pumpkinstrokemarrow

Another deluxe 500 piece puzzle from Falcon - the brand which seems to crop up most often in the charity shops hereabouts. This one a photograph of a pub which I have certainly passed quite often - it being well within both lunch time and after work range of both Home Office and Treasury - and which I have probably used. Next week I plan to make sure that it is still there and still bears some resemblance to its puzzling image.

Sufficiently puzzling that I made a serious mistake at the beginning. Having knocked off the edge pieces in fairly short order, I thought that the next step was to attack the pot plants which march across the middle of the image. A step which proved quite hopeless: far too many pieces and far too little gross structure to be able to link one piece with another. Abandon ship and do the name and awning above the pot plants. This went much better. Then the three windows, then the drain pipes, then the chairs (lots of gross structure so this was the easy step) and more or less last the pot plants. By which time there was enough surrounding support to move things along. Knocking off the brickwork in dribs and drabs along the way.

The item at the top right of the illustration was bought from the cooperative antique shop at the junction of Bridge Road and Creek Road, just across the road from Hampton Court Railway Station. I think that they (there are two of them) started life as lights on restaurant tables. Soft, glittering candle light to help to provide the right ambience for romantic evenings for two. Generally speaking, a rather more expensive class of restaurant than I can afford. And as it happens, the next falcon is of Hampton Court Palace. A snip at 99p from Oxfam in Ewell Village.

I close with another offering from 'Death on the Nile' where someone was described as 'fey', a word which for both the BH and I was applicable to ladies of chaseable age, associating to words like light, fairy, birdlike, unworldly and ethereal. A word with a positive tone. But, moved to look it up, it turns out to be a Scottish word, as was alleged by Agatha, of obscure northern European origins, but with central meaning of someone who is marked for death. Perhaps someone dying of consumption or even Richard III when he mislays his horse at Bosworth. Generalising to unfortunate, unlucky, feeble, timid and so on and so forth. So while our understanding connected through unworldly to the correct understanding, we were both rather wide of the mark.

Just to be sure the word had not moved on since our copy of the OED was printed (in 1901) we checked in our rather more recent Concise Oxford. Meaning just the same, if expressed with the expected concision. Two lines instead of half a column.