sudoku solutions...

I was on a train last week and the guy beside me opened up a newspaper, went straight to the puzzles page and began to do the Sudoku. I don’t know about you but if nothing much is making sense in a day, solving a couple of sudoku squares, for me at least, seems to restore an equilibrium. I didn’t have a paper. I watched.

Interestingly he quickly filled in the numbers across the top line of the ‘easy’, then moved to the top line of the ‘medium’ and then straight to the top line of the ‘difficult’. He filled them in from left to right and then moved down to the second line, filled in every number in turn and so on to the third, until he’d finished the three puzzles and then he began the crossword.

I could see that all the lines and small squares on the grid contained the numbers 1-9 and everything looked correct to me. It took him less than five minutes. It took him less than that to do the crossword and that was a cryptic one.

Do you talk to strangers on the train? I did. I told him that I’d never seen anyone that fast at sudoku before and that I rarely ever finish a cryptic crossword. He said it was easy and then, sheepishly told me that he cheated. How? He made me promise not to tell anyone – he didn’t make me promise not to blog it though – and I agreed.

Everyday, he told me, he’d buy a paper at the station and while waiting for the train, pretend to be reading it. As the train arrived he’d put it in his bag and when he was sitting down take it out to do the puzzles. I still didn’t get it and must have looked confused because he then tapped his pen on the top margin of the paper and I saw that it was in fact, the previous day’s.

So you buy the paper and memorize the solutions while you’re waiting for the train? He nodded. ‘You’re Bonkers!’ I said.

He nodded and sang, ‘If I could be anyone I wanted…..’

It would have been churlish not to join in.