*Track 2 (continued)

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- His crossword driven comfort zone, which he had been hoping would be repeated, had instead been replaced by a form of rhyming riddle he hadn’t encountered since he was back in primary school, stealing kisses under Diane’s knitted poncho at home time!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

###

(‘Track 3’ will follow on 25th September at 10am. In the meantime, please add a comment below with any thoughts on ‘Track 2’.)