‘The queen does the crossword every morning and it keeps her brain sharp.” Now, I don’t know if that is a statement that appears in exam papers under the heading: True or false. It is something I’d been told as a child by my royalist grandma, who had pictures of Queen Elizabeth with her then young husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, hanging on the sitting room walls. I mean, the queen was young in the pictures, too.
The correct pronunciation of Edinburgh was also drilled into my head — just in case I bumped into the Duke himself at some later date. To address him as the Duke of Edin-berg was a faux pas to be avoided at all costs.
Anyhow, fast forward to six decades later and I still have no idea if Her Majesty really does, upon waking, peel open the Times and pick up her royal pencil to fill in the grid. To be even more truthful, I don’t know if she does the cryptic at all. Maybe it’s the quick crossword she has a go at. I never thought to ask, because when you’re four or five years old, you do as you’re told, especially if the queen is held up to you as a yardstick.
Not that I was given crosswords to solve as a child. It was multiplication tables that were rammed into my head-in-the-clouds head every morning. But every time I got some of the trickier ones right — my grandpa used to quiz me on my tables, choosing randomly — I felt like good Queen Elizabeth after a successful completion of the crossword grid.
Seven times eight and nine times six were two frequent trip-uppers. I lost count of the number of times I fell flat trying to figure their answer correctly. Ironically, for all the devoted drilling by my grandparents, it’s not to the mathematics tables that I turned, but to the crossword.
When I was in year seven, I discovered the level of cunning that went into crafting a cryptic clue and, to cut a long story short, I joined the Queen Elizabeth gang of solving puzzles ‘first thing in the morning’. I was hook, line and sinkered, as it were.
However, that is not meant to paint myself into a snooty corner. I say that because, to date, I think I can count on one hand the number of grids I’ve managed to solve completely. I’m hopeless really at getting on to most setter’s wavelength. But I think I’ve always been struck by levels of intelligence in others, and I often do the crossword simply to appreciate the skill and cunning with which the setter crafts his clues, using words to mislead and misdirect.
That said, I’m aware that there are groups of solvers who are so into words and their usage that, the moment a new word or term is found, they feel they must somehow find a way to use it in a sentence, in order to dazzle their audience. I take a step back from such indulgence, but my dear prankster friend Barney, I am rather ashamed to say, is of that other kind.
The other day, over a cup of coffee, he rather innocently broached the topic of coordination in sportsmen. Being of a sporting bent, I jumped into the conversation with both feet and soon we were rattling off a list of names of those supremely gifted: The Federers, Nadals, Tendulkars. Then, equally innocently he asked me what I thought about a sportsperson, who we shall call X. “I wouldn’t have X in my team,” I said. “I agree,” echoed Barney, “because X is totally ambisinister.” Ambisinister? “Yea, Kev. Don’t know the word? It means clumsy with both hands.”
Now, Barney does a British crossword online. I don’t. I like mine in a newspaper. And sure enough, a week later, in an Australian paper that takes the same crossword, there it was, the answer to a clue: ambisinister.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney.
