Alan Connor struggles even to qualify for the annual speed competition for cryptic solvers
This year is the year of the crossword, I told myself a few months ago, so maybe it should also be the year I finally enter the Times crossword championship.
I must hastily add that this notion is not backed up by the speed of my typical solve. There are many aspects of crosswords that I miss whenever I do try and solve quickly, such as lingering over surface readings of clues, looking around for hidden messages and enjoying a general feeling of wellbeing. More importantly, I'm not very fast - or certainly not Times champion fast. Mark Goodliffe, the serial winner of the championship, takes around 16 seconds tops per clue, including writing in the answer. Let's just say that he wouldn't need to put in any extra training on hearing that I was among the competition.
So I wasn't thinking about winning so much as seeing what crosswords are like in the context of a high-stakes event, rather than one or two people sitting idly with newspapers. And there are targets other than coming first that are worth setting oneself – for instance, not coming last.
Entering the championship involves solving a qualifier puzzle in the paper to gain a place at the finals, which will be held in London on 19 October. Puzzles were printed in April, May and June with a space underneath for you to write in the time it took you to fill the grid.
For the April puzzle I was well prepared. I took the newspaper and a pencil to a bench in a botanical gardens. I'd made sure it was okay to turn off my phone for 20 minutes and did so – and had a great solve. I didn't, of course, start entertaining fanciful notions about being a serious contender (except when three entries in a row went in quickly and I wondered if I was the fastest crossworder on earth). There was the usual little hold-up at the end on a single stubborn remaining clue, but my phone was back on sooner than I had anticipated and the deed was done.
Except that, very unusually, the Times had made a mistake. "Much to our regret," went the announcement, "we discovered after publication that the first qualifying puzzle... was virtually identical to a puzzle published last year." Oops. The April challenge no longer conferred any eligibility. For me the problem was that I struggled to reproduce similar devoted between the publication of each of the subsequent qualifying puzzles and its deadline.
The final one came out on 10 July. And yesterday it struck me that since entries had to be postmarked 17 July at the latest, I would have to solve before last post, under whatever conditions necessary. I tried to prepare myself by solving an old Times puzzle but found the experience odd. My mind instantly and irrevocably filled with images of 1970s footage of the Times championship and of the 2006 documentary Wordplay, which depicts the American crossword puzzle tournament. Accordingly, I solved imagining that I was being watched, which is not normal or especially useful. I sensed intakes of breath as I scribbled in some wrong guesses and heard aghast tutting as I spent too long on clues which turned out to be easy. So for the real thing, I calmed my nerves and approached my laptop with a fresh mind.
The laptop was necessary because I wasn't near a newsagent on the day the puzzle was printed and needed to download and print a PDF, which only took six attempts before I'd successfully created a piece of paper that contained all the cells of the grid and every single clue without anything cut off or illegible.
This time, a different kind of self-consciousness set in. I didn't imagine anyone watching me but I did find that I was approaching the puzzle like a first-time solver. Rather than spotting devices quickly, I lingered over clues. Rather than choosing nice multi-word entries and building from these, I hopped around the grid like a nervous frog. I noticed that I was even using little tricks and doodles to elicit the answers that I hadn't employed since I was an utter novice. I would ask if anyone had any ideas why this happened, but I suspect it's not normal.
And I couldn't turn off my phone this time, and it rang. Repeatedly. I stopped the stopwatch each time, but it felt wrong. Sometimes it felt wrong because returning to a clue after a break means that you instantly unlock its secrets – an unfair advantage. Other times I felt as if I'd been putting myself at a disadvantage by switching in and out of different ways of thinking, and that theory was backed up by my eventual finishing time.
Still, it was done and in the mailbag before the final collection from the post office. And even when I got home and remembered that I hadn't enclosed my entry fee, and printed off the puzzle again, scribbled the answers at reckless speed, and tried to remember where I would have put my chequebook a few years ago after the last time I wrote a cheque (do you actually say: "Write a cheque"? I think so, but it's all getting a bit foggy), I was able to make it back and buy some more stamps before it was too late.
The scope for errors in those final moments was not small. Most likely, an incorrect grid will today be arriving at a differently numbered PO Box with a cheque for the wrong amount made out to me and signed "Times crossword championship". In the colossally unlikely event that none of these is the case, I'll write later in the year about the experience of turning up and playing with the champs.