Puzzled

 

Another score from the Allen & Unwin book shelves. I love David Astle's columns about language in The Age, and I also hear his evening radio show from time to time, and I like him a lot. But his main claim to fame is as the notorious DA who sets the Friday cryptic crossword, also in The Age, which Melbourne people have long jokingly characterised as Don't Attempt. 

I like crosswords, I do one every day and two on Saturdays. But cryptics have always been beyond my comprehension. I was in awe of a fellow student at college who once tried patiently to explain to me how they worked -- and English wasn't even her first language. So in Puzzled I saw my chance for a crash course in the mysteries of cryptics once and for all.

Alas, after bravely wrestling with the whole book, I can only conclude that I don't have the right kind of brain for cryptic crosswords. Astle starts gently enough with anagrams and double meanings, but soon we're swimming in 'hybrids', 'manipulations' and '&lits' (or perhaps drowning!) Even with Astle holding my hand, I couldn't figure out most of these clues. Fortunately, the course in crossword solving is also interleaved with autobiographical episodes from David Astle's life, which are both entertaining and interesting and which helped me through the difficult patches. Puzzled is a beautifully constructed piece of work, but alas, I'm not much closer to mastering the mysteries than I was before -- my fault, not David Astle's!