Spanish Jigsaw Puzzle
by Mark Sadler
Yesterday evening, in a moment of
boredom, exacerbated by a lack of anything even remotely interesting
on TV, I broke the cellophane on the jigsaw puzzle that has occupied
the lower tier of our coffee table for the past two decades. If
memory serves I won it in a raffle at a church fête in 1993. The
photograph on the box depicts Queen Elizabeth II (dressed in a pale
green woollen coat and hat) and her husband and Prince Philip,
staring at some zebras in a paddock at Whipsnade Zoo.
As soon as I removed the lid, the
reason why the puzzle had been donated to the church became clear:
The jigsaw pieces were in Spanish. Neither me, nor my wife, speak
more than a few words of the language and we found ourselves unable
to fathom how they fitted together. A rudimentary translation,
courtesy of google, enabled us to match a few of the edge pieces,
however we quickly became frustrated with it and decided to go for a
walk instead.
Before we went to bed that night I
swept the puzzle pieces back into the box. When I go for my doctors
appointment on Wednesday, I will drop it off at the charity shop near
the surgery.
This morning my friend Roger dropped
round while we were having coffee. He mentioned a former work
colleague who orders Swedish jigsaws over the internet. Apparently
the pieces make very good fishing lures.
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