Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru

Note to Meghan and Harry –

“Naming that Baby after me will not change my way of life.” Archie

Meanwhile, a gold star to you if you know what the title of this post means. It may help if I tell you that it is a Japanese phrase transferred into English orthography.

Take the first two letters. Then take the seventh through to the tenth letter (still with me?) and you will realise that we are more familiar with its shortened form, sudoku.  

Anyway, back to the twenty-first century. If you do an internet search for sudoku you discover there are literally thousands of on-line opportunities to try to solve these puzzles. It is amazing to learn that there are so many different ways of rearranging those 3×3 squares of 9 individual numbers. Just writing that sentence takes me painfully back to the time many years ago when I scraped my way through Higher Maths. A few years later, the Principal of the African college where I was working corralled some of his staff into a room and asked us to declare our academic qualifications in Maths. We had just lost our sole Maths lecturer and there was no money to hire another. With quiet pride, I offered up my C pass at Higher Maths, and was promptly given part of his teaching timetable. Most of the students were content to try for a pass in the local exams, but one of them was a star of the Maths universe. My Maths teacher would have been amazed to learn that only a few years after leaving his tender care I succeeded in coaching this student through A-Level Maths by keeping ahead of him one lesson at a time. It was he who did all the hard work, but my pride was at stake and I suppose it shows that when that is the case you can manage to do almost anything – a fact well-known to stroke survivors.

Which brings me back to my relationship with sudoku. I am married to a woman who is pretty good at sudoku, and, thanks to her gentle coaching, I am a recent convert. In my pre-sudoku days, I would watch in awe, marvelling at her ability to tackle the problems offered by our daily paper. I suppose sudoku is a bit like life – there are easy problems, there are difficult ones, there are fiendish ones – and if you want a real challenge there are super fiendish ones. Johanna apparently has the ability to tackle all of these and succeed, much of the time. She is very patient and methodical in life as in sudoku, which is where we differ – significantly.

Now that I have mastered the basics, I feel I should always be able to coast through every sudoku challenge – easy or fiendish. When I succeed, I bang down my pencil with a flourish and shout “Finished!” loudly enough to make the dog jump. When I fail – which is frequently – I bang down my pencil with a flourish, vowing never to waste time on this activity any more, and shouting other words which cannot be repeated in a blog as genteel as this one.

As I said, sudoku is a bit like life, really.