The Racing Puzzlers

This story was written to the following theme:

"The season of renewal had only just begun, but against all odds it had brought a sliver of hope with it."

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The staffroom at the University library was spacious and accommodating. It was where most members of the library staff, of all grades, took their meal and refreshment breaks and could chat with each other when off duty. It had all the usual facilities, such as fridges, microwave ovens, a water heater, a sink, and cupboards for storing the staff members’ coffee mugs. It also had plenty of seating and several large tables.

It had become customary for one of the tables to be set aside for a jigsaw puzzle. This was nearly always a massive 5,000 piece puzzle that needed a large surface – the sort that was not usually available in an average home for the length of time it would take to complete the puzzle. That was why staff members often brought in puzzles that had started off as well-meant Christmas presents but which were better suited for communal solving in the staffroom.

These puzzles were usually the sort that took a great deal of work. Not only were they enormous, but they included huge areas of sky or sea in which it was impossible to find features that helped one to match likely looking pieces to their neighbours. If you managed to fit just one piece during a coffee break you left feeling deeply satisfied.

Then came the day when two such puzzles turned up together. It must have been early in January, when the “what do I do with this” Christmas present crisis was at its height. They were both in the 5,000 piece category, and the pictures looked to be of similar difficulty.

One was a scene that consisted largely of trees bursting into leaf in Spring – masses of tree branches and tiny green leaves, topped with a cloudless evenly-coloured blue sky. It had the title “The Season of Renewal”.

The second puzzle was based on a Victorian painting of a shipwreck. A vessel had gone aground on rocks on one side of the picture, and on the other side there was a distant lighthouse and a small rowing boat that was heading towards the wreck with two people rowing through the raging sea. The bulk of the scene was that selfsame raging sea, all dark colours with lots of white crests, beneath a storm-tossed sky. It was almost certainly a depiction of Grace Darling and her father on their way to save the passengers and crew of the Forfarshire in 1838, and the artist had given it the title “A Sliver of Hope”.

The question was clearly, “which puzzle do we do first?” and then somebody came up with the bright idea of doing both of them at the same time, using tables at opposite ends of the staffroom. A further bright idea was to make a race out of it, with two teams pitted against each other.

As things turned out, the teams were based on the departments that the library staff worked in, with a general division between front-of-house and backroom staff. However, due to the fact that many staff members fulfilled both functions during the working day, this was by no means fixed and people tended to align themselves to the team that contained more of their close friends than the other. The numbers on each team were kept as equal as possible to make the challenge fair.

Team lists were drawn up, and only then was a coin tossed to decide which team would do which puzzle. There had to be a prize for winning the challenge, and it was settled that the losing team would take over the slots of the winning team on the tea-towel rota for the whole of the following term.

And so the race began!

At first everything was absolutely fine, with each team assiduously turning over all the pieces and finding those with straight edges for the frame. Naturally, people kept a weather eye on how the other team was progressing and noting if they appeared to be doing better or worse.

All would have been well if the spirit of professionalism had been maintained throughout the exercise, but unfortunately this was not the case. The opportunity to cheat was always going to be there, and some of the competitors found it hard to resist temptation.

It began with people stealing a few extra minutes in the staffroom, using the excuse, when arriving late back at their workstation, that they had been waylaid by a student who needed their help. It soon became noted, however, that student waylaying of staff when returning from their breaks had increased by approximately 250% in the time since the jigsaw competition had begun.

People then got sneaky and found that their travels around the library in the course of their work seemed to take them past the staffroom more often than not, and a quick minute on the puzzle could always be fitted in without anyone noticing.

However, as time went by it occurred to a few of them that the odd minute grabbed in this way could be spent more productively in direct sabotage of the other team’s puzzle rather than in hoping to find a piece that fitted in one’s own. The sabotage usually consisted in pieces that had already been fitted being unfitted, or of pieces being mysteriously knocked off the table and finding themselves wedged under a rug or a chair leg. This had to be subtle – just the odd piece every now and then – so as not to excite suspicion.

The cheating was relatively minor until the day when somebody had the not-so-bright idea of opening a book on the outcome and taking bets. The stakes were strictly limited, but it did mean that winners might expect to pocket around 20p – which was not to be sniffed at.

With the money incentive added to the mix, schemes for nobbling the opposition, and for guarding against being nobbled, reached what amounted to fever pitch in the environs of a University library.

The building attendants, whose job was to supervise students as they entered and left the library, and who patrolled the place to check that all the students were behaving as they should, found themselves being asked to report back on any unusual movements on the part of suspect library staff. The attendants could view virtually the whole library – but not the staffroom itself - via a system of CCTV cameras that relayed their pictures to a bank of small screens in the front-of-house area. These screens were now avidly watched by jigsaw team members, a number of whom had volunteered to do extra duties in this area for that sole purpose.

But things went too far on the day that a member of the cleaning staff, who was at work in the staffroom with only one other staff member present, was asked by that staff member to clean a mark on the floor underneath the table on which The Season of Renewal was progressing very nicely, unlike “A Sliver of Hope” which was presenting considerable problems with the raging sea section. For that reason, more neutrals were backing “Renewal” than “Hope”.

“You’ll have to lift one leg of the table to get at it properly”, said staff member X, who just happened to belong to the “Hope” team. The leg was duly lifted and a whole corner of the puzzle fell on to the floor.

“Oh no”, said staff member X, “Look what you’ve done. You’ve ruined the jigsaw!”

The cleaner was mortified and full of apologies. “I’m so sorry”, she said, “but don’t worry, most of it fell in one piece so it shouldn’t be too difficult to put it back where it came from”.

“I’ll help you”, said staff member X, diving to the floor to grab as much of the fallen section as he could. For reasons that were perfectly obvious to anyone who knew where staff member X’s allegiance lay, and who was also aware that he had placed a full 10p bet on “A Sliver of Hope”, the largest pieces that were still joined together were nothing like as closely acquainted with each other when he placed them back on the table, nowhere near where they had come from.

When the “accident” was reported to the team captains they decided that it would only be fair for the Renewal team to be allowed to restore their jigsaw before the competition continued. Staff member X was not too happy about this decision, but he reckoned that making his objection public might not be in his best interest, especially if anyone cared to track his movements at the time the disaster occurred.

However, the incident did have the effect of denting the morale of the Renewers while boosting that of the Hopers. Even though repairs to The Season of Renewal had only just begun, against all odds it had brought a sliver of hope with it to the “Sliver of Hope” team and their financial backers.

Indeed, the point was soon reached when both jigsaws were within fifty pieces of completion. Given all the shenanigans that everyone knew about but pretended not to know, a decision was made to end the competition in a sprit of friendship. All betting was cancelled and the stake money returned to the punters. There would be a time set aside for a final race to the line, both teams working at the same time and the winner declared by a neutral judge. To make life easier for everyone, only four members of each team would take part.

So that is what happened. The flag went down and the puzzlers went to work, each desperately trying not to get in each others’ way. The idea was that a hand would be raised when the final piece was pressed home and the judge would make sure that everything was above board.

What nobody expected was a dead heat, but that is exactly what happened. A Renewal hand shot up at precisely the same time as a Hope hand and the result was declared to be a draw, with the tea-towel rota staying as it was.

It was also decided that, in future, the staffroom would only play host to one giant jigsaw puzzle at a time!

©John Welford

Contracting a kidnap

As I discovered later, as soon as I was kidnapped my parents leapt into action. Actually, that is not quite true, because their actions had started some time before I found myself grabbed from behind as I walked towards home, a gag stuffed in my mouth, a hood thrust over my head, a rope tied round my chest and arms, and the whole of me bundled into the back seat of a car. 

Although I could neither speak nor see I could still hear, and the muffled voices that came through to me sounded vaguely familiar. I could have sworn that the man who said: “Why didn’t we shove him in the boot?” was Mr Phillips from number 35, and the woman who replied: “Because we put all the shopping in there, didn’t we?” was Mrs Phillips, also from number 35. It turned that there was a very good reason for my thinking what I thought, this being that my kidnappers were indeed Mr and Mrs Phillips from number 35. 

Naturally enough I began wondering why these two otherwise perfectly normal near-neighbours of ours, who regularly partnered my parents at contract bridge, had suddenly discovered a criminal tendency that had led them to seize a 30-year-old male off a suburban street and roar off into the sunset with him. 

Actually, “roar off” was a bit of an exaggeration. Mr Phillips never drove at more than 25 miles an hour at the best of times, and he was not inclined to break the habit of a lifetime on this occasion. 

My ordeal in the back of the car was not a long one, even at Mr Phillips’s gentle pace. We could only have been a couple of streets away from where we started, when the car pulled into a driveway. The doors opened and I was encouraged to get to my feet, but with the hood still over my head. A doorbell was rung, and when the house door opened a young man’s voice was heard, clearly in some alarm. 

“Bloody Hell, Dad, what have you got there?” 

“Sshh, David, keep your voice down, we don’t want all the neighbours to hear. We’re involved in a kidnap and we need you to be our safe house.” 

The young man was obviously as astonished by the proceedings as I was, but he assisted his parents in bundling me inside the house. He was about to take the hood off my head when he was stopped by Mrs Phillips. 

“No, David, wait until we’ve gone. He might recognise us, and it’s important that he doesn’t know who any of us are. Wait until we’re out of sight before you release him or take the hood off.” 

“And then,” said Mr Philips, “You must let him use your spare room, at least until Susan and the kids get back from Auntie Margaret’s next week. “Further instructions will then be given”. 

“Just what is going on?” David asked. “Have you two been overdosing on John Le Carré novels or something?” 

But no further explanation was forthcoming. The senior Phillips’s left, after which David did the decent thing and released me from my bonds. 

If Mr and Mrs Phillips had imagined for one second that their dastardly plot would work, on the basis that I would not have a clue as to who they were, or who my new jailer was, they were sadly mistaken. It had clearly slipped their minds that I had known David Phillips ever since we had been at school together. Not only that, but I had been David’s best man when he married Susan some ten years previously, and Mr and Mrs Phillips had pretended to laugh at all my terrible jokes when I made my speech at the reception. 

As I stood there in David’s front room, shaking my head to get my eyes into focus, I even recognised the IKEA furniture that I had helped David and Susan put together when they had moved into this house on Waterpark Road only three years previously. 

David was every bit as astonished as I was when he recognised who his parents’ kidnap victim was. 

“John!” he exclaimed. “What the hell is going on?” 

“I wish I knew”, I replied. “I can only imagine that your parents and mine have been playing some silly little game that they dreamed up at their last bridge evening. I’d better be getting off home.” 

And so I did, after David had kindly offered me a stiff whisky to get my brain back into gear, an offer that I was pleased to accept. 

But when I turned the corner of Laburnum Avenue, I could see that maybe going home would not be so easy. You remember I began by saying that my parents had leapt into action as soon as I had been kidnapped? The action they had taken was to order a man and a van to take all my belongings to a storage depot so they could rent out my room to a lodger, and the man was busy packing the van as I watched. 

All those hints about “didn’t I think it was about time I found a place of my own” and “all my friends got married and settled down long before they reached my age” suddenly made perfect sense. 

With better planning, and somewhat less hopeless accomplices than the Phillips’s, their plan might have worked. Actually, I had to admit that it did work, because I had now had no choice but to go back to David’s place for the night before working out a permanent arrangement. 

On the other hand, a large enough bribe would have done the trick just as well.

© John Welford

A Good Disco?

(The challenge was to write a story based on the line: “It was a good disco, the teachers were selling fags and booze in the classroom”. This was what I came up with.)

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Those few days on America’s West Coast will live long in the memory. I was attending a conference on behalf of my company – all expenses paid – and the best thing about it was that all I had to do to justify my attendance was come back with sheaves of notes that I could plonk on my boss’s desk. The more notes the better.

Gathering what I needed did not take long – the notes had all been prepared in advance for every session and consisted entirely of reprints of the PowerPoint slides that the conference presenters duly read out in front of their audiences. Actually being in the room was completely unnecessary, as prior experience at such events had told me long since.

I didn’t even need to visit the conference venue, because everything was available via the Intranet that the organisers had set up. A link had been established to all the hotels that the delegates had been assigned to, so it took less than an hour to download all the relevant papers to my data stick, making sure that I didn’t make the mistake of claiming to have been at two sessions that took place at the same time.

Once back in England all I had to do was print everything off and scribble a few comments in the margins to give the impression that I had been following everything with rapt attention. As long as it was good enough to fool my boss, that was certainly good enough for me.

It was certainly not the first time I had performed this sleight of hand – I was an old hand at this, having had my fill of being a proper conference delegate at venues all over the world. It was always the same – a programme of sessions that were either far too basic or completely mystifying, with the same unedifying rush of hundreds of people pouring out of all the sessions at the same times and heading for the bars or the loos. And all one ever had to show for it was a pile of reprinted PowerPoint slides!

So what it all meant was that I was free to enjoy myself for three whole days in sunny California. I was even spared the famous fogs of the Bay area. 

I did the tour of all the best beaches, although I took the precaution of not getting myself too good a tan, just in case it excited comments back at base. I thoroughly enjoyed a beach volleyball tournament – especially when the women were playing – and at other times there were fantastic views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Whenever I’m overseas I usually have problems with my accommodation. Don’t ask me why, but if something is likely to go wrong at a hotel, it’ll be me who is the victim of the problem. I often find that the keycard doesn’t work the first time I try to use it, and I have to make another trip down to reception to get it re-programmed. But this time everything went swimmingly – one click with the card and I was in. 

I could write a book about all the dodgy hotel rooms I have been in – lights that don’t work, dripping taps, torn sheets, faulty windows, I’ve had them all. But on this occasion the hotel room was almost perfect. My only cause for complaint was that the minibar only stocked Bourbon and not Scotch, but that was a minor setback.

In other words, it was a really good trip, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and the boss was duly impressed when I got back. I’m looking forward to the next one, wherever that might be.

To sum up:

It was good in Frisco, great beaches, few hotel snags or queues for the bathroom.

 © John Welford