It hardly struck me, as I set out for a couple of days in Somerset, that they would lead me to Bridport in Dorset, thence to Dame Margaret Drabble, to the history of the jigsaw puzzle, and finally to some melancholy reflections on the meaning of life. But of such apparently random pieces are jigsaws made, and sometimes they do make a picture.
We'd seen a day of hurricane-force gales along the south coast last Saturday, when our Somerset hosts remarked that they'd bought tickets for a talk by Margaret Drabble at the Bridport Literary Festival early that evening, and were planning to drive over to the town before supper - and would anyone care to come? Gales notwithstanding, Margaret Drabble was there on time, in a scarlet silk tunic and red shoes. The sweet little 18thcentury chapel, now a theatre, was packed for the talk.
Drabble's subject was her latest book, The Pattern in the Carpet - a helen brett wholesale tiffany silver jewelry 925 show Personal History with Jigsaws, published by Atlantic. We were all curious to know what the book might be.
A memoir? A textbook on jigsaw puzzles? A history of the author, or of the puzzle?
Something of all these, it turned out.
Drabble is a pleasant, thoughtful speaker, and had all our attention as she explained that this was a true story, partly about a difficult woman, her aunt, and partly about how she came, at her aunt's knee, to love jigsaw puzzles - a bridge between a solitary and unsociable lady, and children. From this starting point the book becomes an idiosyncratic history of the jigsaw puzzle, which turns out (to my surprise) to be an English invention.
But as its author spoke and answered questions, my mind was tending in a different direction: the nature of all those many puzzles where the challenge is to fit things together. Whodunits, join-the-dots, crosswords, Rubik's Cube - all invite the player to make order out of chaos or fill in the blanks. It's a deep human instinct, I think, to try to make sense of nonsense.
Someone had asked Dame Margaret if she had any tips for jigsaw puzzlers. Yes, she replied, like most people she started at the edges. The component pieces are easy to narrow down, having at least one straight edge; and in this way you can make a frame for your picture, and work inwards. . .
But by now my thoughts were racing. The beauty of a jigsaw puzzle as a challenge is that it is a kind of contained chaos: a jumble, yes, but a jumble we approach secured by three fixed anchors in our task. Though the puzzle-solver may appear to be confronted with a sprawling heap of apparently unrelated little coloured shapes, he knows (1) that they are finite in number and do add up to a single block with defined edges and no blanks; (2) that the block makes a recognisable picture; and (3) that this picture will be identical to the one on the front of the box containing the pieces. His options, in short, are helpfully confined within a template for the reconstruction of which he knows he has all he needs.
Puma Replica WatchesImagine if it were otherwise: that, for each succeeding piece, we dipped into a barrel whose depth was unfathomed, with no idea how many more pieces there might be still to come; that there were no way of identifying the frame-making pieces; that (consequently) we had no idea of its extent. Imagine we were not provided with any copy of the picture we were supposed to put together - that it could be anything.
Or nothing. For imagine that there was no assurance that the pieces ever would add up to any sort of design: that they
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