The Story So Far (for those late to the party)

'Challenge 69 - A Musical Maverick Mystery'

Apologies to those of you who are already up to date with ‘Challenge 69’ for repeating myself, but I’ve realised newer readers may be finding it confusing to navigate to the story alone amongst all the other posts, playlists etc.

So, to make things clearer, or possibly just to serve as a reminder before ‘Track 3’ arrives on Sunday, here’s the whole ‘Challenge’ caboodle so far collected in one place.

A plea for help: For those of you who have already read (and hopefully enjoyed) the first two Tracks, could you please use the share button below to forward this post to at least one other person (though a whole bunch would be good!) you think might also like it. Thanks.

Intro

“… the opening bars of a song, intended as an appetiser for what follows, establishing a melody and rhythm to pique the listener’s interest, to draw them in to the music …”

“I don’t mean to sound callous,” she said, “but shouldn’t you have more important things on your mind right now?”

“I’ve always had a weird sense of priorities,” he replied. “It’s part of my charm,” the payoff line delivered with that self-satisfied smirk she’d come to know (and love), though rarely witnessed these days.

“But a bloody quiz for Chrissake!” she blurted out, immediately regretting that the comment may have betrayed the irritation she felt, however selfish. “Is that to be your final legacy?”

“Think my legacy’s already set in stone darling,” he responded, with familiar grandeur (possibly feigned, probably not), “but this is crucial, we can’t have some dickhead winning my prize.”

“I know that’s important. To you anyway,” she conceded, “but I don’t understand how you stop it by being so long winded and convoluted?”

“Not the first time I’ve been called that,” he laughed, through obvious pain. “Is it too late to change my epitaph? Like Teddy Roosevelt said though, nothing worth having should ever come easy.”

“Couldn’t it just be complicated and short though?” she asked, hoping to keep the exasperation from her voice. “You’ve been working on it for weeks now.”

“I’m almost done, in more ways than one! But it’s been worth it. Those Daedalian clues and red herrings I’ve scattered along the way mean our eventual winner will have had to outsmart me, a rare beast indeed.”

His indomitable pomposity made her smile. Intrigued, despite herself, she had two more questions, “I know why it’s called ‘Challenge 69’, but aren’t you worried it’ll sound like some sex thing when it appears online?”

“Oh, hadn’t thought of that,” he nakedly lied. “You really think so? Can’t be causing any controversy now, can we?”

Well used to ignoring his sarcasm, she posed her final enquiry, suspecting she’d regret hearing the answer, “I know the timetable’s set out in your will, but why the big delay before it launches?”

“The world’s not ready yet,” he declared. “It’ll be better to wait a few years. By the time ‘Challenge 69’ is revealed I’ll be long gone, and, unfortunately my dear, long forgotten.”

Self-deprecation didn’t become him. While he might be right on the first point, he surely couldn’t be more wrong on the second. She hurried to leave the room before he could spot the tears start to escape, again.

Track 1

Everything Must Go (A Matter of Emphasis) - 10th August 2017

Stuart had, he knew, wasted a disproportionate slice of his morning contemplating fruitcake.

In his defence this was no commonplace confectionery. The report he’d heard earlier revealed the cake was over a hundred years old and yet, cutting to the story’s core ingredient, an Antarctic authority had claimed it still, “looks and smells almost edible.” It had been those last two words, the unlikely image they created, that had prompted Stuart’s lengthy, unjustifiable, scrutiny.

The fruitcake in question, wrapped in paper and stored inside a rusted tin, had recently been found by conservationists in a hut on Cape Adare, believed to be the South Pole’s oldest building. Crucially, explaining the discovery’s newsworthiness, it was believed this uneaten snack had belonged to Robert Falcon Scott, Scott of the Antarctic, a staple item on any British child’s educational diet. This supposed ownership had been attributed to the ‘fact’, one Stuart must have forgotten from school, that the cake was manufactured by Huntley & Palmers, whose produce had, apparently, been, “known to be Scott’s favourite.”

This had been no more than a two-minute story on Five Live, sandwiched between the travel bulletin (which thankfully he no longer cared about) and last night’s Carabao Cup reports, but it had proved more than enough, in the hours since, to send Stuart down a maze of reflective rabbit warrens.

On what basis could this cake, 106 years old now he’d researched it further, possibly be considered, “almost edible.”? Even accepting the durability of its high fat, high sugar content, that conditions (in the coldest, windiest, and driest place on earth) may have proven uniquely conducive to preservation, and that all this had taken place well before ‘best by’ food warnings, Stuart still felt the polar expert must have been over egging its edibility. He’d noted there was no accompanying claim that Scott’s fruit loaf was still likely to taste, “almost edible.”

Following a parallel strand of thought, what of Huntley & Palmers? According to Wikipedia, its information digested with an appropriate pinch of salt, the firm had been established in an easily pre-Scott 1822. Formed by Quakers (who he guessed must have been big in all things oaty) the firm grew to become the biggest, most famous biscuit manufacturer in the world, its reputation built on variety tins and ginger nuts, though Stuart couldn’t help recalling a youthful fondness for their iced gems. It had been another of those iconic brands lost in the ‘70s, subsumed into a less snappy Associated Biscuits, but pleasingly Huntley & Palmers appeared to have risen again since as an independent company. A genuine phoenix from the crumbs.

Maybe this whole episode, Stuart had then speculated, could have been one of the earliest identifiable instances of product placement? Scott’s infamous expedition likely qualified him as a pop star of his day, so how much would Huntley & Palmers have needed to fork out to promote their wares as, “the cake no Antarctic explorer should leave home without.” Had Amundsen’s rival expedition been similarly sponsored, by the leading Norwegian producer of fermented trout perhaps?

Conscious of the danger of entering a fruitcake zone of his own, Stuart had finally pondered how pivotal it may have proven, to the course of history, that Scott’s cake had never been eaten? Could it otherwise have provided the extra sustenance required, the marginal gain in today’s lingo, to secure polar victory? Captain Oates might have become famous instead for an entirely different, less tragic quote: “I’m just going outside, I’ll fetch the cake.”

It had taken Stuart a good part of the year since his retirement (did he really need to add ‘early’ every time?) to understand the extra headspace this had freed for such flights of fancy, and even longer to fathom how preferable he found it to a mind clogged by corporate concerns. Rising naturally now around 8am, no longer woken by that 5.30 alarm, faced with a diary-less day to make his own felt both liberating and invigorating. He still had to face down frequent queries from those, sadly in Stuart’s eyes, who clung to careers defining their worth about, “how do you fill your day?” He’d almost given up expecting any understanding of the true answer, that this was both infinitely variable and, crucially, totally within his own control. Today’s honest reply for example would be, “rereading Dickens, walking in the Peaks, listening to the Manics, and fussing over fossilised fruitcake.”

Music, always a feature somewhere on each day’s itinerary, mattered massively to Stuart. It always had. His treasured increase in leisure capacity having fortuitously corresponded with an explosion in streamed musical choice had, unsurprisingly, done nothing but reinforce this obsession. Today, from within his own collection (833 CDs, 339 vinyl options, or a choice of 12,207 songs on iTunes), he was revisiting ‘Know Your Enemy’, the Manic Street Preachers’ third post-Richey album. Arguably not their strongest, but Stuart always felt an empathetic tug on hearing ‘Ocean Spray’, James’ debut lyrical outing on a song prompted by his mother’s untimely death from cancer, its simple words so effective in portraying a deep sense of grief. The song’s poignant, raw emotion was also beautifully framed by a gorgeous trumpet solo. Not, Stuart mused, a rock critique often heard.

As the CD ticked over to ‘Intravenous Agnostic’ (an album should after all be listened to as an album), a great title but a messy song, Stuart’s skittish attention jumped again, like a needle from a scratched groove, settling on the great ‘elephant in the studio’ problem he’d always had with the Manic Street Preachers. An unresolved matter of emphasis. Just why did everybody mispronounce their name and, more to the point, why had it only ever been him that seemed to agonise over this?

Naming their high school band, aiming you would assume for something to reinforce their cherished outsider status, Richey and Nicky (surely the ones in charge of such matters) must have intended, with emphasis firmly placed on the first word, to style themselves as Street Preachers of a Manic persuasion. A hugely powerful image. Instead, the band had forever become monikered, through collectively misplaced stress on the final word, not simply as Preachers, which alone might make sense, but as a preaching community who had chosen to locate themselves on Manic Street, which together very clearly doesn’t.

As annoying as Stuart still found this emphasistical anomaly, it had never proven one he’d managed to move beyond a one-man crusade. His wife Anne disparagingly dismissed the issue as, “just bloody semantics,” while their son Joe, with the certainty of youth, simply observed, “who cares anyway Dad?” He’d even failed miserably to engage his fellow music loving mates Ed and Charlie on the issue. “I can see where you’re coming from,” Charlie had once conciliatorily conceded, before shooting down Stuart’s concern (and agreeing with Joe) by concluding, “but there must be bigger things to worry about.”

He’d even once plugged Manic Street into Google Maps, just to make sure it wasn’t some obscure Blackwood byway (“that’s taking it too far,” Ed had commented, “even for you!”), but the only example he’d found, anywhere in the world, was a back street in the city of Chaguanas (pop 83,489), just south of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, with no attributable evidence this had ever been a hotbed for holy men of any creed. Stuart supposed this mass misdemeanour of mispronunciation, by now seemingly irreversible, must explain why everybody just called them the Manics!

A reluctant conversationalist at the best of times, one of Stuart’s least favourite questions to field had always been, “what kind of music do you like?” How could you ever expect to answer such a complex question within the confines of the succinct response the casual enquirer expected? A five hundred words essay might, just about, allow Stuart to do the subject justice, but restricted to a simple phrase where would he even start? Pop music, discordant rhythms, provocative lyrics, and jangly guitars would likely all, dependent on his mood, feature prominently. But even part way through such a list, Stuart understood, his audience would be lost. Instead, he had come up with a stock short-form answer, one that for him said it all. “I like maverick music,” he’d reply, the inherent truth of his assertion made all the sharper by the confused look it typically provoked.

In Stuart’s musical universe Richey Edwards would always remain one such maverick. The true heart and soul of the Manics, not just before his disappearance but, intriguingly, still so in spirit afterwards. The three surviving band members, devastated by the loss of their friend (however it had happened) continued to make great music, not despite their tragedy, it seemed to Stuart, but by consciously using it to inform and inspire everything they had done since.

It wasn’t just the space reserved stage left when they performed, their long-maintained split of royalties four ways, or the occasional use of Richey’s unmistakable, poetically obtuse, unused lyrics; it was more the way they had managed to retain, even into middle age, the same youthful anger at injustice that had driven Richey, once described by John Robb as, “a walking, talking manifesto.” Right from Nicky’s post-disappearance lyrical admission, on ‘Everything Must Go’, that he feared a diminished future, the band had seemed propelled forward again, seemingly Richey fuelled. Preaching forever, albeit mistakenly anchored on Manic Street.

Stuart had always believed he could find common ground to explore with the Manics. Unlikely perhaps, on the face of it, given his long career working for one of the organisations they had mercilessly vilified on ‘NatWest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds’ (with credit compared to death no less!), but if they could just get past the financial crash Stuart felt they would be able to bond over a mutual love of ‘80s post-punk. Nicky Wire, after all, came over in interviews as a similarly obsessive music fan, openly conceding the inspiration he had drawn from bands like Joy Division and The Cure, other notable mavericks never far from Stuart’s turntable. This Manics’ fandom didn’t end at simply acknowledging such influences either, they often went further, paying direct homage by covering some of their favourite songs.

Stuart loved a good cover version. He’d often thought there ought to be a law requiring every band to cover at least one song in each live set (with a crack squad of ‘undercover cover cops’ in place to police it!)

He also loved making, and constantly honing, musical lists. “The best live performance you’ve ever seen,” for example, had long been a regular beer-driven debate with Ed and Charlie at the gigs they still attended. But there were a multitude of other categories to choose from. Having finally managed to mentally regurgitate Scott’s fruitcake, Stuart became free to plough his full attention instead into revising his top five cover versions list. He had several key criteria; it must be a markedly different take (no room here for pastiche), prove capable of redefining a song you already loved, and cause you to think of it differently afterwards. It only took him half an hour or so to come up with a new ‘covers’ list, in a traditional reverse order:

5) ‘Umbrella’ – a Rihanna cover by the Manic Street Preachers. A great pop song transformed by James’ sweeping vocals.  A welcome window into the band’s underappreciated playful side.

4) ‘Just Like Heaven’ – a Cure cover by Katie Melua. Ed’s daughter Rose had sung at Stuart’s 50th party, meeting the only rule he’d set her, “to include at least one Cure song,” by covering this cover.

3) ‘Jack the Ripper’ – a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds cover by Japandroids. A driven, noise laden version by an obscure Canadian band which, unbelievably, manages to out doom the original.

2) ‘Running Up That Hill’ – a Kate Bush cover by Placebo. Anne had used this as the alarm on her phone for ages now, permanently imprinting it on Stuart’s brain. Especially the first five seconds.

1) ‘Hurt’ – a Nine Inch Nails cover by Johnny Cash. The highlight of his great American Recordings renaissance, a stunning stripped back vocal enhanced for eternity by the world’s best, ever, video.

A great list, Stuart concluded, whilst acknowledging a host of other contenders bubbling just below that could easily force their way on next time.

Having made a conscious effort to bin as much business baggage as he could over the last year, literally so with his work shoes the day after leaving (symbolically akin to burning your schoolbooks), Stuart had to concede one corporate compulsion remained that he had singularly failed to break. He still felt obliged to micro-manage his e-mail inbox, suffering a familiar anxiety if the number of unresolved messages spilled onto a second page. Given the antiquity of his personal webmail provider this only allowed him a capacity of thirty live messages to work with. Stuart suspected this fixation, especially if logged alongside his list making, would probably see him diagnosed today as operating on the lower reaches of the autistic spectrum. In his youth though the only Spectrum anyone would have recognised was a dodgy computer developed by a batty, balding, battery car driving boffin called Sinclair!

Just as he had found at work, copious crap still seemed to flow into Stuart’s personal inbox, including (a cynical corporate observation perhaps) an equal number of people attempting to con him daily. How many flights did EasyJet and Ryanair think he could take in one year? and however sad it was he’d become part of the target audience did anybody really take out funeral insurance? Despite his morning having been irretrievably lost though, much of it in a cake-fed haze, the afternoon had at least brought one intriguing new email which Stuart had left to be consumed last, much like he used to do with the best bit of his dinners as a child (the sausages maybe?). Being honest, he still did the same thing today.

The message’s sender was listed as ‘Challenge 69’, which meant nothing to Stuart, and its subject line read, “an invitation to win a unique prize,” which screamed out scam, followed by a plea of, “please don’t delete, this is not a scam,” which probably just confirmed it was. Hovering over the delivery address revealed little more, just noreply@Challenge69.com, so Stuart finally took the plunge and opened the email. If nothing else he was always interested to find out what innovative new methods fraudsters had devised to get people to click on their virus infected attachments, or to freely cough up their banking details. The message’s content was brief, not obviously fraudulent, employed an unusual font, and, while not entirely grammatically correct, read:

The weblink took Stuart through to a simple one-page site with much the same messaging, though it expanded a little on the registration process. The page repeated the warning that potential entrants could only successfully log on by using the same email address their targeted invitation had been received on and stressed that from midnight tonight the site would become password protected, locked to new recruits. Once registered, it explained, entrants would become part of a closed ‘Challenge 69’ community, with a first ‘clue’ due to be released via the site at 10am tomorrow.

Stuart couldn’t help being intrigued, particularly by the openly cavalier stance taken on data protection, but he remained healthily sceptical. A quick Google search of ‘Challenge 69’ came up with three partial hits; a question posed on a peer-to-peer support forum for a Californian software company, issue number 69 of ‘Challenge – The Magazine of Science Fiction Gaming’ (being sold online by a shop in Cornwall), and a fitness training centre (with the exact same name) located in Breda, a city in the south of The Netherlands. None of these seemed to have any recognisable link to Stuart’s unsolicited offer, with its curiously worded proclamation of uniqueness.

Even operating under his ruthless, self-dictated, inbox management rule this was only live message number twenty-three (giving him seven more to play with), so Stuart allowed himself the luxury of temporarily closing but not deleting the ‘Challenge 69’ email. He could think it over further, he reasoned, while walking the dog. Subconsciously though Stuart accepted he’d been reeled in, having already pre-calculated how much time he had left before the invitation’s midnight deadline.

He paid less attention than usual today to the stunning Peak scenery, finding it obscured by a fog of questions running through his mind; what the hell was ‘Challenge 69’? what could a prize described as, “a one-off copy with no likeness,” be? what kind of online database might he have been recruited from? and how, anyway, could you legitimately claim to have, “carefully chosen,” 107,683 recipients?

In the short time it took Oscar to wolf down his keenly anticipated post walk treat, Stuart, showing a similarly animalistic tendency, had already logged back on to the ‘Challenge 69’ website. He entered his registration details (with thankfully no financial information required) and pressed send to be taken to a new page:

It was obvious from the unexpectedly high ‘Challenger’ count that Stuart hadn’t been the only one who had bitten. If he had just foolishly volunteered as a mark for some elaborate con trick, then at least he wasn’t alone. Any normal marketing campaign would kill for the 4.8% registration rate that ‘Challenge 69’ (whoever they were) appeared to have achieved in just a few hours. Stuart also reasoned this development would provide him with a novel new answer to Anne’s regular, slightly condemnatory, enquiry about, “what’ve you been up to today then?” when she got back from work shortly. Explaining it would provide a welcome distraction as there were still, he found himself gauging, almost eighteen hours left to wait until tomorrow’s 10am first clue deadline.

Anne, predictably, had proved largely unimpressed by Stuart’s ‘Challenge 69’ saga as he’d outlined it over tea, “it’s got to be a scam,” being her final word on the subject. On the positive side though she had seemed to find his Scott fruitcake story mildly amusing. Surreptitiously, Stuart managed to log back onto the site a few more times later under the pretence of checking on the football scores, a cover story that owed its efficacy to Anne being unaware there were rarely any big games on a Thursday.

No further Challenge information was forthcoming, but the site did have a constantly updating registration count. This number continued to rise steadily through the evening, reaching five figures shortly after 7pm and racing quickly through the teens. Whatever undisclosed, quite possibly illegal, method of targeting had been employed it was working. Finally, after he’d endured some typically tedious Brexit dominated editions of ‘Question Time’ and ‘This Week’, as the time ticked past midnight, a new ‘Challenge 69’ front-page message finally appeared replacing the already familiar login boxes:

###

Despite an uncharacteristically fitful night’s sleep Stuart was prepared. A 10am deadline, particularly on a Friday morning, was not unfamiliar to him as this always seemed to be the time tickets went on sale for recently announced tours. Little he wanted to see normally sold out with Glastonbury like speed, yet another indicator his tastes fell more to the obscure that Stuart acknowledged with a certain pride, but there were occasions (Nick Cave for example) when a ten minute delay could at worst leave you ticketless, or even at best stuck with seats on a remote row with a warning, “this ticket may have an obstructed view of the stage,” a phrase invoking the concert goer’s equivalent of a rail traveller’s dread at hearing, “this train has been replaced by a bus service.”

At 10am precisely, on Friday 11th August 2017, with Anne once again out at work, it took Stuart just seconds to log back on to the ‘Challenge 69’ website and receive the following brief message:

By the time Stuart had read through the full message twice he had become consumed by a strange cocktail of emotions, two measures of confidence with an added dash of panic.

The panic stemmed from the very first line, ‘Challenge 2’. What had happened to number one? Had he misunderstood or misread the joining instructions? logged on too late? or was the site, which he’d quickly taken at face value, simply malfunctioning? Illogically he tried logging off and on again, but the same headline still appeared.

On the other hand, presuming he hadn’t already missed the boat leaving its first harbour, Stuart was confident he could solve this clue. It looked to him like familiar cryptic crossword territory.

He’d grown up doing the Daily Mirror quick crossword with his Mum, only realising much later in life how impressive she’d been at completing it, largely without dictionary assistance, despite having been forced by circumstance to leave school at fourteen. Stuart had then parked any such lexicographic interest, through high school and university, with their more immediate distractions, only to discover it making an unexpected return during the lunch breaks in his first job (for a finance company in Wembley) where he’d graduated onto the Daily Telegraph cryptic version.

Stuart had two regular lunch partners; the manager Mr Elias, always known by his surname, who interestingly never smoked upstairs at lunchtime, only downstairs at his desk in front of the customers (that was the early ‘80s for you!), and the clearly over-qualified receptionist Margaret who, proud of her Irish heritage, tried to insist everybody call her Mairead, which never worked as nobody could pronounce it. It soon became clear Mr Elias (or Jim out of work hours) had carefully selected his fellow diners, choosing those members of staff he deemed best qualified to assist his daily, almost pathological, quest to complete the Telegraph crossword. Stuart had probably initially been selected based on his recently acquired Geography degree, with an incorrect assumption made he would therefore know every river and city, but with he and Margaret performing well enough to keep their places in the crossword first team the trio were soon finishing the task most days, even if (Jim authorised) it sometimes took them well over their allotted hour.

Thirty-five years later this solid grounding stood Stuart in good stead. He could still spot a cryptic clue and dissect its structure from a mile off. While it would have proven difficult back in 1982, upstairs in Wembley, to discover the name of the river, “flowing through Leeds,” (and he would likely have been castigated for not knowing it, “just what sort of Geography did you study?”) today, even though it felt like cheating, it took just moments on his smartphone to establish it was the river Aire.

Equally obvious, if your mind had been conditioned to work appropriately, was that the potential referenced by the clue was highly likely, especially with the added reference to flowing, to refer to the potential difference in an electrical circuit. Proving the case there was probably more intrinsic value to be gained from a Physics ‘A Level’ (even at a disappointing E grade) than from a full degree in Geography, Stuart could still recall that electrical potential was measured in volts.

Combining the singular version of that with the river in Leeds gave you Voltaire.

Stuart may have read a sum total of zero of Voltaire’s prodigious output (over two thousand books he discovered later), and he was fairly confident he’d prefer ‘Great Expectations’ to ‘Candide’ any day of any week, but he had recently, conveniently, got a pub quiz question wrong about, “the nom de plume of the 18th Century French Writer, François-Marie Arouet?”. He’d guessed the Marquis de Sade, only to find the correct answer was Voltaire, but importantly he still remembered the exact question having been phrased as, “which 18th Century French writer, from the Age of Enlightenment, ...”

That last word sealed the deal. The solution to, “enlightened potential flowing through Leeds?” had to be VOLTAIRE.

It was still only ten past ten. Despite continuing to worry over how he had managed to miss ‘Challenge’ number one (and what the repercussions might be), Stuart recklessly typed VOLTAIRE into the solution box anyway, and pressed Enter.

Track 2

My Mother the War - 10th September 2017

It was hard to feel sympathy for Richard Branson, however cruelly Irma had treated him.

The latest alphabetized hurricane had been dominating the news for days now and some of its statistics were stunning, easily qualifying Irma as the most powerful Atlantic storm in recorded history. Sustained winds of more than 185mph meant Irma, according to meteorologists, would have generated over seven trillion watts of power by the time she was done. More than double the impact wreaked by all the bombs deployed in WW2.

Most of the storm’s US biased news coverage had centred on either the approaching threat to Florida, whose 6.5 million residents had been advised to evacuate, or on Washington’s rapidly growing projection that the total clear up bill would exceed $50 billion. Despite this, Irma barely seemed to have registered on the President’s overactive tweet radar. Presumably in The Donald’s opinion it was just a bit of weather, and certainly nothing whatsoever to do with non-existent climate change.

Yet, largely ignored, the heart of the storm had already ravaged The Leeward Islands. The number of people confirmed or feared dead was steadily rising, with more than 60% of the residents on some islands declared homeless. A true humanitarian disaster, Stuart reflected, yet CNN remained fixated on the threat to wealthy Floridian’s condominiums, while an even more parochial BBC seemed to regard the catastrophic damage to Branson’s mansion, on Necker Island, as the key news item.

The bearded billionaire and his domestic staff (an observation that made him sound even more like a plantation owner) were safely holed up in his extensive wine cellar, in communication by satellite phone, but with pretty much everything above ground destroyed. While undoubtedly a personal disaster for Sir Richard, Stuart felt annoyed how little attention, relatively, was being paid to those locals more fatally impacted, less able to recover. How many on Barbuda, closest to Irma’s eye, had a wine cellar they could shelter in or, more pertinently, a $5 billion dollar fortune to rebuild their homes?

Stuart had always regarded himself, though he guessed everybody did, as devoid of bigotry. Yet it would be wrong not to concede that at least part of his anger over this wall to wall, non-stop Necker nonsense could be attributed to the one long held, deep rooted prejudice he couldn’t deny. He was an unashamed, unreconstructed toffist. Suspicious of anyone with a public-school accent.

Its roots were Pavlovian, his high school days in Cambridge having taught Stuart to despise the condescending attitudes, typically voiced in Etonian tones, that so many of its university students showed towards the townspeople. Every time they ventured outside their rarefied dorms and cloisters, it had seemed, displays of assumed, inherited superiority deepened this class centred chasm. Town vs Gown hadn’t proven the myth he had once assumed it was, rather a very real, very unpleasant problem. Thankfully his own student days in Sheffield helped Stuart realise this was a largely Oxbridgian phenomenon, but he had still carried that same conditioned sense of intolerance (of pompous twats) throughout his life.

There was a growing focus these days, rightly, on smashing the glass ceiling, allowing more women to achieve their full business potential, yet insufficient attention was still paid, Stuart felt, to an equally pernicious workplace issue. How many of the senior executives in our purportedly egalitarian FTSE 100 companies boasted Oxford or Cambridge as their alma mater? Too bloody many was the answer.

While Stuart allowed exceptions to his prejudicial rule (who didn’t love Stephen Fry?) he had never found it in his heart to excuse Branson. How could you ever buy a genuine, rags to riches back story for a self-made entrepreneur if their grandfather was a privy councillor, glorifying under the title of The Right Honourable Sir George Arthur Harwin Branson? And just how many fledgling businesses would have survived an early £70,000 fine, and likely imprisonment, for illegally evading purchase tax, without parents like Richard’s who had been able to re-mortgage their home and bail him out?

Stuart’s socialist credentials may have become blurred, without doubt more conflicted, over the years, but this was one working-class chip (quite possibly a whole bag) that had never entirely fallen from his shoulder. Maybe this also explained why, however comfortably middle class he had undeniably become, he still preferred his lyrical diet to come with a healthy helping of left leaning, socially conscious bite. This reflection must have subconsciously bled into his latest Spotify selection, as for today’s one-month on, pre-‘Challenge’ soundtrack he found himself listening to 10,000 Maniacs’ third album ‘In My Tribe’.

Natalie Merchant possessed one of Stuart’s all-time favourite voices (another obvious list category). Her singing, often articulated at the edge of audibility, required a real effort to decipher the words, but with persistence rewarded by poetic story telling lyrics, best delivered angrily, aiming to right perceived wrongs. A theory supported right now by ‘Don’t Talk’s pointed request for truth to prevail over lies. There was a real beauty to the strange timbre of Natalie’s vocals, it seemed to Stuart, one felt as much as heard, a sort of unknowable earth mother tone that had always appeared to be as much of a mystery to her as to the listener.

“Can’t see what all the fuss is about,” Anne always reckoned. “Sounds like Stevie Nicks to me.” There might be a passing resemblance, Stuart had to concede, but it was no real contest, Nicks was no maverick.

Culturally Stuart delighted in dissonance, things that should conflict yet somehow, surprisingly, worked together to create a better whole. David Lynch was his ultimate dissonant hero, with Twin Peaks’ small-town murder mystery cloaking the blackest of psychological traumas, but 10,000 Maniacs’ debut single ‘My Mother the War’ (with the equally weird and wonderful ‘Planned Obsolescence’ on its B-side) had always, to his ears, been a prime aural example of the art.

He knew Charlie, and particularly Ed, would likely denounce such observations as pretentious (Morley like) bollocks. Admittedly a charge hard to refute. They had probably also moaned about, “twee folk rock,” back in 1985, after seeing the band together at the Hammersmith Clarendon (sadly now demolished), but if so, Stuart was confident he would have counterargued, long into the night, about the sheer perfection of the encore they had just witnessed. Introed by an acapella rendition of ‘He’s 1A in the Army’ the band kicked into ‘My Mother the War’ and the following four minutes had stayed with Stuart ever since. At its gloriously undecipherable best, Merchant’s singing counterpointed the post-punk disharmony of the music with the howling guitars in the instrumental breaks perfectly underscoring Natalie’s uncoordinated, whirling dervish dancing. Her long hair and long skirt appeared to take on lives of their own. There was still YouTube footage of this online, from the Newcastle date on the same tour, but it never quite matched Stuart’s recollection.

At this juncture, a dash of personal dissonance distracted Stuart further, prompting him to think of his own mother, to wonder what she had done in the war? Born in 1927 she would have been just twelve at the outbreak of WW2, eighteen by the time it ended. As he had reflected last month, as ‘Challenge 69’s first clue was released, she had left school at fourteen, but what had happened then? He knew his dad, too young to enlist, had been categorised as an essential farm worker during the conflict, but he was a whole lot sketchier on his mum’s war effort. Sadly, she had died (under similar ‘Ocean Spray’ circumstances to James’ mother) before Stuart had been either old enough, or sufficiently mature, to ask.

He had a vague memory of being told she had to travel twenty miles or so, by bus, to work at a ‘munitions factory in Letchworth Garden City. A quick internet trawl revealed a company in the town called Kryn & Lahy, set up by a Belgian diamond merchant after he had fled WW1, which by the late 1930s had employed over seven hundred people, many of them fellow refugees from his homeland. The firm specialised in the manufacture of aircraft supplies, which had to be a euphemism for weaponry if ever Stuart had heard one. Had that been his mum’s war then, building bombs with Belgians?

By the ‘60s she had been a housewife, looking after Stuart and his brother, a seemingly ubiquitous role for women in their rural, working-class community. His dad, meanwhile, that agricultural job made redundant by mechanisation, was working shifts at a local factory. Only looking back now did Stuart appreciate how poor they must have been in pure monetary terms, though with no comparator it had never seemed that way at the time. Having recently read Alan Johnson’s haunting memoirs of growing up in substandard, inner city, local authority slum housing it was clear their own village council house had been a much softer option, but nonetheless life must have been a struggle for his parents. He regretted never having had the opportunity to tell them, with his own wisdom of age, how much he appreciated the sacrifices they obviously made to keep this state as well hidden from him as it was.

Stuart often teased Anne, unfairly and largely inaccurately, that coming from a more privileged middle-class background she could never understand true poverty the way he did. His primary justification for this claim, which Anne chided him, “has scarred you for life,” centred around the single Mars Bar treat his dad brought home each Friday payday. It was only years later, Stuart would explain, that he realised not every family cut their confectionary into four equal, budget constrained segments. It told you everything you needed to know about Stuart’s childhood though, the enormous unpayable debt he would always owe, that his and his brother’s portions had been noticeably bigger than a quarter, and always included the end section, guaranteeing them extra chocolate.

The plaintive strings of ‘Verdi Cries’ returned Stuart from this reverie, its words bringing ‘In My Tribe’ to a close with a final battle call, appropriately heralding the ‘Challenge’ ahead. He had risen early, especially for a Sunday, conscious from the moment he woke that today would bring the competition’s next deadline. With time to kill before he could find out what 10am would unveil though, Stuart tried to pass some of it by watching ‘Andrew Marr’.

More Brexit unsurprisingly, but also a rare sighting these days of Tony Blair. It seemed so long ago now, far more than the actual span of twenty years, since they had believed ‘D:Ream’s anthemic claim that a brighter day had dawned as their song accompanied New Labour’s sweep to power. A moderate left of centre Government offering pragmatic socialism, committed to greater equality but arguing this was best achieved via a society that worked with business, rather than operating in ideological conflict. From the evidence of today’s interview Blair’s tune hadn’t much changed, and nor in truth had Stuart’s views, there was barely a word he disagreed with. Just how had pragmatism fallen so out of favour, he wondered, and politics become so polarised? And was it right that everybody, apparently, had stopped listening to a man once hailed as a visionary over one dodgy dossier decision?

Enough of the Iraq War though, never an argument you were likely to win, and time to switch off Brexit (if only that were possible!). There were now just thirty minutes left before today’s ‘Challenge’ deadline. It had proven a long wait since Stuart had typed VOLTAIRE, pressed Enter, and received in return an immediate if largely uninformative message:

There had been no acknowledgement made, or explanation given, of the worrying absence of ‘Challenge’ number one, but Stuart had at least been relieved that this didn’t appear to have tripped him up. The website didn’t provide its ‘Challengers’ (as he now thought of himself) with any opportunity to communicate directly with the somewhat nebulous ‘Challenge 69’, and despite having checked every few days since there was still no wider online presence through which to gather any additional information.

The only active part of the site, if you logged off and on again, was a simple count, in the top righthand corner of the screen (where the registration numbers had previously sat), which updated the number of people who had passed the latest ‘Challenge’. When Stuart first realised this, at around 10.30am on that first day, it had simply read:

He had obviously been cryptically quick off the mark. Having submitted his answer at just after ten-past ten would, most likely, have put Stuart somewhere close to the front of that initial count. If nothing else, it seemed, you could at least follow how many of the 23,484 ring fenced registrants had passed the test and track the rate at which they were achieving that status. Progress had been slow at first, allowing Stuart to bask in a small glow of pride at his relative crossword competency, but it had soon become clear he wasn’t the only one taking ‘Challenge 69’ seriously. By around 6pm, as he and Anne left for their regular Friday evening pub outing, the count had already risen to 1814/7800.

Anne’s only comment, “who’d have thought there were so many bored people?” had temporarily punctured Stuart’s enthusiasm, but it had proven no more than a slow puncture, easily patched. He was officially hooked.

In the end it had taken just over two days for this success counter to reach its limit (7800/7800), consigning the remaining 15,000 plus entrants to the losers’ lot, presumably now permanently locked out from the ‘Challenge 69’ site. As Stuart had quickly learned to expect, there had been no fanfare as this total was reached. Any subsequent logons to the site simply met with a repeat of the same static message, instructing those ‘Challengers’ still alive to log back in at the same time next month.

It felt odd to be part of some exclusive club, even odder to have absolutely no idea who your fellow members were, but ultimately Stuart had followed Anne’s advice to, “put your toys back in the box,” and had busied himself with other stuff. Albeit he had kept half an eye on the calendar as it counted down towards 10th September.

He decided he could kill the final twenty minutes of his long month’s wait by refining the ‘best female voice’ list that Natalie Merchant had prompted him to start mulling over earlier, though he slightly agonised whether, like the Oscars, he could nowadays be criticised as being genderist for keeping women separate:

5) Liz Frazer – Stuart could take or leave a lot of the Cocteau Twins, but never failed to be both startled and entranced by This Mortal Coil’s ‘Song to the Siren’ (which on reflection should probably have made his covers list).

4) Aretha Franklin – while he had never been a huge devotee of soul, Aretha’s voice was still as effortlessly essential to this list as Elvis’s would be to a male version. If you needed any convincing, then just watch her steal the ‘Blues Brothers’ film.

3) Lorde – much like Kate Bush had once done, with ‘Wuthering Heights’, it felt like Lorde had discovered a way to reinvent singing on ‘Royals’, and a couple of albums later Stuart still found her voice fascinating.

2) Moira Rankin – bringing an inevitable challenge of who? But His Latest Flame’s ‘Stop the Tide’ was one of Stuart’s perennial favourite lost singles (another list?). Moira had this stunning, country twang voice he never tired of.

1) Natalie Merchant – a deserved ever-present on this list, in Stuart’s opinion (with ‘San Andreas Fault’ his go-to solo track), predictably securing today’s number one spot off the back of his morning’s listening.

Reading back over his final list made Stuart smile, particularly his number two entry as he imagined Ed’s likely response, “why do you always have to be such a pretentious git?” There were some absentees he felt guilty about: Siouxsie, Patti, Sinead, PJ, Amy, and Delores, to name just a few. Equally there were others that caused no such angst. He knew many would argue that if Aretha made the cut, on quality of voice alone, then Whitney Houston should join her. But Stuart knew he would rather stick knitting needles in his eyes (or should that be his ears?) than ever include Whitney and her overinflated syllables on any of his lists.

Having risked an abortive logon at 9.58am, trying to get ahead of the game, the following message appeared right on schedule at the top of the hour:

Having quickly scanned through all the text (and there was a lot more of it this time), already feeling under time pressure, Stuart had three immediate observations:

- ‘Challenge 3’ seemed to have got lost in the same quizzical Bermuda Triangle as number one. Was there some logic, or maybe some pointer he was missing, as to why only even numbered ‘Challenges’ were appearing?

- The number of correct solutions accepted had dropped from the first (or should that be the second) ‘Challenge’, down to 6,600. Some quick mental arithmetic detected an upside here, roughly 85% of the remaining ‘Challengers’ could get through today, compared to just a third of the registered population from the initial clue, and

- His crossword driven comfort zone, which he had been hoping would be repeated, had instead been replaced by a form of rhyming riddle he hadn’t encountered since he was back in primary school, stealing kisses under Diane’s knitted poncho at home time!

Riddle-Me-Ree was apparently the correct term for this type of puzzle. The website that established this had contained little other helpful advice beyond suggesting you should work through the letter options, given by each clue line, and then solve the resultant anagram. Stuart felt annoyed that he could, probably should, have worked that out for himself, and hoped the five minutes he had just wasted online didn’t later prove crucial. However, he followed their line-by-line advice:

-      Line 1, in transport but not motion, gave four letter options, R, A, S, or P,

-      Line 2, in medical and lotion, more helpfully provided just two alternatives, I or L,

-      Line 3, in telephone but not connected, led you to L, P, or H,

-      Line 4, in house but not elected, resulted in another four, H, O, U, or S (he’d suffered a slight panic on this one, debating whether he should use just ‘house’ or ‘the house’, before realising it made no difference to the answer anyway),

-      Line 5, in party and apart, by far the easiest to work out, meant P, A, R, or T, and

-      If the whole from Line 6, “takes you back to the start,” then presumably the overall solution needed to be another word related to transport or motion.

Stuart transcribed his answers, in large capital letters, onto a separate sheet of A4:

Unhelpfully to the job in hand Stuart couldn’t help himself, probability and statistics being another of his obsessions, calculating the total number of possible letter sequences. The sum involved (4 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 4) resulted in a rather worrying 384 potential combinations. While many of these, likely most, wouldn’t form proper words he wasn’t sure that made the task ahead any easier.

Stuart regarded his cryptic crossword expertise, requiring the ability to spot connections, as a science, a skill he’d had to learn, while today’s word game felt more of an art, less of a forte. Thinking back to his lunchbreak Telegraph apprenticeship, it had typically been him who had spotted the phrase in the clue that suggested an anagram, but then Margaret (or Mairead) who had solved it. Taking those roles to their logical conclusion it was hard to recall what Jim had added to the equation, apart, Stuart guessed now, from having been a far more astute boss than he had given him credit for!

Such ruminations were, Stuart suspected, a form of displacement mechanism. A way to avoid the obvious conclusion that he was getting nowhere fast with his core tactic; staring intently at seventeen letters on a page, hoping they would miraculously reconstitute themselves into the five-letter word required. He had even wasted ten minutes, for no good reason, working out what anagrams he could make from Margaret. Tram rage, presumably some Victorian public transport antecedent of today’s road variant, had been the best he could come up with.

The clock was ticking. It was already 10.40am with Stuart no nearer to an answer. Quickly logging off and on had confirmed, as he had suspected, that the ‘Challenger’ success counter was up and running again. Mercifully, this showed only 73 people had so far passed ‘Challenge 4’. No need for any full-scale panic just yet, but he desperately needed a more logical approach. As he was starting to consider whether there was an online cheat he could employ, some form of Scrabble aid perhaps, his hoped for, unscientific miracle suddenly jumped from the page, right at the point he had given up believing it would.

PILOT. That had to be the answer. It fitted all the letter clues and met the transportation brief he had set himself for the overall anagram solution. Without further hesitation, Stuart typed PILOT into the answer box, clicked the Enter button, and received a new message:

Stuart’s anxiety level, already high, rose another notch. The pool of certainty that had flooded over him, just seconds ago, drained away in an instant. His inadvertent cry of anguish, as the failure of his entry was so bluntly confirmed, had brought Anne rushing into the room fearing some genuine calamity.

Stuart explained what had happened. Attempting to appear slightly less foolish than he felt, he tried to pass this off with a light-hearted conclusion, “it is, I accept, very much what Joe would refer to as a first world problem!” Only in the process of attempting this joke did he realise how accurate their son would have been to describe it that way. Having spent a significant chunk of his morning getting annoyed with the media, for underplaying the plight of Hurricane Irma’s true victims, here was Stuart becoming distraught over getting a ridiculous quiz question wrong. Even Branson would likely exhibit a better sense of proportion than that he had to concede, while his own behaviour, in comparison, could probably best be described as Virgin on the ridiculous!

Stuart’s discombobulated inability to argue with Anne’s succinct summary of the situation, “you’re such an idiot,” left him equally powerless to counter her unexpected follow up. “Go make a drink. I’ll have this sorted by the time you get back,” so he simply did as she had directed.

As their tea brewed, Stuart thought back over the conversations around ‘Challenge 69’ he had held with Anne over the last month. In amongst her mocking, playful jibes about, “boys and their toys,” and, “doing something more useful with your time,” he should have picked up on her growing interest, particularly after the response to his first answer had confirmed they were down to the last 7,800 ‘Challengers’. Anne enjoyed a quiz as much as Stuart did and, despite denying it, had every bit as strong a competitive spirit, especially when it came down to beating him. She would currently be straining every sinew, more accurately every neuron, to find the solution before Stuart arrived back with their teas.

“Told you. Am I not always the one who gets the wordy answers on Only Connect?” she crowed, even as he approached.

“Go on then, hit me with it,” Stuart replied.

“It’s obvious, it’s ALPHA,” Anne declared, with a broad grin.

“Well, the letters fit all the clues, but the answer is nothing to do with transport,” he countered.

“Doesn’t need to be,” she explained. “My whole takes you back to the start it says, and Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet. Job done.”

With an unpalatable mixture of relief and annoyance Stuart was forced to concede there was an incontrovertible logic to the answer Anne had come up with, in a mere fraction of the time he had spent agonising over it.

“Go on then, move over,” he sighed. “I’ll give it a go. We’ve still got two tries.”

“No need,” Anne replied. “I’ve already done it. Look, I’ve got a Congratulations.”

###

If you’ve had this post forwarded to you, and got this far, then you must be ready to subscribe to ‘Challenge 69’!

(‘Track 3’ will follow on 25th September at 10am. In the meantime, please add a comment below with any feedback on the story so far.)