Saturday 17 August 2013

Spanish Jigsaw Puzzle

Spanish Jigsaw Puzzle

by Mark Sadler


Yesterday evening, in a moment of boredom, exacerbated by a lack of anything even remotely interesting on TV, I broke the cellophane on the jigsaw puzzle that has occupied the lower tier of our coffee table for the past two decades. If memory serves I won it in a raffle at a church fĂȘte in 1993. The photograph on the box depicts Queen Elizabeth II (dressed in a pale green woollen coat and hat) and her husband and Prince Philip, staring at some zebras in a paddock at Whipsnade Zoo.

As soon as I removed the lid, the reason why the puzzle had been donated to the church became clear: The jigsaw pieces were in Spanish. Neither me, nor my wife, speak more than a few words of the language and we found ourselves unable to fathom how they fitted together. A rudimentary translation, courtesy of google, enabled us to match a few of the edge pieces, however we quickly became frustrated with it and decided to go for a walk instead.

Before we went to bed that night I swept the puzzle pieces back into the box. When I go for my doctors appointment on Wednesday, I will drop it off at the charity shop near the surgery.

This morning my friend Roger dropped round while we were having coffee. He mentioned a former work colleague who orders Swedish jigsaws over the internet. Apparently the pieces make very good fishing lures.

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