Facing up to the blues in a world gone to pieces 1,500 pieces
‘ARGH! I don’t believe it. How could they? That’s really, really, really not fair!’ I was stamping my foot in convulsions of temper, like a toddler having a tantrum, hovering on the verge of tears. Helpless outrage can do that to a man. Only the cool gaze of dear Hermione regarding me over the rim of her lap-top dragged me back towards adulthood.
‘What appears to be the problem, Medders?’ my cherished wife enquired gently, assuming an air of infinite motherly patience. I paused in mid-stomp, blinked back the childish tears and pointed wordlessly at the coffee table…
The jig-saw was not actually a Christmas present though it came to occupy large chunks of the Christmas holiday. It was young Persephone who produced it, blowing the dust off the box after bringing it down from the attic one Sunday afternoon. With rain lashing down for days on end she had been inspired by boredom to explore the storage space in around the water tank where old clothes, three-quarters empty paint tins and discarded bed linen vie for space with abandoned toys. Somewhere amidst the clutter of ancient cassette tapes, redundant ash-trays and bank statements preserved since the eighties, she lit upon the jig-saw.
‘Our World’ was the title proclaimed in large letters – a 1,500 piece monster of a challenge featuring a map of, yes, the world in its entirety from Kamchatka to Cape Horn, Alaska to Australia. Persephone showed me her latest find and suggested that it might be nice for us to do it together. Nice to do in a father-and-child sort of way, she urged. Nice in a learn-a-little-geography sort of way. Nice in a forget-about-the-weather sort of way. She can be very convincing, but I was in no rush to take the bait.
I had a match recorded and ready to watch. Surely we had nowhere suitable to tackle such a big puzzle. Besides, an old puzzle was likely to have pieces missing. Persephone was not to be deflected. She calculated that the coffee table had the correct dimensions to accommodate ‘Our World’ with half a centimetre to spare. When the family sat down to enjoy ‘Mrs Brown’ she took the lid off the box and enrolled her brother in the search for edge pieces, their attention flicking back and forth between television screen and jig-saw.
I succumbed as it became clear that they scarcely knew their Assam from their Albania and they clearly needed assistance from someone with a practical grasp of matters global. By the end of the night, we had the four sides of the rectangle completed and a start made on the vastness of Siberia.
Of course that was the easy part. Progress was maintained throughout the following week with an assault on Europe though our Eldrick soon deserted us in favour the more immediate thrills to be enjoyed at his gaming console. A productive burst on the African front filled a sodden Saturday but before long I found myself labouring alone across the steppes to Mongolia and beyond as Persephone had re-discovered her friends.
I was left solo, solitary, single-handed to complete the continents and confront a blue nightmare. I sorted out a pile of blue pieces with red squiggles. A pile of blue pieces with blue lines. A pile of blue pieces with black lettering. The planet has more sea than dry land and I was in danger of drowning as I put aside a pile of blue pieces dotted with islands. A pile of blue pieces with shades of both light blue and dark blue. A pile of blue pieces with no shading, no lines, no lettering.
For weeks, I teetered on the edge of despair and surrender, before gradually accelerating through Micronesia and the Madagascar Basin to the finish line. Eventually, more than a month after the marathon commenced, a mere tens pieces remained in hand to fit ten remaining spaces. I decided to defer the delicious, indulgent, purely personal pleasure of completing the jig-saw for one final hour hour by bringing The Pooch for a walk.
I returned eager to administer the coup de grace, only to discover that someone – someone who had long since fallen by the wayside – had done the job for me. All 1,500 pieces were now in their correct positions.
‘Argh! That’s really, really, really not fair!’