This is probably the second post ever in the history of this blog that is distinctly NOT about gardening. Instead, it’s about what I spent the last couple of months happily spending time on (when instead, I probably should have been doing some gardening). I used the winter months to recover from the on-slaught of garden work last season and this winter, I re-discovered a little hobby of mine that soothes and massages my obsessive, compulsive disorder and that is doing a jigsaw puzzle:
Here it is completed, with no pieces missing, all 1500 pieces of it. This brightly painted tower of deities is a part of the Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai, India. I think my parents have been here but I’ve done the next best thing, which is to complete a jigsaw puzzle of it. I’ve printed this picture out, put the date on it and will return it to the charity shop from whence it came for the next person to take home and do.
We were told when we bought the jigsaw that there were no pieces missing and so of course, my OCD meant that I had to make up the jigsaw to check. Although it would have been much quicker to count the pieces, that wouldn’t have told me what any possible missing pieces would have looked like. The sky – with its uniform blue – posed somewhat of a problem and the low light levels in winter made it difficult to distinguish one blue from another, but with perseverance, it too was completed.
This isn’t the end of the story yet though, as sat waiting on the sideboard is a mammoth 4000 piece jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the lid is of a thatched cottage with a garden (that has a distressingly large amount of uniform green lawn) and – you’ve guessed it – a bright blue sky. I suspect that after working on that, I’ll be gagging to go out into a real garden as opposed to finding and slotting together pieces for a jigsaw one.
We were told that this 4000-piece jigsaw, has no pieces missing either. Well there’s one way to find out…
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