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How I fell late but hard for jigsaw puzzles

This article is more than 8 years oldAndrew MartinAs a child, they seemed the epitome of boredom, something reserved for rainy days. Now, I find the cardboard conundrums compelling

When I was growing up in the 70s and rain was falling heavily outside (I trust the ears of northern readers will have pricked up at the R-word), or the whole family was in some public holiday lockdown (and I hope that all readers will be with me now), my parents would propose constructive activities. All were complete nonstarters: tidy your room, read a book, do some colouring-in, clear out the shed, do a jigsaw.

Since then, life has panned out in such a way as to give all those activities a seductive appeal as antidotes to globalised job insecurity or various forms of computer-generated neurosis. Adult colouring-in books, promoted as enhancing mindfulness, were the publishing phenomenon of 2015. And as for tidying your room and clearing out the shed … decluttering is now, as the young people say, “a thing”.

But jigsaws have never been relaunched in the same way. According to some retail comparison figures released just before Christmas by the Office for National Statistics, sales of them in 2014 were down compared with 2008.

This surprised me, for the not-at-all-logical reason that it was around 2008 that I started to get into jigsaws. In mid-December I completed a 1,000-piecer: in effect two jigsaws showing Waterloo station in peacetime and wartime. The most difficult part was the blacked-out station rafters of the wartime scene. This had been a birthday present from my stepmother, who has been into jigsaws all her life, “probably because I’m an only child”.

I found no jigsaw in my stocking on Christmas morning – which would have delighted me as a boy (if I got a present with that tell-tale rattle, I could hardly be bothered to open it). But 40 years on, I wanted a puzzle for the holiday. So I bought a 500-piecer from a charity shop for £1.50.

It’s a modern edition of a jigsaw dating from the 1920s, and the image is of a black-and-white photograph showing a crowd of scowling men, identically dressed in dark suits, standing by some unmarked delivery vans on a foggy day. Behind them is a tall building with the words “Rington’s Limited Merchants” carved in stone. You have to look hard to see the smaller word “Tea” – which is what Rington’s made – carved lower down. All in all, I would have sacked the PR person who suggested this jigsaw as a means of promoting the company.

Many such advertising jigsaws were created in the interwar period. The Great Western Railway produced 80, one of which I own. It shows the Cornish Riviera Express, and comes in a lovely box of faded orange, lazily marked: “About 150 pieces”.

Jigsaws were also a popular form of distraction in the Great Depression, and since modern life produces its own big worries, it’s not hard to understand the success of mindfulness and colouring books.

But I don’t think jigsaws can join the mindfulness bandwagon. They are compelling as much as relaxing, and if done communally can promote intense competition. You can be left holding a single piece, muttering feeble things like, “I was sure this went there,” while your companion has connected half a dozen. Jigsaws are more likely to board the bandwagon of “resilience” – a current buzzword in education – in that almost anyone can complete any jigsaw if they take long enough. (I spent about two weeks in the dark rafters of Waterloo station.)

It could be said that jigsaws have an image problem, but I think there’s a mystique about them. There are half a dozen thrillers with “jigsaw” in the title, and I trust that anyone watching me at one of my jigsaws assumes I’m not just fiddling about with bits of cardboard. No, they will suspect I am simultaneously solving some bigger puzzle.

A first observer might confide to a second: “Now that might look like a boring middle-aged man trying to assemble an image of Windsor Castle, but the jigsaw focuses his mind, like Sherlock Holmes with his three-pipe problems. I mean, you know what Andrew’s really doing, don’t you? He’s solving the West Lothian question.” Another factor that might help the puzzle cause is global warming, a byproduct of which is apparently constant rain: perfect jigsaw weather.

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