*Track 5 (continued)

While Joe and Anne concentrated immediately on the meat of the new challenge (and very meaty it was), Stuart couldn’t help getting distracted again by a couple more obvious anomalies. The unexpected may by now have established itself as the expected, but even so ‘Challenge 14’ still managed to throw a couple of fresh spanners into the already mangled works.

The numbering system had just got even weirder. From the start it now read; 2, 4, 7, 12, and 14. While the first four hadn’t formed any known number sequence, at least none that Stuart could uncover online, there had at least been a grain of logic in the gaps between the numbers; 2, then 3, followed by 5, each interval being the sum of the previous two. On that basis he had been expecting, hoping maybe, that this month’s gap would be 8 (or 3 plus 5), leading to number twenty. But no such joy. ‘Challenge 14’ instead took Stuart right back to the drawing board. Still unwilling to accept this pattern could be random (it surely had to contain some form of additional clue) he made an early New Year’s resolution to try to solve this before January’s ‘Challenge’. Always presuming they managed to get through today.

Even more disconcerting was this month’s ‘Challenger’ cut-off limit at 3,300. This was one question Stuart had convinced himself he had resolved. While its starting point, at 7,800, had appeared arbitrary it had been dropping since in an entirely predictable way; down to 6,600 in September, 5,500 in October, and 4,500 in November, each reduction one hundred less as the months went by. He had mentally banked December coming in at 3,600 to confirm this pattern, reinforcing his calculation that the whole process was designed to run for a year from start to finish. Given this new accelerated rate, Stuart now realised, ‘Challenge 69’ could be done and dusted by Spring.

“Stop faffing over the numbers Dad,” was a legitimate, timely challenge from Joe, “we can worry about those later. Think I’ve got one of these.” At least someone had been using the first five minutes of their unknowable time limit wisely.

While Stuart had been lost in an unproductive numerical maelstrom, Joe and Anne had concluded between them that ‘Challenge 14’ was another wordy cryptological test. Four separate clues, each of which, it was suggested, needed to be answered by a pair of capital letters, with the combined results presumably forming an eight-letter anagram that would then need to be ‘unconfused’ to reveal the final answer. Stuart couldn’t argue with any of this, “go on then, which one have you solved?” he challenged Joe.

“If we’re looking for two letters then the Spielberg film has to be E.T.” Joe argued.

“Sounds logical,” Stuart conceded. This might not have been an answer that overly challenged his son’s encyclopedic knowledge of modern-day movies, but its title’s brevity did seem to meet the brief, “but what about the rest of the clue?”

“Well, Addis Ababa is in Ethiopia, and it says online ET can also be its international country code,” continued Joe, with a smugly satisfied smile, “which just leaves the Annapolis bit.” His earlier look had betrayed that Joe already had an answer for this part but didn’t feel sufficiently time constrained yet to resist forcing his father to drag it out of him.

“Go on then,” Stuart sighed.

Building it up, like a Holmesian revelation of his final supposition, Joe laid out his train of argument, “Annapolis is in Maryland, I did have to look that bit up, so to catch E.T. there ‘at another time’ you’d need to be in a different time zone. Maryland, like we are in Ohio, is on Eastern Time, otherwise known as ET. Shazam!”

Unwilling to admit, for now, how impressed he was with Joe’s powers of deduction, even more so by the speed at which he had deployed them, Stuart still had to agree this explanation fitted all three parts of the second clue perfectly. They had ET firmly in the bag (hopefully Elliott would forgive them!) The convoluted structure of this three-part solution had, in addition, given them a strong indication of how best to go about unpicking the remaining clues.

In a bid to prove her own early productiveness (with an unspoken, implied commentary on Stuart’s lack of the same) Anne jumped in with an insight of her own, “I think you’re both missing something.” Their attention grabbed, she continued, “Addis Ababa isn’t just in Ethiopia, nor Annapolis in Maryland, they’re both the Capitals of those places. The capitals bit in the clue might not just be referring to capital letters?” This seemed a sound theory, and the sensible place to stress test its accuracy was the third clue.

“Denver’s obviously the Capital of Colorado,” Joe announced, continuing on his Americana roll.

Closely followed by Anne, “and isn’t Bogota the Capital of Colombia?” A quick check confirmed it was.

Not wishing to be outdone, at least not again, Stuart won the latest smartphone dexterity race by quickly confirming, “both Colorado and Colombia are commonly abbreviated to CO, that just leaves the battery bit.”

There wasn’t a scientist amongst them, but they were all armed with enough mobile computing capacity to easily establish that cobalt (along with nickel, lithium, and graphite) was one of the four essential raw materials required for battery production and, as Joe triumphantly pronounced, an element that is, “abbreviated to Co on the Periodic Table.”

With just a quarter of an hour gone they were already halfway through the first set of clues, with both ET and CO apparently nailed on as correct answers. By running his tried and tested logoff/on progress check Stuart confirmed just seventeen ‘Challengers’ were already through. From a positive perspective this meant they had time on their side, still plenty of headroom within the (surprisingly low) benchmark of 3,300, but if your glass was half empty you simply had to wonder how anybody, let alone seventeen bodies, could have been successful so quickly? How hard was it going to be to beat such obvious genii later in the competition?

Following his early success Joe now seemed to have taken full control of proceedings, assuming a supervisory role, “Mum, you take the first clue, Dad the last one, I’ll help with both,” and without disputing this generational role-reversal they both did as they were told. Stuart had to concede his earlier concerns over the wisdom of mass participation had been unfounded and despite the remaining clues proving more complex their ‘melding of minds’ approach helped unravel both within the hour.

Cairo being the Capital of Egypt was the obvious starting point on the fourth clue. They were initially thrown by the country’s ISO code, EGY, having three letters (rather than the two they needed) but then Anne spotted the clue’s reference to ‘making a call’ and established that Telecom Egypt, the state telephone company, was commonly known as TE. This potentially being the solution prompted Joe to convert Vilnius to Lithuania and, with the ‘landing from’ tip added into the mix, to discover that flyLAL, the country’s national airline, operates its flights under a TE code. The third, confirmatory element fell into place as Stuart managed to drag up, from the recesses of his corporate memory, that Extroverted Thinking, one of the eight cognitive functions in the Myers Briggs personality test, had a designation of TE.

To give credit where credit was due it was, once again, Anne who unlocked the final clue, the one causing them most angst. Conwy, the town, is the administrative Capital of Conwy borough, but further investigation of this was proving fruitless until Anne’s memory of childhood holidays in North Wales, allied to the clue’s ‘correspondence’ reference, led to her sudden exclamation of, “Llandudno. That’s in Conwy, and the whole area has LL postcodes. It’s got to be LL.”

Their personal Stateside sports correspondent then followed up this potential breakthrough with, “well American kids’ sports are all called Little League, that could be LL,” which appeared to seal the deal. It was only ever going to be Google though that revealed LL could also be an obscure computer science language. “That’d have to be some geeky child,” Joe complained, “but it all fits.”

In the order solved these clues had given them ET, CO, TE, and LL, or rearranged according to their original ‘Challenge 14’ order these became LL, ET, CO, and TE. Transcribing both sequences onto a separate sheet, while Joe mocked him with, “it’s back to the anagram king now then,” Stuart spotted it immediately, legitimising the regal title Joe had just proffered on him by declaring that the answer had to be COLLETTE. Joe laughed, “what, the pub landlady, what’s she got to do with it?” but Stuart knew he was right, and he knew why.

“The correct spelling of the name is one L and two Ts, she’s a famous French author, a woman before her time,” he explained, “there’s a film coming out soon about her life, with Keira Knightly. Colette at the pub’s probably named after her.”

Joe, having thought this through and compared it back to the initial clue wording, issued one final, fair challenge, “but are you sure that’s right? I get a writer can be a woman of letters, and it covers off the misspelling bit, but was she a noblewoman?”

“No,” Stuart conceded, but this time it was him choosing to keep back the vital piece of information, the final piece of the jigsaw, “but that’s the clever bit, there are two misspellings. I read about the film the other day and Colette was nominated for a Nobel literature prize. That makes her a doubly misspelt Nobel woman!”

Today’s newly formed clue collective agreed unanimously this must be correct but couldn’t then decide which version to enter as their solution. Should they use their full anagram answer, Collette, or the correct historical spelling with one L less? This was another Oxford v Cambridge, heads or tails, question but, with three attempts available, not an agonising one. On the flip of a coin, they entered COLETTE and lost a life, but then received a Congratulations immediately afterwards for the fuller, misspelt version, which Stuart opined, “really must mean something important, but I’ve no idea what.”

Everything completed in seventy-seven minutes, with a comfortable finishing position (in the high 400s), meant Stuart was forced to accept, despite his scepticism, that syndicated solutioning had proven surprisingly successful. His fellow ‘Challengers’ drifted off, job done, to focus on the remainder of their respective Sundays. Anne needed to get the Airbnb ready for tomorrow’s guests, while Joe was off to the gym, still plotting how to come up with that one idea that would allow him to ‘do a Chesky’, to out earn Brian.

Once left alone, Stuart reflected again on the ever more pressing speed with which these ‘Challenges’ needed to be completed to stay in the race. Somehow, he felt, this wasn’t the way they had been devised. It almost seemed like these clues must have been set in a more innocent pre-search-engine time. Denied immediate Google access, for example, how long would it have taken, via what means, to find out flyLAL was Lithuania’s national airline, let alone to discover that its IATA code was an un-linkable TE. It didn’t feel like these ‘Challenges’ had been intended, in design, to be the sharp sprints they had become, allowing little time or space for contemplation.

It hadn’t been that far back though, Stuart thought, when knowledge was less commoditised. You couldn’t earn an ‘80s Degree without knowing how to work your way around a library, how to mine Dewey Decimal’s depths to dig out the facts you needed. In that era these clues would have proven a much more severe, certainly more time-consuming, ‘Challenge’.

Mind you, that had also been an age when The Fire Engines could make their debut album in two takes, within a day, for less than fifty quid (“that much?” some might ask), and you wouldn’t get away with doing that anymore either.

###

(‘Track 6’ will follow on 10th November at 10am. In the meantime, it’s great to get reader feedback so please add a comment below with any thoughts on ‘Track 5’.)