pumpkinstrokemarrow

Puzzle number 13 comes from yet another line, JR Jigsaws 500, from Stockport. It came in a lower grade box which rather belied the entirely decent puzzle within, only marred by some of the cuts being incomplete, resulting in small tears, and a tendency of the larger pieces to fold. A side effect of the small tears was a larger than usual amount of that odd cardboard dust you get left on the table when packing a jigsaw back into its box. Dust which, in this case, is now safely lodged in the Patrón compost bottle (see earlier posts on this last subject).

Once again, completed in around 24 hours.

Started for a change by sorting into four heaps, three small and one large: edge, skyline, sky and remainder. Then did the edge, then did the skyline. Put the modest amount of sky aside as a treat for later.

Buildings on the right, working across to the buildings on the left. Boats on the right, working across to the boats on the left. Boats in the middle. Waterline. Cliff. And lastly the sky.

One of the oddities of this puzzle was that while the size of pieces varied a bit, with the largest being perhaps four times the area of the smallest, they were all regular, that is to say all the interior pieces came in the prong-hole-prong-hole formation. No irregulars with protuberances of curious shape. This meant that the sky, despite being small, was difficult. Very little colour variation to help one along. The key was that the sky pieces came in essentially two sizes, large and small and one could usually tell which any target hole was - a target hole having at least two pieces adjacent to help one along. So sort the sky pieces into large and small then move onto trial and error, with the sorting into two roughly equal piles massively reducing the number of trials and with the process being slightly better than random. Brain-eye coordination was adding some value.

Celebrating the successful conclusion of this puzzle by reading M. Drabble on the subject - an author whom my mother used to read but whom I have never read. Beyond, maybe, glancing at the 'Millstone' once, many years ago. An interesting bird on an interesting subject. Printing marred by an irritating tendency to omit the space between a period and the capital letter following, which I find very ugly. Fortunately, not usually more than one to a page. But how can such things happen in these days of fancy word processing and publishing software? Should I write to the publishers - some outfit called Atlantic books, an outfit of which I had never previously heard?

Scanning marred by coming out a bit light in colour, like an overexposed photograph. Don't think that this was the result of the box being very slightly smaller than A4, thus leaving a small gap on the scanner plate.