I'm a magpie. I hoard things. I invest emotions not in the things themselves, but in the events they connect me to. Like when I go to a wedding of friends, I'll take a keepsake, some little nik-nak to connect me back to the event. A bag of sugared almonds here, a jewish skullcap there. Its probably a symptom of something but it results in a hoard of oddities around my flat, taking up space but I can't find the will to throw them out, to dispose of that memory. It feels almost like a betrayal. 

20 years ago I lived briefly in San Jose. A wonderful period of youthful indomitability. Once I visited a renaissance fair as only the americans can put on. A more efficient organisation of mead and archery I doubt existed in the middle ages. Cholera and poverty were mercifully absent so accuracy may have been sacrificed at the altar of the almighty law suit but I for one, wasnt complaining.

There I bought a jigsaw. A 1500 piece, 1 metre by .5 metre jigsaw of a fantasy scene. Purchased with all the good intentions associated with the acquisition of an exercise machine, and with as much usage in the final analysis. 

But it became my connection to a time and a place and it started a journey with me through 6 apartments and 20 years. Its an unfinished project, a loose end which I promised myself, at every move, I would complete THIS time. No, reeeeaaaallly.

And so I packed it for Malta, knowing I would be alone for the majority of the time and keen to have something to pore over while engaging my brain in Boards work.

Thanks to Lyinair.com's boarding policys and weight restrictions, I took the bag of pieces out of the box and cut the scene out for ease of transport. I transported the pieces to Malta but the scene only as far as my front room where, presumably it still sits. 

I punish myself sometimes when I've been stupid. I force myself to deal with the consequences of my stupidity without redress. I'm also a stubborn git and so it was I unpacked the pieces and set to work to do a jigsaw I had barely seen for 2 decades without any guidance or clear idea of what the scene was. I only remembered that is was very weird and complex. Which is not a particularly useful memory in the circumstances.

Dav offered to go to my flat and email me a pic of it but for some reason the perverse punishment appealed to me. I had already constructed some ideas on how to approach it and curiosity cajoled me into attempting to prove they would work.

 

  
 

 My idea was to bubble-sort the pieces by the primary colour on the piece, then by the secondary colour within that first grouping then by distinctive markings if any, etc etc. Pieces with 4 inlets could not be connected to other pieces of 4 inlets, so they would not be subgrouped near each other. Equally with pieces of 4 outcroppings. I'm sure theres a proper word for those things but  you know what I mean. The theory being that this would locate each piece somewhere in the vincinity of its 4 brethren and that would make things easier.

As with all jigsaws, I started with the edge pieces and corners. My system worked partially and despite the protestations of my maltese mate Eddy that I was barking mad and it couldn't be done, I set myself to the task.

If you have never sat accross a room and glared *balefully* at a jigsaw, let me tell you that when you realise that you have not only anthropomorphised a puzzle and invested it with human qualities, but that you have then determined that those qualities are loathsome, deceitful and malicious... its quite a realisation. Its also time to get up and go to the nearest pub.

I had 30 days and figured that was perfectly adequate. Then I did some maths and realised I would have to connect 50 pieces a DAY to achieve that. Then I realised that my maths was crap and connecting 2 pieces together would probably leave me with a jigsaw of about 750 double pieces. Part of my brain became more interested in working out what the rate of placement would have to be and the rest went back to shouting about the pub.

I cant claim I did it entirely on my own because Eddy finally joined me in what had become a sort of battle of wills with an inanimate object. I sought particular pieces and it *hid* them. Not in the chaos of randomness. No, it did so knowingly, deliberately. 

Obvious and distinctive pieces which should have been easy to find, were obsfuscated among the butter-wouldnt-melt-in-its-mouth innocent arrangement of multitudinous parts. Don't tell me it had no knowledge of its whimsical cruelty. Dont be naive or oblivious to its true nature. It is evil, evil to the core.

Every placement became a victorious skimish in our epic battle. I found myself worryingly smug or sneeringly superior at every defeat I visited upon it until finally, in a rout worthy of its middle ages origin, large swathes of pieces began to fall to my sword. I had overlooked the fact that as I placed pieces in their final locations, the number of pieces remaining dwindled and thus diminished my foe's one and only weapon. Collapse was inevitable and victory, finally, was mine.

 

Vanquished and conquered, I have hung its hide on my wall. Like a trophy.