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Completed my fourth jigsaw yesterday, this one a product of a company called Educa (http://www.educa.es/), part of the thriving Spanish jigsaw export industry. Or they might regard themselves as Catalan rather than Spanish as they bother to have a Catalan version of their website.

I have commented in the past on the way that doing a jigsaw of a work of art is a good way of making one look at the thing, a comment which has been confirmed by my experience with this one, a view of the Nativity Facade of Sagrada Familia. Along the way I decided that the beach at Barcelona must be made of that special sort of sand which lends itself to drip castles and that Gaudi must of been an aficionado of same when a child, and translated his passion into a cathedral in later life. I say cathedral but it is not clear that that is actually its status - in my picture book of same I can only find a reference to a monumental expiatory church. Furthermore, there is a proper old cathedral in Barcelona Old Town and perhaps the rule is that you can only have one cathedral in any one town. Other than Rome maybe.

The jigsaw has 500 pieces and is about the same size completed as the alpine valley (jigsaw 2). It had been cut out of substantial card which made the pieces much nicer to handle than those of the beach scene (jigsaw 3; see April 7th). It is regular in both the first and second senses: pieces all more or less square and exactly four pieces meet at every interior vertex. Most of the pieces were of the prong-hole-prong-hole configuration and some way into doing the jigsaw I found that they could reliably be sorted into thin pieces and fat pieces, with thin and fat alternating chequerboard fashion in a very regular way. This greatly reduced the number of trials when one was reduced to trial and error. Some of the pieces had a Spanish flavour in that instead of two proper prongs there was one proper prong and a bulge. With the matching piece having one proper hole and a depression. Other new features were a little stand on which to erect the top of the box for easy viewing of the picture and various bits and bobs to enable one to preserve the completed jigsaw for posterity.

My opening strategy was to sort the pieces into five heaps of roughly equal size: pond & trees, border between church and sky, interior of church, edge and sky. Assembly in the same order. First two heaps went fairly smoothly. Moving on, found that there was a lot of fine detail in the picture, rather too fine for the picture supplied, which had not been much of a problem for the first two heaps but which became one for the interior of the church until I worked out that the interior had a strong up and down grain and one could usually tell the grain of any particular piece. Another dodge for reducing the number of trials. The sky presented a different problem in that there were no clouds to break it up, just a gentle shift from light blue to dark blue as one moved up the jigsaw, with the shift being gentle enough that one quite often needed to put a piece in the wrong place before one realised it was the wrong colour. In mitigation, I got quite good at discriminating among the different shapes of prongs.

Got very near the end of the sky when I realised that I had made some mistakes. But once again my luck held and I was able to spot the mistakes, undo the damage and complete the jigsaw.

The illustration is of the right facade but is taken from the picture book rather than the jigsaw box, this last not being convenient to scan. Pond & trees missing but it does give an idea of the thing.

PS: over breakfast been reading about a row about the drive to assess disabled and damaged people as fit for work and I offer a comment from TB. A chap there, perhaps getting on for fifty, damaged his back some years ago, has been out of work since and he has now been assessed as being fit for work. He says fine; I would love to get out and work. But who, in the present climate, is going to take someone like me on, who used to be a labourer, with my sickness record and my lack of computer skills? Complete waste of time. The younger person with a more up to date skill set and without a sickness record is going to get the job every time. Hard to work up the energy even to try.