Rubik's Cubes, Family History and Other Puzzles.

"If you are curious, you will find the puzzles around you.  If you are determined you will solve them," Erno Rubik is famously quoted as saying.

In 1980 I went on a German exchange trip.  My pen pal, Bettina, lived next door to Karl Heinz Roomy Knicker's mother and we had to check for photographers before playing in the street. He was a famous footballer, just in case you were wondering about the significance.  I liked my pen pal.  We got on and had been sending letters back and forth for the previous six months as the school recommended.  We were both curious and determined.

On one day, with her family, we did several things I'd never done before.  We went to Koln (Cologne), we had pizza in a restaurant, drank champagne (only a little), and bought a Rubik's Cube each.
We were hooked.  We worked on our puzzles day and night for the full two weeks and eventually solved it.

When I got back to England it took about a year before someone published a book on 'How to Solve the Rubik's Cube' and people were very keen to tell me that I was solving it wrong.

"You have to get the top two layers first."
"I get the corners first."
"No, that's wrong. The book says it has to be the top two layers."

I have stubbornly lived in blissful indifference to my inaccuracy for the last 35 years until Greenwich University Maths Department gave my son a new cube.  Now I realise that I don't know 'how' to do the cube at all.

I can't make the words match on every face

This is a problem.

The problem is eating away my summer break.

I have to keep trying.  I'm determined.

I believe that Rubik's original quote is the basic flaw in my nature.  Other, normal, people can leave a half finished puzzle.  Many of them don't even see the puzzle in the first place and they do lovely things in their summer break like eat, drink and go to the theatre.

I, on the other hand, am spending my time on a Rubik's cube, getting to the end of Candy Crush (level 1101) and solving the puzzle in my family history that has been bothering me since my last attempt at working out my family tree.

Then, I was concerned that in that in 1851, my Great Great Great Grandfather, Charles, appeared to be living with my Great Great Great Grandmother, who was 15 years his junior and his children, ranging in age from 5 to just 6 years older than his wife. Since then I have taken a trip to sit in a dark and stuffy registry office. I discovered that he had been married before and that, just as my journalist daughter, who is attached to fact had said, Sarah had died at the age of 24, at the same time as her child Mary was born.  But Charles had not been married before Sarah, of that, the records office could be certain, which didn't explain Harriet. The puzzle, still unsolved, had to be left but it kept nagging at me.

Visiting Greenwich, after getting the wretched cube we went on the Cutty Sark. I got what my daughter calls 'the history feeling.' Apparently not everyone gets the history feeling so I will describe it to you. It starts with prickles at the back of the neck and a slight shortness of breath and you think, "This is important. Something happened here." I kept thinking about Charles and Mary's son, Henry (my GGGrandfather) who had been on a ship in the 1861 Census and at sea in 1891. 

"It was probably a ship just like this. I wonder where he went and what his ship transported," I said aloud, causing a small child to back away from me and go running, crying, burying himself into the skirt of his mother.

So, my determined puzzle solving has started again and I am loosing every waking moment (except for the Rubik's Candy Crush interludes) and some sleeping time to the solution of the puzzle.  

"What's for tea?"

"There's cheese in the fridge. It's too exciting to stop."

"Why?"

"Oh, not much. I'm on the Isle of White and I think I've found Harriet.......wait..... there is a huge change in fortune. Can you bring me some cheese and more caffeine I could be some time."