11. The Guardian Quick Crossword

No matter how hard I try, I cannot make my brain understand cryptic crosswords. This is one of the many ways I know that I am not that clever. But the Guardian Quick Crossword (Daily on the back of G2, inside the back of Saturday Review) has become an important part of my daily ritual.

Six o'clock (or thereabouts) comes, and the writer packs up the trusty Mac, abseils down the back of the building to the kitchen, feeds the hound, pours a perfectly French amount of wine into a glass, puts on some kind of fitting popular music, and settles down to the crossword.

Sometimes it's as if my brain has been waiting for just this kind of challenge, and the whole thing is done, in neat letters, before half the glass is empty. Sometimes the brain is made of slurry, and half an hour later only five clues have been done (and they're probably wrong) but two glasses of wine have somehow disappeared. Sometimes, but not that often, there's one I simply don't know. These clues will typically have something to do with geology or geography.

There's something thrilling about narrowing a tricky one down to three or four blank spaces, and then finding that you do know that word really, you just previously had no idea of its correct definition. And over months and years you find that your general knowledge has improved, and suddenly you got much better at Trivial Pursuit. Yes! Sitting at the kitchen table with the Quick Crossword has a useful crossover application.

I never cheat. I will sometimes ask herself if she can help, but a combination of dyslexia and sadism makes her an unreliable helper. I don't ask my mother because she sighs and wonders out loud just how much that education cost her. If I can't do it - I can't do it. But days on which I don't get to within a snifter of the full grid are few, and if a juicy swear word will fit into the recalcitrant last space, that usually seems like a fitting end.

Then I get up, and make the supper.