Jigthoughts

In the other place, at the start of series 1, I gave some thought to classifying the pieces of a jigsaw according to their shape and to the way that they fitted together, but without regard to colour, finish, pattern or material or to their number. I think it is time to give this matter some more thoughts.

We restrict ourselves to two dimensional, one-sided jigsaws which are flat and which are of circular, square or rectangular shape.

We restrict ourselves to jigsaws the pieces of which are essentially quadrilaterals. We specifically exclude the jigsaws which might be made on the basis of a triangle or a hexagon rather than a square. Never come across either, which seems odd, so maybe there is some catch which has not yet reached me.

We consider just the interior pieces. Boundary pieces are subject to boundary conditions, rather different to those of the interior.

Property 1. A jigsaw has property 1 if the pieces may be considered to be making up a rectangular array of so many rows and so many columns, with exactly one piece at each position of the array. Circular puzzles might exhibit a rotary or polar version of this property, although I do not recall one which does; circular puzzles generally being cut more freely than rectangular ones. But nor do I recall a circular puzzle in which the pieces have been cut on a rectangular grid superimposed on the circle; the cut is always at least vaguely polar, with the result that the center of a circle is a singularity which is not shared with rectangles.

Property 2. A jigsaw has property 2 if each piece may be considered to have four sides and for each side to carry either a hole or a prong. With holes being of a shape to hold a corresponding prong, so it should not be possible to slide one piece into position against another; the prong has to be lifted into the hole not pushed. Prongs and holes usually having this not pushing property; the only puzzle which I can remember which systematically failed this test was the foreign puzzle noticed in the other place on 12th April.

Property 3. A jigsaw has property 3 if each piece has a prong-hole-prong-hole configuration. No exotics like prong-prong-hole-hole or hole-hole-hole-hole. The addition of proportion of exotics generally makes a puzzle easier to solve.

Property 4. A jigsaw has property 4 if exactly four pieces meet at every vertex. One makes fewer mistakes with a jigsaw with this property - but on the other hand the interest is fewer too.

Property 5. A jigsaw has property 5 if all the pieces are of a size. The area of the largest is not more than (say) two times the area of the smallest.

Property 6. A jigsaw has property 6 if there is exactly one solution to the puzzle.

Property 7. A jigsaw has property 7 if any one piece fits exactly one position in the jigsaw, without regard to the image. A stronger version of property 6.

Property 8. Property 8 is a combination of property 1 and property 2, with the added qualification that each piece is roughly rectangular and sensibly placed in its position. It's center of gravity is not far from the center of the position. The four prongs and holes are roughly cardinally pointed cruciform with respect to the center of gravity. Variation is permitted, but of a modest and demure variety; no extravagance or whimsy.

Rectangular puzzles from charity shops are generally fairly well behaved with regard to these properties.

The next step is to consider the extent that these properties are independent, one from another. Can a jigsaw have property A while not having property B?

Jigsaw 1, series 2

Item 1: the first jigsaw of the new world. Item 2: jigsaw numbering seems to have come adrift. A total of 25 boxes while the last recorded is jigsaw 24 (October 19th in the other place). Bit of a fag to go through the record and sort it out. Maybe there should have been a spreadsheet?

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.

Nearly collectable

On Sunday to a small after-the-bank-holiday car booter at Hook Road Arena. A small but select affair at which I was moved to move into the collectible end of the jigsaw market.

Started off with my first framed jigsaw, an old Ordnance Survey map assembled and framed, ready for hanging on the wall, probably from a similar outfit to that which produced the Exminster jigsaw which got us started in the jigsaw scene (see 25th February).

The jigsaw covered an area perhaps of a mile by a mile and a half, with Hook Road Arena itself, very appropriately, in the middle. The chunk of map reproduced was also of an age to include the various places which gave their names to the hospitals of the Epsom cluster, not much else of them subsisting. There was also a school in what is now West Ewell quaintly described on the map as being licensed to dispense divine service. The arrangement for hanging the thing on the wall was new to me, being a stout cloth disc, maybe two inches in diameter, stuck to the backing hardboard. Given that the framed jigsaw must weigh a few pounds, I hope that the glue was good, and, to be on the safe side, the thing has been hung where it will not do much damage to anything other than itself if it falls. Which is not quite where I had wanted to hang it, but the position will do for now.

Moved on to my first antique jigsaw, illustrated, and which perusal of my jigsaw book (see 6th November 2012) suggests was from the Waddington's catalogue of 1939. The original box was complete although the lid - this being an end opening box - was in several pieces. But the puzzle, sadly, was incomplete with five pieces missing and two pieces superfluous. So a collectible manqué, but well worth the £1 I paid for it for the interest. Not sure yet whether to keep or recycle. Tastefully frame, complete with broken lid and superfluous pieces?

The puzzle was probably intended for children and was relatively easy to assemble, edge then planes first. The pieces, though large, were of more interesting shapes than is usual in a modern, mainstream puzzle, to the point where describing the puzzle as fully interlocking on the box was not entirely accurate as while the assembled puzzle interlocked plenty enough to hold together, that was by no means true of all pairs of adjacent pieces. Quality of picture and colour not what one would expect now, with the faces of the aviators and their support staffs being distinctly odd.

I was also offered a splendid plough plane for £16, more or less entirely made of some kind of pale, fine grained hardwood with brass trim. Wonderful thing probably destined, as the foreign salesman explained, for a shop window or a public house. But I was tempted: hugely better value than the £45 wanted for a solid steel 'Stanley' rebate plane, probably from the fifties and still in its original box, on offer in the adjoining aisle.

And along the way, I acquired a rather posh looking little plastic bag, for all the world the sort of thing you might get from a perfume shop in Bond Street, but actually coming with VIP electronic cigarettes, open 7 days a week for your refills. See http://www.vipelectroniccigarette.co.uk/ for everything you could possibly want in that department - except an e-cigar which did not seem to be on the menu.

Jigbooks

I reviewed some properties of jigsaws on 1st November and now notice a book about same, a book which, I might say, takes no interest whatsoever in the formal properties of these fascinating puzzles.

So far, my second book about jigsaws, the first being the memoir by Margaret Drabble, noticed in the other place on June 14th amongst other dates. A quite different sort of book this one, a book written with all the love and care of someone - Tom Tyler - who has spent a good part of his adult life in and around jigsaws, rather than that of someone, albeit a gifted amateur, who has come rather late to the craft.

The first interesting point about this book is that its purchase, from Amazon, was the first occasion on which I noticed that the Amazon price was not the best price on the street. On this occasion, we learned from a leaflet accompanying the Saturday DT that an outfit called Postcript would have supplied the book for something like half the price that Amazon required. To be fair, Postscript (http://www.psbooks.co.uk/) do seem to rather specialise in this sort of coffee table book for the discerning buyer. The sort of books which one suspects were made to be remaindered, with some obscure shop in some obscure town serving to offer them at what is described at the proper price and from which very few purchases are ever made. It would not even need to be open very often or for very long to comply with the laws of the land concerning sale price labeling.

But the main point is that the book has done what I wanted. I have learned something of the history of jigsaws, something of their manufacture and something of the worlds of jigsawyers and jigsaw collectors. A regular cornucopia of jigfacts.

I have, for example, been conditioned by having restricted myself, in large part, to machine pressed jigsaws, with the way in which the cutting dies are made (by hand) accounting for much of the regularity that I was talking about on the 1st. Saw cut jigsaws are much freer in their composition, also rather prone to the inclusion of whimsies which I find a little irritating. I like the regularity of the machine pressed puzzles. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how hard I would find it to switch to the hand cuts. Would the whole pace & nature of the game change? Would one enjoy the various traps and pratfalls which the enterprising hand cutter had worked into your puzzle, traps and pratfalls which make cunning and subtle use of the subject image? Certainly, some of those illustrated in this book look as if they would be very difficult to solve. It would not do to be in a hurry or to be competitive.

Then I think that it would be fun to visit a jigsaw factory. But maybe that would take a bit of organizing. Maybe it would be easier to visit a jigsaw museum. So I ask Mr. Google about jigsaw museums to find that there are plenty of museums offering online jigsaws of their exhibits (see, for example http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk. Clearly my notion of using jigsaws as an art educational aid is not very original at all) but none where the jigsaws are the exhibits. One would have thought that there would be such a thing somewhere. The sort of thing you might come across in Brading (on the Isle of Wight), or Yarmouth or Blackpool. I shall try to remember to keep looking.

The book goes on to explain that there is now a computer controlled contraption which enables one to cut a wooden jigsaw using high pressure water jets - the same sort of thing I presume which dental hygienists like to attack one's mouth with. Hopefully this will mean that one will be able to commission a jigsaw of more or less any image one likes, of more or less any degree of difficulty - without the expense of a hand cut. If one had a companion machine that could apply a digital image in a suitable way to a sheet of plywood one would be away. And I would hope that such a companion machine would be available, art shops having been able to transfer images to hardboard - thus avoiding the need for the glass which reflects - for thirty years or more. It may even be that the imaged boards that they produce are already of jigsaw quality, that is to say that the image will stand up to and survive the cutting process.

In the meanwhile, there are plenty of people out there who make their living cutting puzzles to order. So I shall spend a happy breakfast hour dreaming about the image that I shall have turned into a puzzle for some upcoming birthday. Shall I go for a photograph or a painting? Shall it be a landscape? Shall I tour the National Gallery to select a suitable image? In the case where the artist has fussed about the frame - Holman Hunt, for example, was apt to - would it be appropriate to include the frame in the image?

And so one might go on.

Jigsaw 8, Series 2

My usual practice of late has been to photograph the completed jigsaw, but in this case, as the National Gallery thoughtfully included a flier of a convenient size to scan in the box, I scanned instead. Much better picture as a result although much less evidential value.

A picture, as it happens, which was the subject of an hour's art lesson back at the time of my O levels.

On the grounds that the money would be going to a good cause, that is to say the National Gallery, I did think of buying a proper digital image from them. An alternative to dropping tenners in one of their collecting boxes. It would have been fun to have a proper image to examine on screen, but given that I described the use as Internet the price was £250 or so which I though was a bit rich. Especially as one could not be altogether sure that the money was going to go to the National Gallery itself, rather than some outfit it has sold the franchise to. Maybe I would be able to examine a digital image before buying at one of the public access terminals at the gallery?

A good quality, 500 piece jigsaw from Ravensburger. Nice positive feel to the pieces when they are clicked together - with the exception of just one piece which felt a bit loose for some reason.

Edge first, then the mosaic floor with its skull. Then the carpet on the table then the various objects on the carpet and on the lower shelf of the table.

Then the faces, then the other easy bits of the two figures. Then the green backdrop. Then filled in the odd holes leaving the dark elements of the two figures, dark elements which played the role in this puzzle more usually played by the sky.

Luckily, although piece size did not vary very much, there was a good mixture of prong configurations and a good mixture of prong and piece shapes, all of which made scanning the heap for a particular piece a lot easier than it would otherwise have been.

Followed completion of the jigsaw by visiting the jigsaw, taking in the Garafalo (see 16th November) while I was about it. This provided an opportunity to ride a Bullingdon again, the first time since October 21st last (see the other place). Bad start at the Vauxhall stand which could only manage 3 broken bikes, but at least they had been clearly marked by lowering and reversing the saddles. Walked across the bridge to find that the north side stand had 3 serviceable bikes. Grabbed one and headed up Vauxhall Bridge Road to get thoroughly ensnared in traffic and roadworks in and around Victoria Station. Would probably have been a lot quicker to do that bit on foot, but eventually found myself in Victoria Street and so on to Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square. To find that the stand at Cockspur Street was full, then the one at King William IV was full and I finally found a space half way up the Strand at Southampton Street. I had put my key into the hole at Cockspur Street which I thought gave me an extra 15 minutes to find a stand with a space - but the Bullingdon Bike people seem to have changed their website and it no longer gives you details of individual journeys, so I don't know. Maybe the individual journeys will come back if I become a regular user again. So, eventually got back to the National gallery where I was able to inspect the two jigsaws.

Easy enough to find the Holbein, which did seem much more impressive now that I knew it a bit better. But finding the Garafalo was more of a challenge, so I thought I would test the trusties. First older trusty suggested I try a couple of younger trusties chatting nearby. First younger trusty thought the best plan was to ask the older trusty, but disabused of that thought, she went off to some other source. Second younger trusty thought hard and came up with room 9. At which point younger trusty came back with the nearby room 6, which turned out to be the right answer. But ten out of ten to the three of them for helpfulness. Room 6 turned out to be mostly Garafalo, with several large pictures, including a cleaned version of the jigsaw and several small pictures. He seemed to be into a lot of detail, landscape and drapery. One might say that he loved painting intricate and beautiful (if unlikely) drapery.

I particularly liked the expression on the face of the St. Augustine (not quite the same on the image you get on their website) and I was intrigued by the painting of a pagan sacrifice, which seemed an odd subject at a time when I thought the church was still the main customer for paintings and when church subjects were still the only respectable subjects.

We also spent time on the mosaics in the entry hall, but more on that in a future post.

Bought another jigsaw, from the same family, on exit.

Jigsaw 4, Series 3

A reprise of Jigsaw 2, Series 2 of on or about the 16th November 2012, that is to say getting on for 18 months ago. Picture itself seen at least once in the interval, most recently on 2nd March.

I enjoyed doing this jigsaw, but on this occasion rather than writing my notes blind, I have read those from the last occasion first.

I find that most of what I said then stands today, the main variation being the order, in that this time I did clothes (does one spell the plural of a piece of cloth this way?), then bodies, then townscape then landscape. Last time the bodies came after the undifferentiated landscape.

New camera does a much better job on the illustration than the old, although some of this may be down to the lighting conditions. Interesting the way that the camera picks up the pieces of the jigsaw and their joins much more strongly than the naked eye.

Having enjoyed the reprise, I shall experiment by doing the jigsaw again, forthwith. How does proximity affect the experience? The jigsaw is now all ready to go again, all the pieces face up and sorted into edge, irregular and other - where by irregular I mean the twenty or so pieces (out of the 500 or so) which do not conform to the usual rectangular format, that is to say something which is essentially rectangular with exactly one prong or one hole on each of the four sides - but nothing is joined up yet. We shall see how it goes.

PS: click to enlarge the picture and you should be able to find an irregular piece. For example, half way between the flying lump of red cloth and the top, just to the right of the white tuft sticking out of the rock face. Happy viewing! The improbability of the flying lump presumably bothered neither artist nor customer, this despite the overall realistic tone of the thing.

Jigsaw 11, Series 2

A Masterpiece jigsaw from Philmar, a reproduction of Canaletto's Grand Canal. The same Philmar as that of Jigsaw 2 of the present series (see 16th November last) and the same Oxfam shop, so quite possibly the same first owner. But, oddly, flying under different colours, 'Masterpiece' rather than 'Elite'.

There was a more important difference in that this jigsaw was an 850 piecer and I almost logged it out of series. It may be a coincidence but it took a lot longer to solve this puzzle than usual, the usual being 500 piecers. A lot longer than the ratio of 850 to 500 would suggest. But still 99p; no extra charge for the extra pieces.

One complication of the extra size was that I needed to deploy the parental card table (less green felt) to hold the completing jigsaw, the usual table being far too small to hold both the pieces and the jigsaw. BH got a bit grumpy about the additional clutter but she did, luckily, manage to contain it and I was allowed the extra clutter until completion.

Another complication was the large amount of sky, a lot more both relatively and absolutely than is usual. A sky with little in the way of cloud to break it up, only rather subtle variations of colour. But I get ahead of myself.

I started with the edge, as usual, then the skyline. Then the dome and the building below it (Saint Piccolo), then the building on the extreme right. Then worked down into the buildings generally, slowly spreading into the canal, and so to the completion of the bottom half of the image, so leaving the large amount of sky, which I have to say was rather daunting.

So daunting that progress for the first week or so was very slow, and only possible at all because of the generous variation in piece shape, making up in some part for the lack of image or colour to bite on. Regular prong-hole-prong-hole pieces very much in the minority. In the course of all this I was able to observe the same interaction between conscious and unconscious processing as last time around (see 11th March). Also, while on that occasion the brain slowly tuned in to the subtle variations of prong shape, here the brain slowly tuned into the subtle variations of sky colour, only visible in the right sorts of light, not necessarily day light. Do chunks of brain get rewired in such a short time? Or is it rather that one is activating chunks which are ready and waiting in some dusty corner?

However that may be, there was a sudden and large acceleration at about the one third point. The second two thirds took a couple of days where the first third had taken a week, possibly two weeks.

Is there any significance in that I worked pretty steadily from left to right? With the only perturbation being that at the very end I was left with a vertical strip, two or three pieces wide and maybe ten pieces deep, a few inches to the left of the right hand edge of the image.

Although the card was quite thin, the joining of the pieces was very positive. One was always confident of a fit, once obtained. There was just one mistake on the way, this arising from over confidence, thinking that I could fit a piece on the basis of one side, rather than the usual two. I paid for the over confidence with a fruitless ten minutes searching for a piece in the heap, before finally realising that the piece wanted had been the subject of a mistake.

Next stop, National Gallery to inspect the original. Not for the first time, I don't suppose, but possibly the first time that I will have looked at it properly for a while.

Jigsaw 2, series 2

An Elite 500 jigsaw, one of two, from the Oxfam shop in Ewell Village. 99p each. Made by Philmar, yet another jigsaw outfit which is very visible on the web, for example on ebay, but which does not have its own site - presumably because they are no longer up and running. Is there a niche here for chaps like me to set up sites for defunct jigsaw manufacturers as a home for all the information you could possibly need about them? Would this count as an infringement on copyright?

This particular puzzle is described an an antique love scene by Garafalo. The National Gallery has this and maybe half a dozen other paintings by him and will sell me digital images of same. A low grade student image for private study only comes in at £50 - very close to the price charged by Vic Guy for a photographic image of Worcester Cathedral (see October 19th in the other place). Perhaps market forces really are forcing prices together. But what student is going to pay £50 for an image which he or she can browse on the Internet for free? And if they live in London, maybe even go and take a peek at the real thing? Mysteriously, the chap is missing from my usually reliable Canaday, which seems odd for a chap with a presence at the National Gallery. But alive and well on Wikipedia.

The puzzle was quite difficult, although a pleasure to solve in a leisurely way, in part because it was all very brown, while the real thing has clearly been cleaned since Philmar took their image and is now much brighter in colour. Not altogether comfortable with this business of restoring pictures; not an unreasonable thing to be doing but one can never be quite sure that one is heading back to the original and one may have become quite attached to the old, faded and unrestored picture. Maybe high grade replicas would be a better way forward, leaving the original to moulder?

Edge first. Then the red and white cloths. Then the scene in the top left, or at least most of it. An interesting example of the growing interest in landscape, with allegory no longer quite enough. It took quite a long time to adjust to the quite subtle changes of colour in the landscape, changes which were more or less invisible at the start of the proceedings. But once one has tuned into the palette as it were, one can motor along quite quickly, selecting the right piece by its colour.

Then the faces, then pushed out from the faces to do the bodies, gradually filling in the interstices. Why are cupids so often as obnoxious looking as this one? Is that all part of the allegory?

This leaving the dark, top right quadrant, for which I sorted the pieces by prong configuration. And given that there was quite a high proportion of pieces which were odd in one way or another the dark quadrant was not as bad as one might have expected.

One panic along the way when I was convinced that a piece of the boundary between the top left and top right quadrants was missing, a piece which should have been conspicuous for being half white and half black. Which I failed to find until fairly near the end because I had earlier decided that the missing piece was actually part of the white cloth and the brain's search algorithm omitted this piece from its search for the boundary piece without further reference to me.

Turning to the jigthoughts of 1st November, the jigsaw did not have properties 2, 3, 4 or 5, although the pieces were in a roughly rectangular array. An exotic touch was a small number of prongs which needed to be clasped by two half holes, rather than the simpler and more usual arrangement of a prong fitting in a hole. Achieved by stretching (say) a lower piece to include half of what should have been the upper piece, including half a hole, thus preserving the count and property 1 - while breaking property 2. Properties 3, 4 and 5 were nowhere.

Virtually no jigsaw dust.

PS: a tweet in the form of a twit-twoo. Or put another way, the first evening visit of an owl to our back garden for quite a long time. We used to hear them along the stream behind the houses opposite, but haven't heard one there for a bit either. This one was undoubtedly an owl, despite its cry being closer to a twit than a twit-twoo. Perhaps it will work up to that on its next visit. Perhaps there is a sex difference here?

PPS: I actually voted for a PCC yesterday, one of the few occasions on which I have voted in recent years. A vote on this occasion because there was choice, I thought the contest was reasonably open and I did have a view on who should have the job. That is to say the chap who has been chairman of the Police Authority for a bit. At least he should know the ropes while the new arrangements settle down. Then we can see. Meanwhile, counting proceeds as I type.

Jigsaw 9, Series 2

This jigsaw being that bought after the inspection of the last, as explained in the entry for 4th February.

Another Ravensburger Premium, with the same good feel to the pieces as the last. Not quite such a snug fit, but snug enough that one was never in doubt about whether two pieces had been correctly fitted together or not.

An interesting painting and an interesting jigsaw, the first that I have done without any clear strategy or direction about the solution. Did the edge in the usual way and then thought that the landscape top right was the place to go and managed a bit of that. Then did most of the yellow robe of the kneeling figure front centre. Then dotted about, gradually getting through the puzzle but without doing one thing, then another. Just sort of muddled through; all very odd. And then there were plenty of pieces which looked as if they ought to be easy to find but proved difficult - and then when one found them it turned out one was looking for the wrong thing. That one thought one was looking for the last piece of yellow robe when more careful inspection revealed that one should have been looking for a mostly blue piece. Very easy to jump to the wrong conclusions in this business.

Yesterday off to inspect the real thing at the National Gallery.

Started at the station a lucky find of 300g of every day value bacon which had found its way onto the pavement opposite the new Tesco's being fitted out next to the new booking hall for Epsom Station. The packet appeared to be entire and is now in our fridge awaiting further action. The slices might possibly come from more than one pig, although that would depend on exactly how the presumably automated slicer coped with end of pig. But I think we can be reasonably sure that slices of bacon, even every day value bacon, do not involve horse.

Then onto an easier Bullingdon than on the last occasion, picking one up at Vauxhall and being able to drop it off behind the National Gallery, Cockspur Street being full again - but behind the National Gallery even better. A journey which took 18 minutes and which demonstrated that the Bullingdon people are still putting up journey details for inspection, despite my suspicions last time around.

Got into the Gallery and selected just the right trustess to tell me where Foppa lived. She sank into deep thought and then announced that he was in the Sainsbury Wing. More deep thought and then announced that he was in Room 55. Still more deep thought and his first name was probably Vincenzo. And she was right on all three counts.

A large and impressive picture, if a little shabby. Interested to find that the golden crowns and such like were some sort of appliqué. Very thick gold stuff; maybe it really was gold. But I was annoyed to find that the jigsaw has chopped off the top foot or so of the picture, a top foot which made clear that the stable was a ruin, a symbol of the ruin of classical civilisation in the face of the advance of the Christians, or so I was informed by the label. Rather less trimming on the other three sides, but the overall effect was that the composition of the jigsaw was badly damaged. One might have thought that the National Custodian of such matters would enforce a bit more accuracy in jigsaws sold under its banner.

I am not sure if Foppa counted as a Pre-Raphaelite, with Raphael being a contempory, but he seemed to share the Pre-Raphaelite love of naturalistic details. For example, the large number of animals and birds scattered about the odd corners of this picture. But it was quite startling to move to the 'Virgin of the Rocks' in a nearby room, where the treatment of the Virgin's face by Leonardo is in a different league to that of Foppa, his near contemporary. On the way, I was rather taken with an Annunciation by Crivelli, another picture with some odd details, for example what looks like a short fat cucumber sitting on the ledge at the front of the picture. I decided that a lot of these chaps might have been painting religious subjects for religious patrons but were perhaps not terribly solemn about it themselves. But then, that might be the lack of solemnity that true believers and papists allow themselves, unlike us atheists. I think George Eliot may have done a cameo on the subject. All that being as it may, I did like the Annunciation.

A good light lunch at the nearby Terroirs (http://terroirswinebar.com/).Posh sardines on toast. Generous supply of good bread. Good house red and an even better pudding wine (a 2009 Jurançon) to go with the lady of uncertain morals from Chile (a rather fine pudding).

PS: checking up on Saint Valentine today, I find that he is not a proper saint at all, having been demoted in the Holy Cull of the sixties of the last century. This on the authority of Google because he is mentioned in neither our Chambers Encylcopedia nor my fine, 12 volume 'New Library of Catholic Knowledge' from Burns & Oates. But I was pleased to see that the front and end pieces of all 12 volumes of the Library are reproductions of the Christmas Special jigsaw, as recorded on 1st January. Oddly, Valentine has survived in the calendar of our Book of Common Prayer, perhaps because this last is still in its original form, untouched by aforementioned Cull.

Jigdreams

Rather an odd dream about jigsaws last night, quite incoherent on waking.

I was doing a jigsaw when I suddenly came across a sort of trap, in the form of a choice between placing one piece in the position under consideration and placing another. The pieces very much of the rather odd, and yet to be reported, flavour of jigsaw 12. Chose the wrong piece and the whole jigsaw goes terribly wrong in some way, some way which I am no longer able to elaborate beyond a strong association to the face of the late Richard Briers, the bad parson of last night's 'Midsomer Murders'. The loop is closed by his murder weapon - an Indian, sabre like sword - being very similar in shape to shapes found in many of the pieces of the jigsaw, an important aspect of its oddness.

There is also a brain failing which I forgot to mention in the context of jigsaw 11. The sky being difficult, I resorted to sorting by colour - either blue or white - and then by prong configuration.  The idea is then that one soaks up the salient details of the position under consideration into the brain, then scans the pieces in the relevant heap or heaps for a match, without needing to actually try many candidates. The brain is supposed to be able to pick out, if not the right piece, at least just a small number of possibles. An example of salient details might be hole, then long section, then short section at an obtuse angle to the long section, then prong.

But it was not working very well. I found that the scan only worked if I orientated the pieces in the heap to match that of the position under consideration. The brain was unable to do the rotation for itself - something that I am sure it used to be able to manage. As a result it was questionable whether the technique was helpful at all - in the sense that just trying all the pieces in the relevant heaps might be quicker than trying to be clever about it.

Car booter

This morning off to my first car booter of the season this morning, of moderate size following a run of rather wet Sundays and bank holidays.

Moderate haul.

Item 1, what look like 2 mint condition mono LPs from 1954 of 'Under Milk Wood', with one alcohol friendly Welshman reciting the words of another. According to Wikipedia the words were commissioned as a radio drama for the BBC, from whence this recording. I had thought the thing was a narrative poem, so I have learned something today.

Item 2, the first 6 episodes of 'Fawlty Towers', a series of which my younger brother was very fond but which I have never got into. Maybe with our taste in television veering towards the light and cheerful, this will now appeal.

Item 3, an old jigsaw. At 50p it seemed a bit churlish to open the box up on the spot, but back home it turns out to contain 1 piece from the jigsaw which came in the box in the first place, 2 complete jigsaws of the same sort but not as good, half of a further uninteresting jigsaw, 1 piece of a fifth jigsaw and a die. Box and 2 complete jigsaws retained to add to the nucleus of my forthcoming collection of heritage jigsaws (see 20th May 2013). However, the price of retention was the retirement of our copy of 'Alice Through the Looking Glass', an old edition from Nelson, line illustrated and in good condition, but whose place on the bookshelf has now been taken by the jigsaw. A pity, but we have had the book for a long time, I have never read it and don't think I will now.

Item 4, two thimbles, sold to me as having been fashioned by an outdoor silversmith from Agadir silver but which turn out, on closer inspection, to be African flavoured souvenirs from the neighbouring Lanzerote. I think it was a charity stall so let's hope that it was a charity that I approve of.

Item 5, the one that got away, or a collection of the words of Morse, to go with our Morsoleum (see 20th February), a dozen or so pale green (rather than the more respectable black) volumes still in their shrink wrapped plastic parcel. I had closed the deal at £2.50, rather better than the £10 which Epsom Oxfam were asking a few weeks ago, when I made the mistake of asking for a bag to put it in, and while putting it in the bag the seller - a lady rather younger than I - spotted a sticker on it saying something about ebay and £89.99 and cancelled the sale. My purchase was marginal so I did not insist on my consumer rights - and my own rather limited perusal of ebay this afternoon suggests that the going price is around £12 so I wish her luck with her venture.

Jigsaw 18, Series 2

Rather a long time since I last reported completion of a jigsaw, but here we are now with another 99p job from the Oxfam shop at Ewell village.

Another Falcon de luxe, described this time as both fine art and nostalgia. But much the same sort of thing as jigsaw 16 of 12th June.

This one is a trimmed version of a splendidly garish painting by one John Macvicar Anderson, that well known painter from Glasgow who died in 1915. He died at the ripe old age of 80, so he must have made quite a good thing out of of it. You can have your own print of this painting for a mere $49.99 from http://www.allposters.com/, while the painting itself last went under the hammer in 2003, on which occasion it went for a little more than £125,000. Bit too strong for me. There is also the confusion of there being an architect of the same name. Is it the same person?

An easy going puzzle, but one on which I got off to rather a slow start. Pace, as seems to be usual, gradually increasing to a breathless finish late (for me) last night.

Edge first, then the skyline, a skyline which with all its ups and downs covered a lot of ground. Then the bridge line, then the buildings between. Then worked down over the water. Then worked up over the sky. Just one mistake along the way, a bit of sky which I put in the right place but the wrong way around. A lot easier than jigsaw 16, despite coming from the same part of the same stable. Nice positive feel to piece placement and I was only occasionally doubtful about whether some particular piece went in some particular hole or not. So much so that I was occasionally able to place a piece on the basis of a fit on just one side, rather than the much more usual two.

Easy to follow colour & feature coding. Then the gently waving horizontal cuts, just about visible in the illustration, made finding pieces from the heap a lot easier than it would otherwise have been: there being small pieces, wedge shaped pieces and large pieces. Quite unlike, in this respect the very straight jigsaw 15 of 19th May. But it does seem that all Falcon jigsaws have keys which help one crack the thing; so in this one wavy lines, in another some other wheeze. Is it all down to the taste of the die cutter? Were they real craftsmen, something after the way of a crossword puzzle compiler?

Mostly regular with exactly four pieces meeting at every interior vertex and with few if any pieces of the two-prong-two-hole variety.

Jigsaw 3, series 2

The second Elite 500 jigsaw, once again in the National Gallery (one supposes that Elite 500 found the local shop convenient), a Canaletto depicting the celebration of the feast of San Rocco, a saint believed to be good with the plague. Once again, cleaned since Elite took their image.

An interesting picture although I found the crowd scene at the bottom unconvincing. The perspective does not seem quite right, possibly because the master has played fast and loose with the vérité on the ground, at least according to the technical notes on the National Gallery website. He also stooped to the use of compasses to get his roundels round, with the holes left by the compass clearly visible when up close and personal.

I then pondered about the use of what we would now call old masters as items of display, just about visible below the awnings, to advertise the wealth and power of whoever it was organising the celebration. No prosing about the quattrocento here thank you very much. And then poking around on the web, I find that the church they are coming out of is the dingy building on the right, whereas the grand building opposite is the home of a charity, not all that unlike some modern charities in that all the dosh seems to go on fancies for the trustees, rather than on the starving millions. See http://www.scuolagrandesanrocco.it/ for a rather stunning shot of the interior.

Started with the edge then did the sky line. Then tackled the various strong horizontals: the awning and the ledges surmounting the two rows of windows. Did not actually finish any of them until much later but they provided an admirable spring board for spreading out. Building, then crowd, then sky. This last helped along by sorting.

For once in a while, only the second occasion in what must be more than 30 jigsaws now, there was one piece missing, the hole more or less in the centre of the image, and a chain of three pieces next to the hole duplicated. Now this is not the sort of thing that is going to happen while doing the jigsaw at home. But then I observe that the cutting is not very clean, so maybe what has happened is that the cut jigsaws were not coming cleanly away from the cutter. With the missing piece left behind for the jigsaw next and the duplicated pieces left behind from the jigsaw previous.

Having knocked this off, did a round of Horton Lane, anti clockwise, for the first time for a while. Rewarded by three tweets along Longmead Road. A small egret (although I failed to notice the yellow feet and the crests), a sphere of mistletoe and a treasury tag, size two and a half inches. Who on earth among the denizens of the Longmead Road would want such a thing as this last? Or had it escaped from a visiting waste transfer vehicle?

PS: I wonder how you feel if a year ago you sold HP a parcel for £10b which they have now decided is actually worth £5b. Do you feel ashamed of having ripped them off? Do you feel clever for having ripped them off? Do you sue them for defamation of character? I think, one way or another, I would feel a bit uncomfortable. Retirement a bit tainted. But then it was never likely that I was ever going to be in this sort of position, so maybe what I might or might not have felt is not very much to any point. But I should add that I type on an HP Pavilion Slimline PC with which I have been very satisfied. Perhaps they should have stuck to them and printer ink and not messed with this clever stuff from Cambridge.

Jigsaw 9, Series 3

The first jigsaw for a while (see reference 1), cunningly playing to my blogged interest in the periodic table (see reference 2).

Nicely produced jigsaw from the Royal Society of Chemistry, but with no clue on the box as to where the image came from or who actually cut the puzzle. So I have no idea whether the little pictures which come with each element have any significance, beyond illustrating this jigsaw. Perhaps the fact that they do not appear in the book at reference 2 is a clue. I note also the slightly non-standard presentation of the lanthanoids and actinoids.

A regular puzzle, with exactly four pieces meeting at every interior vertex.

Unusually, I did not do the edge first, rather the two blocks of words, easily the easiest part of the puzzle. Easy to pick out and easy to assemble.

Then finished the edge and then a bit stuck. Not the sort of image I was used to at all. Tried arranging some of the pieces with the legible beginnings of the names of elements in alphabetic order but that did not help much, perhaps because the table I use was not quite big enough to do this particular puzzle in complete comfort.

But I then noticed that the elements were colour coded.and it then proved quite easy to pick out all the pieces of any one colour, for example yellow. And it then proved easier than I expected to pull the right little pictures out of the heap to complete the row or column in hand. Worked in from the bottom three edges, doing the chunk of blue in the middle, roughly sodium across to roentgenium, last. The heap was by then small enough that the relatively large size of the chunk was not a problem.

The sky - in this case the small areas of deep blue, helped along by pink veins - was trivial compared with the sky in the average puzzle.

All in all an entertaining resumption of puzzle activity, ending up slightly bemused that so many of the little pictures had a circular theme, bemused as I could not think of any good reason why this should be so. Does it reflect the dominance of images with circular themes in the sort of image library one would have used to make the puzzle?

Probably rather easier to find out why so many, but by no means all, of the element names end in 'ium'. One presumes that the fact that most of the elements which have been around for a long time do not so end, for example gold, is related to the fact that most of the most common verbs are very irregular. Left as an exercise for the reader.

Last but not least, where is the element to the right of roentgenium and below mercury? Is there some mathematical or physical reason why this one does not exist, or is it just that no-one has gone to the bother & expense of creating it yet?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/jigsaw-8-series-3.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-works.html.

Christmas special dismantled

The agreement was that I would vacate the front room by New Year's Day, thus making it available for activities such as ironing and writing letters. In the event, the puzzle was completed on the evening of 30th December and the trestle table was cleared away by the end of the afternoon of the the 31st December. So we have started the New Year comfortably ahead of schedule.

Nicely made puzzle, cut from thick card of a pleasing feel and with a very positive connection between adjoining pieces. Corners of the four corner pieces nicely rounded, a nice touch I do not recall coming across before. A very regular puzzle in that all the pieces were very much of a size and four pieces met, pretty much exactly, at every interior vertex. On the other hand, being foreign, there were comparatively few pieces having the normal prong configuration of prong-hole-prong-hole, which one would expect to dominate a British made puzzle. This, together with the good colour variation and the visible grain of both pavement and sky made the solution of this larger than usual puzzle easier than it might otherwise have been.

I had pondered about the dimensions of this 1,000 piece puzzle, with factors of 2, 2, 2, 5, 5 & 5 and thinking that perhaps 25 by 40 was the best that one could do, rather neglecting the possibility that there might not be exactly 1,000 pieces. As it turned out there were 999 pieces with factors of 3, 3, 3 & 37 and the answer was 27 by 37, a slightly fatter picture than my original solution would have yielded.

The maker, as can be seen from the illustration is the Italian games manufacturer Clementoni who run the elaborate and slightly tricky web site at http://www.clementoni.com/ from which I learn that this particular jigsaw is not in their catalogue. Perhaps it got to 'The Works' as as remainder, like the two books mentioned previously (on 26th December). As it happens, I have now remembered that this is the second Clementoni puzzle that I have acquired, the first being David's painting of the coronation of Napoleon. A puzzle which I am quite sure that I have completed at least once (not the trestle table, so where?) and which I think was probably a Christmas present (from whom?), perhaps 10 years ago. Interestingly, this puzzle is still in the Clementoni catalogue. While Amazon offer a rather splendid 6,000 piece Clementoni puzzle for £40. Maybe next year? Or maybe the 13,200 piecer of the 'Last Supper'. What would be the profile of the average buyer of this one?

The picture was fascinating, and much more so puzzle size than box size. Maybe the real thing, which I find to be a fresco by Perugino on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, would be even more so? Masters of the mouse should have no trouble finding it at http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/. I started the puzzle of the picture with the dome, the yellow pieces of which were easy to pick out (except those at the far right), then moved out and down, completing most of the three buildings. Then the landscape, then the rather odd figures in the middle of the picture - figures which I only learn after the event represent two scenes from the life of our Lord. I had thought they were simply young Italians striking poses, as they do. Then down to the heads, then knocked off the large figures one by one, a proceeding made relatively easy by the strong colour coding already mentioned. Lastly the two ponds of sky, made easy by their small size and narrow shape, which last meant that every piece could be fitted somewhere. No dark interior to work into.

I was impressed by the quality of the robes that the Apostles could run to by the time of handing over the all-important key to St. Peter. Presumably they had roped in some rich widows by that time to help with making teas, cutting cakes and funding generally.

I was also impressed to find that Raphael was a pupil of Perugino, making this last a genuine & original Pre-Raphaelite. Most appropriate as we were slated to pay a second visit to them on New Year's Eve.

PS: to quote from somewhere turned up by Mr. Google: "Clementoni has successfully pioneered the perfect relationship between art and jigsaw puzzles for many years. This is why we have decided today to premiere a project of considerable importance and prestige to emphasize once again its leading role in the world of jigsaw puzzles: a superb art range including the most beautiful and most famous works of art on show in the world's leading Museums. Each jigsaw puzzle comes in an elegant box in terms of size, color and gilt printing methods, together with remarks about each painter and each work. From the Louvre to the Centre Pompidou, from Leonardo to Picasso, the Museum Collection range transforms ageless art into exclusive jigsaw puzzles."

Tribute 2

I noticed the jigsaw tribute in the DT on 3rd October.

Today I notice a second tribute, to a different jigsaw, in the form of a booklet about Kent lodged in a holiday house nowhere near Kent. A jigsaw (jigsaw 5, series 2) which was completed at the end of 2012 (see reference 1) and which resulted, shortly thereafter in visits to the place in question and to nearby Rochester. Memorable visits both, with our being impressed on the first visit by the size of the Medway and on the second by the size of Rochester castle.

We learn from today's booklet that England is considered to have been invented on the occasion of the battle of 455 mentioned in the earlier post, the first time at which the resident tribes of what is now England had banded together in a joint endeavour to repel the German invaders. Ultimately unsuccessful on this occasion.

I then started to doze a bit and got to wondering about the way that the thousands of books from a single printing might spread out over the world - the sort of thing that, back in the fifties of the last century, one might have been required to write essays about. I recall my older brother being tasked with an essay on the day in the life of a gate post. So let us suppose that 10,000 copies of this particular book were run off during the week commencing Monday 4th February 1952.

First thought is that I talk glibly of 10,000 copies as if they were all the same, when in reality they were not. The first 10 were especially bound in white calf skin and used for presentation purposes. The next 90 were especially bound in blue boards and wrapped with a tastefully designed dust cover. The remaining 9,900 were knocked out as booklets and intended for sale in souvenir shops in the ordinary way. But even they are not all the same. The first batch was done by Fred who was recovering from a binge at the time and slightly overdid the blue ink. The second batch was done by Alf who never got the hang of the stapler. And so on, with a serious collector being able to distinguish copies from the various hands involved.

We next suppose that all of them were equipped with a chip which could report its position to base, rather in the way of a mobile phone. We are then able to track the movement of every copy through its life, and perhaps a little beyond as the chip might not expire with its host book. We neglect, in what follows, this interesting complication.

So, for any point in time after said Monday 11th February 1952 we can say that so many books are still extant and this is their geographical disposition. We stick to a two dimensional disposition and neglect, in what follows, other possibilities. So on Tuesday 15th September 1953, 5,000 of the books might still be in store in Rochester. There might be clusters of them scattered around the souvenir shops of Kent and beyond. One of them might have made it to Valparaíso in Chile, carried there by an expatriate lecturer in the university there. Fifteen might have made it to Stratford, Ontario of all places, carried there by enthusiastic members of Stratford High School's famous girls' choir which had done a singing tour of Kent, England. One could make an entire television documentary about the disposition of the books on some particular day. One could make a series, taking a series of such days, a series which might include bearded pundits banging on in a learned way about the details of the mechanics of the dispersion of printed matter, rather as if they were talking of the migration of sardines around the Atlantic.

And the next thought is about the status in the scheme of things of something like 'the number of books from the February 1952 printing of this particular guide to Kent which were still extant and in the province (or duchy) of Aquitaine in France in the spring of 1961'. Can we assert that this number exists, even if no-one has bothered to articulate it in speech or words, let alone actually compute it? Is the failure of this number to exist anything to do with the fact that 'extant' is a rather woolly concept. Is the book still extant if it is being cannibalised to make wrappings for fish and chips?

I can see that such a number is different from the square root of 10, and certainly from the square root of minus 10. But it is perhaps in the same ball-park as 'the average age of the population of Cottenham'. And in the neighbouring ball-park as 'the length of the longest salmon in Loch Ness'. With due consideration being given to the angles that Cottenham might be empty of people or that Loch Ness might be empty of salmon. Or that length might not be a sensible attribute of a salmon.

At which point, my thoughts turn towards the breakfast baker.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2012/12/jigsaw-5-series-2.html.

PS: I notice in passing the attempt of one Fiona Grant to sell me an advent calendar this morning. Google, quite properly, shoves her email in the promotions pot, but I am beguiled by Fiona being the sender and open the thing up, to find that she represents the Eden Bible Company. They are not the only energetic company to hide their marketing material of this sort - bulk emails - under such clothes, with the Tate Gallery being another such. Faintly dishonest to my mind, but which, oddly, irritates me less than those letters from utility companies addressed and signed as if I was a personal friend of the sales director. Is the essential difference here that the former are usually women (whom one assumes, possibly quite wrongly, to be young and pretty), while the latter are usually men?

Perhaps the EC should make a law that all such communications should include a fair & recent mugshot of the signatory in the top right hand corner.

Goya not

Last week we thought to Goya, thought to Goya without booking in advance. So we turned up at the National gallery at around 1100 on a weekday morning, to find long queues and what looked like an uncomfortably crowded exhibition. We decided to pass in favour of a spot of jigsaw hunting, that is to say hunting down pictures of which I had done the jigsaw.

We failed on the Garafalo of reference 1, it having been moved from its last known home in the basement, presumably on account of the building work evidenced by the complex scaffold outside.

But we did find the ambassadors of reference 2 and we did find the adoration of reference 3. The former reminding me of the carpet used as a table drape in the recent performances of Henry IV Part I and the latter seeming oddly subdued in tone. At this point we branched out into art history, as exemplified by the rooms in the middle fifties. Rooms in which there seemed to be trouble with, for example, connecting heads to shoulders - and with the folds of cloth.

I suppose part of the interest in cloth arose from richly coloured cloth being a marker of wealth, so something which patrons wanted to flaunt, something with which one wanted to clothe objects of veneration and something which came to be of interest in its own right. How does one capture the seemingly random folds of cloth in a realistic and interesting fashion? An interest which has survived to our own time, at least in this part of Epsom. But a trick which the master of the St. Bartholomew altarpiece had not mastered in his early work - late fifteenth century - snipped from the National Gallery web site and include above. In the gallery. in the flesh, as it were, the folds around the right (as viewed) hand arm looked particularly odd. An example of the way that the brain can learn, from observation, how cloth should fold, without necessarily being able to articulate what is wrong when it is wrong. The wrongness is hidden in the connections of the millions of neurons which look after the folding of cloth and statistics do the business without the need for grammar. Further musings on this fascinating subject to be found at reference 4.

As it happened, we noticed something of the same sort a couple of days later. A chap was walking along the platform at Epsom station and there was clearly something wrong, something odd about the way that he was walking. Inter alia, the rhythm of his steps was all wrong.  But more than that we could not say: the brain could compute oddness, but could not display its reasons. I associate now to a chap whom I used to know who made a living out of the fact that neural networks could be quite easily trained to be very good at spotting odd behaviour, behaviour which needed preventitive maintenance attention, in complex machines at Heathrow airport. Again, the network would know that something was wrong, but would not know what was wrong; that bit you had to do for yourself.

We also noticed the elaborate chairs in which some of the saints were placed. Mostly elaborate wooden chairs, but which very much reminded us of the niches in the Lady Chapel at Ely, older than these paintings by getting on for two hundred years. Perhaps they were already anachronisms by the time of these masters. The heritage speak of their day.

While Tura's muse (to be posted next) reminded me of the sort of thing that the writers of fantasy novels and fantasy computer games go in for now. A reference forwards rather than backwards in time.

Out to wander down Whitehall, to wonder outside the Houses of Parliament about whom the large black Mercedes saloon, allowed inside the security perimeter, might belong to. The person whom I took to be the chauffeur would not tell me, would not even tell me that he was not allowed to tell. Perhaps foreign, perhaps diplomatic, as my understanding is that important politicians of our own get driven around in British flavoured cars.

Bused ourselves to Vauxhall for lunch at the Estrela Bar. Some opted for what turned out to be an excellent lemon sole, grilled, while I settled for a substantial portion of a stew involving some sort of bony beef, some red beans and some rice, served in my own private saucepan. Taken with the bread and olives with which we started, a substantial lunch indeed. Washed down with a half bottle of the entirely satisfactory house white called 'Encostas do Bairro '.

PS: despite the interest in 'The Virgin and Child with Musical Angels' evinced above, I was not able to recover it from the excellent online catalogue maintained by the National gallery on their website. I had, for example, already forgotten that the picture was topped with a round arch and it took a further visit to the gallery yesterday to get things straightened out.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/jigsaw-2-series-2.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/jigsaw-7-series-3.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/jigsaw-9-series-2.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/abstract-expressionism.html.

Pictorial times

A few days ago, off to see the Foppa jigsaw again.

Weather a bit wet and windy, starting out with an announcement at Epsom station that there had been a landslip somewhere south of Dorking, that the service there would be buses for weeks and that, for the moment, one train in two to Waterloo was being cancelled. Then, once on the train there was a very dodgy sounding cough, terminal even, but a quick scan of the coach failed to reveal the owner. But the cough was soon masked by a small boy explaining his computer game, which sounded like a virtual, dungeons and dragons version of lego in that it involved collecting and assembling, at great length to his granny. He was very absorbed in the whole business and it all sounded quite educational: it might not be the same as reading Alison Uttley or Rosemary Sutcliff (which would have been about where I was at at his age), but world relevant skills were being developed.

Decided that the rain was going to hold off, so hopped off at Clapham Junction and picked up a Bullingdon at Grant Road East, heading off towards and through Battersea Park in the usual way. For a change, up the Mall and through Admiralty Arch, making it to a vacant spot in the stand at Southampton Street off the Strand just as serious rain started. Ducked into a natty little cup cake shop - which, frustratingly, I can now neither name nor locate - and took tea & cake, both being good, but with the cake being rather hard to eat without making a considerable mess. Clientèle mainly ladies and I was entertained by two of them having a serious, social worker style discussion about the sectioning of a child, perhaps the child or at least the ward of one of them.

Onto the National Gallery where I took in three pictures. The Adoration of the Magi by Foppa, the Grand Canal by Canaletto and some fruit, a tribute to Cézanne, by Gauguin. The Foppa is growing on me and I think I shall be visiting it again, quite apart from its jigsaw (now, it seems, discontinued. The gallery shop seems to have moved on to a rather different sort of jigsaw, without interest to me). The Canaletto, my next jigsaw, was enlivened by a trusty who was happy to talk about such things and who even admitted to knowing someone who did them in a serious way. The Gauguin was looking more sensuous than I remembered it, disturbingly so for a still life. The thing had come alife.

Calmed down by a visit to the Salisbury in St. Martin's Lane, where the entertainment took the form of a middle aged couple from Sweden, holiday makers staying in Bethnal Green of all places, although maybe it is not as rough now as it used to look from the train to Cambridge from Liverpool Street. I found that the lady knew all about the famous goose book (see posts of 17th February and 26th March of last year), but was much more interested in reading crime fiction to brush up her English. I could only think of Agatha Christie but between us we could drum up some more and ended up by directing them to Foyle's in Tottenham Court Road - rather than Charing Cross Road. Hopefully they made it as I imagine that Foyle's would have had a splendid collection of English language crime, maybe even running to translations from Swedish crime, to tie in with the better class of crime drama to be found on BBC, better that is than the stuff on ITV3, which is what we watch.

And so back to Epsom where the rain continued.

PS: annoyed to find this morning that I broke the half hour barrier on my trip from Grant Road, which, as a result, cost me £3. Must do better.

The aboriginal jigsaw

This was the very special jigsaw which got the house going on jigsaws, thought previously to have been rather childish, by both FIL and myself, probably only fit for those in their second childhood. After FIL had done this one we both knew better.

The puzzle was a birthday present for FIL, a jigsaw made from an aerial photograph centered on the house in Exminster where he lived for near 50 years. Sufficiently artisanale to have several very non standard pieces in the middle, in particular the one containing the house.

As befits a jigsaw first assembled by an elderly gentleman, one piece is missing and shows up nearly yellow just below the centre of the puzzle. And four or five pieces from the left hand end of the top edge are somewhat the worse for wear as a result of a coffee flood plain, having separated out into two or three layers each. We are considering whether to repair them or whether to store the damaged pieces in a separate bag as a memento.

Started with the edge in the usual way. Then the motorway, which was easy. The motorway for which FIL was nicknamed 'Motorway Dick' as a result of his leading the campaign to stop the then thriving asylum being chopped in half by the motorway - with his own home finishing up underneath. Hence the hump in the motorway as it passes to the north of the village - a hump for which there was a considerable bill but which has served to contain northern expansion. Then the railway cutting across the top right hand corner of the puzzle, with Exeter above and Dawlish below and to the right. Then the by-pass running just to the west of the railway. Then the lane - Days-Pottles Lane - running along the bottom of the puzzle

The village itself looked a bit daunting, so did the various brown fields next. (One can understand how black and white photographs taken in tricky circumstances during the last war might have been quite difficult to interpret). Then the asylum - now housing for people who work in Exeter, very much in the way of the Epsom asylums. Then the border between village and field. By this time there were few enough pieces left in the heap and enough pieces in the assembling puzzle just to pluck out likely looking pieces from the heap and place them.

Not being my village, I did not have much momentum on this one, except towards the end when I thought I was slacking a bit too much and wellied it a bit.

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.