Today, I am going to allow myself a little gloat. For the first time, I have managed to complete the sudoku puzzle that appears each week in the magazine of Le Figaro.
There may seem nothing special about that. All such puzzles are there to be solved, you may be saying, so what I have done is no more than many other readers must accomplish week after week.
But this is not your common-or-garden sudoku. Le Figaro calls it the diabolique de la semaine and the compiler, Bernard Gervais, gets a prominent credit - "engineer and former professor of mathematics, specialist in Su Doku - [yes two words for Le Figaro]- in France'.
Telephone numbers are provided for €0.34-per-minute calls to obtain either the full solution or one full block of nine numbers.
If I am honest, the magazine had been open for months at the page containing the puzzle I finally completed. It had been cast away on a desk, one of many Diaboliques started and abandoned in the course of the year. Typically, only a few numbers had been filled in.
On returning to the page today, it was like starting from fresh. But a couple of obvious moves leaped at me from the page and the rest was relatively easy.
What a contrast with the Daily Mail's sudoku, one of those I see in UK publications. Each puzzle is graded in order of difficulty and I bother only with the five-star or hardest.
It generally takes me about 10-15 minutes, though very occasionally I have been known to "bust" the puzzle - that is to say make a false move that is not easily enough remedied to correct and resume.
What this tells us about the respective readerships of the two publications, or management's perceptions of them, is open to debate. Le Figaro also publishes the easy variety and it is fair to say the harder ones that appear in another part of the newspaper are rarely that hard, though nor are they as easy as the Mail's five-star puzzle.
But at least I now another use, other than as a handy reference source, for the pile of Le Figaro magazines I permit, squirrel-like, to build up. And I have experienced the feeling sometime described by crossword fanatics on finding they can graduate from The Daily Telegraph to The Times.
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