pumpkinstrokemarrow

But first, an exit report on jigsaw 10, another £3.50 job, this one from the AA - another bunch of people who were once proud to be mutual but who have now been made over into a profit taking organisation, now hiding under an umbrella called 'Acromas', itself hiding under an umbrella made up of a clutch of private equity outfits. It seems that the money used to buy the AA is swinging around the neck of Acromas in the form of a millstone of debt, which might possibly go bad in the present climate, which might mean another swathe of job losses somewhere in the system.

Back at the jigsaw, I had not known that the AA were in the jigsaw business. Presumably, like other own brand goods, the own brand owner gets one of the leading brands, say Falcon, to knock out some stuff for them. A two edged sword for Falcon: they get some business at what might be a slack time, but the AA is taking a slice of the action and possibly building up market share at their expense. Made with thin card and with very regular pieces, with very little variation other than the inclusion of a higher than usual proportion of hole-hole-prong-prong pieces, without which the jigsaw would have been even harder to complete. As it was I made a lot of mistakes, some of which required a bit of unpicking, rather than simple swapping of a couple of pieces. I had to rework the top of the left hand edge several times, and I would not like to put serious money on that part of the puzzle being right now.

Edge first, with aforementioned errors on both left and right hand edges. Then the railway, then the train & smoke, then the grass. Then the trees in shadow above the first coach, then the right hand trees, this turning out to be the hardest part, then the left hand trees. Each zone being nicely coloured coded for easy sorting, with the exception of the last two tree zones where some of the pieces which turned out to be left handers were initially mistaken for right handers. It is, of course, possible that the ultimate tree zone only seemed easier than the penultimate because the number of pieces had, by then, been reduced to the extent of this last, solution time being strongly dependant on the number of pieces in hand.

For a touch of variety, read the 'Guardian' in the intervals of assembly, in which I was rather irritated by the headline of the piece about an alleged miscarriage of justice. It seems that a lady, now in her sixties, was convicted of murdering her elderly aunt, for whom she was the primary carer, who served around 12 years and has had various appeals turned down. Conviction and sentence upheld. But the Guardian has been digging and now alleges that evidence about another suspect, subsequently murdered in some drugs spat, was suppressed by the investigating police to keep the rather weak case against our lady look better than it really was. As is often the case in these disputed cases, the evidence which convicted her being quite slight: no bloodstained hammer covered in her finger prints or anything clear & simple like that. Conviction by hunch of investigating officer - hunches which are not always right, which is why we go in for evidence and stuff like that. The Guardian headline then proclaimed that this new evidence proved the innocence of the lady. Perhaps just about true in the sense that the new evidence, if it had been available at the original trial, might have made her conviction unsafe, made the evidence presented fall short of the standard of beyond reasonable doubt. But this is not the same, in ordinary parlance, of saying the the lady is proved to be innocent. We do not prove people to be innocent, we fail to prove them to be guilty.

Nevertheless, on the face of it, despite this lurch towards the standards of the red tops and the DT, there is, at the very least, a bad smell hanging around the investigation. A taint.