colour or texture. Or whatever. With the added bonus that the completed puzzle photographs with less reflection than usual.

Started with the edge, as almost always. Then the skyline.

The colour of the lifeboat made that the next target, it being quite easy to pull most of the pieces out of the heap. As it was for the sign of gifts to its right. Then the Christmas tree, its lights and nearby lights.

Then onto the windows, gradually spreading out to do the buildings and the people to the left of the lifeboat. Then left hand snow, then the smaller boats. Knocked off some lower sky.

This left the water which was of modest size and quite easy.

And the balance of the sky which was rather larger. After doing the easy smoke, I resorted to sorting the pieces for this last lap. Interesting how it helps having the pieces in orderly rows; I guess it means that the brain has a lot less work to do in deciding whether a piece fits a hole or not. Just one of a small number of possible rotations to worry about, rather than an infinite - or at least large - number.

I made just one mistake, which only came to light when placing the very last piece, which fitted the very last hole but did not quite match the picture. But having identified the problem, identifying the piece with which to swap, maybe 10 pieces away to the right, was a matter of seconds.

A very regular puzzle with the great majority of pieces being of the prong-hole-prong-hole configuration, but I did notice a bit of slackness about the cutting in the sky. While four pieces did meet at each vertex, some of the corners were slightly out, maybe by as much as half a millimetre.

All in all, all very satisfactory.

PS: is it worth asking the blogger people how I get English English spell checking rather than US English? Such a switch would helpfully reduce my confusion in such matters.