Feeling puzzled? This is how crosswords soothe us in hectic times

In 1942, two dozen solvers assembled in a Fleet Street room, their task to crack the Telegraph crossword in under 12 minutes. The winner won a cigarette lighter, and maybe a pack of Capstan thrown in. All up, four solvers beat the clock. Next week, each received a mysterious letter.

Confidential, said the envelope. The writer was Colonel Nichols of MI8, the defence wing concerned with decoding. Come join Spy School, went the offer. So it was that crossword wizards joined chess champs, historians, linguists and mathematicians in cracking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park, much as films such as Enigma and The Imitation Game describe.

The crossword clue is poetry to pore over and savour.Credit: Monique Westermann

As a crossword addict, I love and lament this story. The love is obvious. Who doesn’t want their hobby ennobled as a war-changing talent? My lament lies in a single question: what’s the rush?

Life is fast enough. From instant coffee to two-minute noodles, we slurp our existence. Online shopping can magic a curling wand onto your porch overnight. Satnav tools remove the nostalgic kerfuffle of getting lost. We binge episodes without an intervening week of wonder. Hence my retro-pleasure in a puzzle, or feeling puzzled. Staying for a beat with bafflement. Two beats. Savour the moment. Let it sit.

Because time is a crossword’s inbuilt benefit. Clicks make you rush; clues make you stop. If push comes to shove, I can monster a cryptic before my beer goes flat, but what’s the hurry? Consider a clue like a recent Times gem: Goes off side in a pleasure boat (6-7).

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Being cryptic, there’s decrypting to do. Which end is the definition, and which the wordplay? The surface story reads without a ripple. A pleasure boat seems the answer’s likely meaning, but what craft fits? BATTLE-CRUISER? Hardly pleasure. SHRIMP TRAWLER? I cherish this mental fishing. PADDLE STEAMER?

The pieces click. Goes off = ADDLES, beside side = TEAM, inside “a”, the grocer’s way of saying “PER”. The deception is built as snugly as caravel planks. Rather than rush to the next clue, take pause to admire the engineering, the poetry, the wiliness. More than filling squares, puzzling is appreciating how your brain was lured. Lulled. Life is a speedboat in comparison.

Slow food is a powerful movement. Slow fashion. Slow travel. We watch The Ghan chug to Alice on slow TV. So why not slow puzzling? Crossword tournaments use speed as their first yardstick, accuracy second, and pleasure somehow unmeasured. In Wordplay, the 2006 US doco, a stopwatch haunts the tournament’s pavilion, the latest grid as good as a time bomb.

The sentiment was echoed in 1928, when a certain M. R. James boasted on the Letters page he could undo the Times puzzle in the time it took to boil his breakfast egg. And the chap despised it runny, by all accounts. Kudos, cowboy. You’re welcome to it.

Philosophically, I’m more in Roger McGough’s camp, the Liverpool poet expressing his devotion in four lines: “Got up. Had a shave. Did Times crossword. Had another shave.” Done right, you can lose Greenwich Mean Time inside the black-and-white world, a magic space where deadlines come to die.

Hence my queasiness on reading of the Enigma test, the crossword challenge deployed to find the “golden geese”, as Winston Churchill called the Bletchley Park decoders. Odds are, if I had sat in that Fleet Street room, I’d probably get so rapt in relishing a paddle steamer I’d miss the boat.

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