#Comics tyke crossword clue cracked#
#Comics tyke crossword clue trial#

#Comics tyke crossword clue trial#

A crossword is one of life's simple pleasures, whereas Sudoku - the very word scares me - sounds like hard work, a kamikaze game of trial and error rather than a gentle stretching of the cranial muscles.Īnd as far as I can see, you have to play Sudoku alone, whereas crosswords can be a family pursuit.įortunately, my wife is as keen as I am and we have complementary skills on the grid. I wouldn't call myself an addict, just a devotee. My daily words workout is apparently going to keep me young, stoke up the memory, stave off Alzheimer's. Now I can come out of the closet, with medical authority on my side - crosswords and similar puzzles are jogging for the brain. No longer do I have to conceal what I do, afraid that doing the crossword is seen as a Billy-no-mates pastime. I do this for relaxation, of a sort, and I am glad a professor of neuroscience has now decided it is good for me. That darned compiler! 'Way' had not been a street as I'd imagined but a preposition - in this case 'how' - and with an 'a' and an 'RR' (Right Rev = bishop) thrown in the middle. I had to wait for the answer in next morning's paper: 'Harrow'. But 'Way in which to welcome a bishop in school (6)' completely threw me. I was OK the other day on 'It's comic for a Stateside mother to use spice (8)' - answer: cardamom (comic = a card, Stateside mother = mom). the letters making up the answer have been scrambled up) and 'flower' can be a river (flow-er! Get it?) as well as a daffodil.īut above all, solving a cryptic crossword requires lateral thinking, and you can never be quite sure that you've stretched your mind or your imagination enough. And it helps to know the 'language' of crosswords - that 'scrambled' indicates an anagram (i.e. Solving those clues takes a degree of literacy, of course, and some general knowledge is good.

Now, every day, people such as me can have their own private battle against a faceless enemy.Īre you a word wizard or a number cruncher? Tell us which puzzle you prefer at the bottom of the article.

#Comics tyke crossword clue cracked#

These were some of the skills of cryptologists possessed by those who cracked the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II. One or more of these word puzzles will often escape me, however long I stare at them, juggle the components, hunt for the key, try to get inside the mind of the setter. Those 30-odd conundrums, puns and anagrams I attempt every day are my 11-plus, my O-level, sometimes, on very difficult days, my degree paper. 'O' is round, liver is an organ, and twist is - well, see what I mean?

Take, for example, the following: 'A round organ with a slice of lemon (6, 5).' Eh, what? Oliver Twist, of course.

To which my response is: 'It's not that difficult once you get the hang of it.' The ones with the daft clues which have those to whom this is a mysterious art akin to Egyptian hieroglyphics muttering: 'What the dickens is that about?' Not, you will appreciate, the straightforward word definition ones, but, intellectual snob that I am, the big cryptic ones. I am old enough to have been educated in the traditional way, with exams, for which you crammed and learned to exercise your brain in a one-off, now-or-nothing, do-or-die way.Ĭarol Vorderman makes the case for Sudoku here.Īnd I think that may be why, 35 years on from my formal education, I like to test my mind with crosswords. Quite honestly, I feel sorry for today's schoolchildren and university students who are continually on trial with coursework.