Tuesday, May 30

I'm a great fan of word puzzles. I've enjoyed crosswords since I was at school and I can still remember when I solved my first Sudoku puzzle. It was 2004 and I had been looking for something to amuse Madeleine on one of her visits to us. For some reason we were travelling to Canberra and were in a cafe in Goulburn and had come across the puzzle in a newspaper.

I was hooked immediately. I got into the habit of downloading a few from the Internet and printing them out, six to a sheet. When the time for retirement loomed, I started to stockpile them for the long boring days ahead. There was always plenty of spoiled photocopier paper around and we were only being charged 1c per sheet for the printing so it was cheaper than buying books.

Over a few months, I almost filled a carton with the sheets, plenty to keep me busy - 5 reams to a carton, 500 sheets to a ream, 6 puzzles to a sheet. You can do the maths. More recently, I supplemented them with an app on the iPad but there's something reassuring about old-fashioned paper and a sharp pencil. I retired at the end of 2009 so it's taken a while, but I finished the final sheet last week.

I still have my Sudoku app but have been looking for a new challenge and, happily, I've discovered a good app for acrostics. You answer 25 to 30 crossword clues and transfer the letters from the answers to a grid to spell out a quotation. It's just as addictive as Sudoku so I'm looking forward to many months of pleasure.

Out of interest, I looked up the Internet to see which oriental hermit first invented the sudoku puzzle. Surprisingly, he wasn't Japanese. Of course, the Americans claim that it was invented by one Howard Garn in the Land of the Free, but that's not right either. The most likely candidate is a Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, in 1783.