Once the pages had finished rustling and he had landed at the crossword section, a chessboard of missing letters confronted him. There was a row of hieroglyphic clues for the Cryptic crossword, childish clues for the ‘quick’ cross word and the a string of questions for today’s challenge. They were lined up like soldiers in a military parade, neat and orderly with their serial numbers assigned to the left. These were well polished clues. Footsteps began marching inside his still sleepy mind, but, with the first rifle crack of intuition and the victory of a word worked out, he was bolt awake, eyes wide open as if he’d just been shaken from a caffeinated dream.

The black and white mystery novel of the crossword began to unravel as if Sam Spade himself were helping. The answers swirled and dived on a smoky cigarette-haze dance floor in his mind – “Play it again Sam’ , The room reeked with the smell of the discarded butts of thought that had been tried and spat out as he tried to solve 18 across.

It was as if he were staring at a blank wall with bricks missing and he was slipping scrabble tiles around to fill the gaps. As soon as he was on the scent of an answer, he’d send down a tracker dog into his labyrinthine mind, a big lolloping St.Bernard with a welcome drop of the whiskey of success tied around its neck. He knew if that didn’t work he had a hunting dog with a Concorde nose that could sniff out the answers. It would come back with a letter or two firmly clamped between its pearly jaws. They would be dropped at his feet like slippers and somewhere in the engine room of cognition, sense would form and he would signal the bridge for ‘full speed ahead’.