Children in Need

3D CROSSWORDS


This is completely off-message, but my other blogs are members-only. Anyway, this post will be pulled next weekend - or not, depending on events.

Chums who know me know that in my “spare” time (when not pouring invective on anything that moves, breathes, is orange, if I may say that without causing offence, or appears on the telly) I am a compiler of crosswords, and it was in this role that I, with eleven other compilers, was approached by a fellow compiler two weeks ago (and it only seems like a lifetime.)

Brother Sirius is a crossword compiler with a vision. He wants to raise money to build a new school in Coventry (a city close to mine own heart) for children with vision that is impaired, as his increasingly is. The cost is a trifling £29,000,000.

Sirius is the inventor of the 3D crossword. Hitherto he has contented himself with rattling collection boxes outside his local Tesco or wheedling thruppenny bits for charities from his 3D crossword website -



http://www.calendarpuzzles.co.uk/


But a few months ago a small and innocent person of some six summers said “Mr Sirius Sir, why don’t you print a big book of your, like, really like cool 3D puzzles and flog it on the Internet, whence all good things flow, like loot for charitable causes?”

Now if Sirius was a normal person he would have patted that small child on the head and said “Avaunt thee unto thy playpen, dear squarker, and let us hear no more about it, or anything else at all, for that matter, until thou art at least 24 years of age and art no longer spotty about the countenance, and hast learned to speak something resembling this wonderful English language of ours that is spoken, yea, even unto Coventry, and occasionally, moreover, unto Nuneaton and Bedworth, which are an place wherein dragons dwell.”

But I can vouch for the fact that Sirius is not a normal person - not, that is, if a normal person seeking someone’s cooperation phones them up pretending to be Patrick Moore, as he did.

Sirius has a sense of humour that accords very much with mine own (although I think I am slitely beter at speling.) He is, in fact so utterly, completely barking that his project has attracted the attention of the BBC, and more specifically, Children in Need. He has, on his long march, attracted the cooperation, goodwill and advice of such luminaries as top crossword compilers Araucaria, Enigmatist, Doc, Rufus, Qaod (or Laos - I told you Sirius has eyesight problems), and others whom I have no intention of naming because I’ve been doing the proofreading, chaps, and some of your clues I didn’t understand, so it jolly well serves you right, and several highly influential crossword editors with big purses, whom no setter in his right mind would wish to offend. Oh, and his PCC. (Well, I tried to warn him. The help and cooperation of the PCC, said I, is like unto an sword that hath two edges. Both blunt. Don’t expect an answer before about March 2017.)

What for me has been so enjoyable about this last couple of weeks has been the huge exchange of completely lunatic e-mails (more than 100 each way), and the plans for the post-Calendar future (A Dictionary of Misprunts, for example, or the 4D crossword, where even if you've worked out the solution you can't enter it into the grid until a week last Tuesday or 4018AD.)

We are all on tenterhooks now. Will Doc get his clues in before the deadline? Will Sirius get on the telly? Can the make-up people do miracles? Will Sirius have time to build his mock-ups and sort out the PayPal arrangements? Will Sarah Montague (Today, R4) get cold feet? Will Jeremy Paxman relent, put on a silly hat, and engage in prattish stunts (that question isn’t rhetorical. It’s definitely a no-no. Dignity, and so forth. It’s a man’s thing)? Will Patrick Moore turn up and argue that Sirius isn’t really a star at all?

The children in need of the fruits of Sirius’s demented genius wait with bated breath.