Look carefully and you’ll see we’ve written no jigsaw puzzle posts for almost two weeks. What’s going on?
Well, thing is, we got burned (in a manner of speaking). A tasteful 1500-piece Louise Rayner picture of Chester became our jigsaw nemesis. We never even finished the border; the sky — a uniform dingy white — was particularly difficult (we’ve already said how much we dislike big skies in jigsaw puzzles).
We also suspected there was a piece missing. Of course, if there’s one piece missing, who knows how many others might also be missing? That’s my logic anyway, and it was a good excuse for abandoning a puzzle that looked like a potential nightmare, with its pastel shades, many of which were simply minor variations on brown.
We are now doing a 1000-piece puzzle with much more clearly defined colours. ‘Candy Corner’, by Malcolm Root, shows a small boy with his nose pressed up against the window of an old-fashioned sweetshop. A delivery van has just arrived and the driver is approaching the shop door. I believe, though, that this is really a scene from the Great Humbug Heist of ‘48, the biggest gobstopper snatch in the history of confectionery retailing. The boy is not shopping but acting as lookout for the rest of the gang, who are already inside the shop and have tied up the shopkeeper with twenty-five yards of licorice bootlaces.
When we finish the puzzle, we’ll peer at the part of the puzzle near where the lookout lad is standing and see if we can identify any of the other gang members through the window. If we can, you can be sure we shall be informing the local constabulary forthwith, unless any of the descendants of the original gang want to pay us off in contraband Opal Fruits — in which case, we’ll forget we ever saw a thing.
