pumpkinstrokemarrow

Must be something about the finish of the pieces of this jigsaw, a first from Hestair Puzzles, which makes them more reflective. To look at their, colour is as strong as that on the lid of the box, but one would not think that from this old-speak Nokia facilitated illustration.

Started off badly, put off by the strong smell of tobacco coming off the newly unwrapped pieces. Visions of some scruffy & elderly gent., quite unlike myself of course, bumbling around in a mess of half finished jigsaw and fag ash. Or perhaps, given the strength of the smell, pipe droppings. Fortunately, the strong smell was much attenuated by the time I had finished. Either the smell had blown off or that part of the smelling apparatus had turned itself off.

Turned all the pieces face up, sorting edge from other onto the table. Not sticking with an earlier scheme of sorting out the sky or anything else at this stage. Got the edge all done, except for one piece. I was completely sure that the scruffy & elderly gent had lost the missing piece down some nook or cranny in his scruffy & elderly armchair. Some time later it turned up, with my only excuse being that it was a lot darker in colour than I was expecting, a darkness which clearly made it invisible.

Next stop the sky line, then most of the big tower on the left.

Then the path line. Having been successful with the path line, thought to do the weaker line of the base of the château but this was a complete failure. Much more success with the dormer windows running along the top of the right hand facade, and then working quite quickly out from there to do most of the rest of the building. Two panics on the way, both making me think that there were missing pieces. One panic resolved by BH finding the offending piece on the floor when she cleared up the following morning. The other resolved by my finding that I had made a mistake in the lower part of the left hand facade.

Gradually filled in what was left of the bottom half of the image, getting stuck in the ribbon between the path line and the bottom edge. A stuck which was resolved by finding that I had made mistakes in the bottom edge, mistakes which were only resolved by removing the offending section of the bottom edge, placing the pieces in the row above and only then refitting the bottom edge to the row above.

Sky not too bad at all, there being a fair amount of colour variation. There was also an unusually high proportion of prong-prong-hole-hole cut pieces, also making things easier.

Mission accomplished. With very little sorting during the proceedings. I sorted out the grass and flowers below the path line and at the end I sorted the sky pieces by prong configuration. For the rest, relied on Mark I Eyeball picking the required piece from out of the spread on the table.

Puzzle finished, I close with report of a minor irritation from Amazon. Some time in the past few months they have started pricing their stuff exclusive of VAT, with the VAT only being added in when one comes to the checkout. With the effect that one, despite trying to keep a grip on this fact, thinks that one is paying less for one's product than one is. One gets hooked by what looks like a good price and is too committed by the time that one realizes that it is not quite as low as it looks. A dirty trick. One might think that Amazon make quite enough money of us (out of which I understand that they manage to pay very little corporation tax to us or to anyone else) not to chisel in quite this way.

No doubt, if prompted, they will come up with some specious but unassailable accounting argument for having made the change. Maybe one could whinge louder if the standards of public life in general were higher in such matters.