Opinion

Nuala McCann: Crossword addiction can bring out the worst in some of us

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

The pandemic has turned Nuala and her husband into a pair of crazed puzzlers. Picture: PA
The pandemic has turned Nuala and her husband into a pair of crazed puzzlers. Picture: PA The pandemic has turned Nuala and her husband into a pair of crazed puzzlers. Picture: PA

“I feel it in my waters,” I tell my husband.

He rolls big Tom-and-Jerry eyes.

But I do. I know in my bones when they’ve changed the crossword setter.

Not in this paper… I’m a loose woman when it comes to crosswords.

But one of our favourite cryptics has become extremely cryptic and that crossword is a struggle.

The pandemic has turned us into a pair of crazed puzzlers.

We wake up to a Wordle, progress to a sudoku, and polish off the evening with a cryptic crossword.

We swear death on the Wordle’s Americanisms – “movie” is so not a word… In Ireland, we say “fillum” and we’re proud of that spare syllable.

Crosswords are an addiction minus the joy of booze.

It’s an addiction that exposes the worst of some of us – one of us is a strouncer, a pencil chucker and a huffer for Ireland.

But enough about me.

The other of us tends towards the long suffering.

But we were both thrown off course by the arrival of a new setter.

I knew it because I couldn’t do it.

“It’s not the same,” I tell the long sufferer. “You get into the other person’s brain and you know what way they think,” I tell him: “Like marriage really.”

He does the Paxman eyebrow thing.

Anyone who does cryptic crosswords will understand.

Setters have their pet words and favourite anagrams.

The joy of solving a clue is like finding the orange one in the bag of Revels… tasty, satisfying.

But then a new setter takes over and no cryptic clue is safely solved… it’s like being stuck with a run of coffee Revels.

This new relationship with this new setter will take time.

At the risk of boasting, I was winning prizes for crosswords in the newspaper when I was six. Not that I was actually ever doing such crosswords.

It was less of the miniature genius and more of the kind aunt who put all her beloved nieces and nephews’ names on her own work and sent them in.

Every so often, your name appeared in the paper and a handy little cheque for two shillings and six arrived through the door.

Scroll on down the years and I do remember how upset faithful readers of the Irish News got if somebody accidentally put in the wrong grid for the Saturday crossword.

More recently again, the cryptic crossword became a thing for my mother, my aunt and I.

The two sisters would ring each other on a Saturday evening to check out who had got it all done.

I had originally been trained in the mystery art of the cryptic crossword at my aunt’s knee. I later honed my skills in long hours waiting for care in the Mater Hospital.

Ma’s cunning ploy was to ring me first – pump me for any answers that she hadn’t got – then sit and wait, like the cat that got the cream, for her sister to ring up.

She never let on that she’d bagged a few answers from me.

“I never know which end of the clue is the one with the puzzle,” she’d say.

“That’s why they call it cryptic,” I’d tell her.

In later days, ma extended her Saturday night crossword solving tactic to her home-made soup.

She was, in her prime, the queen of home-made soup.

But it got to the stage where she wasn’t so able and I’d make the soup.

Later in the week, she’d serve it up to my brother.

Like her sister and the Saturday night crossword, I’m thinking she omitted to say it wasn’t hers.

That ploy fell apart when I put in the spoon of sweet chilli sauce.

Not an ingredient with which she was familiar and one that her big son didn’t like.

“No more chilli sauce please,” she’d tell me.

Now, it would be great to pass her crossword answers or dole out the chilli soup.

Instead, I sit with a new crossword setter.

Like marriage, it takes time to get to know the inner workings of another human being… to know that they like a certain spoon with their porridge and the pillowcase that doesn’t “squeak”.

I also know that I’ll go to bed mystified about a crossword clue and wake up with an urge to run a bath, jump out of it and shriek Eureka!... the answer will appear overnight.

Magic moments, as Perry used to sing. Pass the Revels.