Back in the annals of time, when Bob Hawke was Prime Minister and the Australian Cricket team was something to celebrate, of a morning, we would get the paper from the local store. The Adelaide Advertiser was it, the Sunday Mail on Sunday, such is, and was, the parochial state of Newspapers in South Australia and we were not posh enough to get The Australian, in the days before it was it was a right-wing propaganda rag.
Like most families, there was often a fight for "the funnies" - the page of the newspaper with the cartoon strips and the crosswords puzzles.
As time went on, whenever I got hold of a newspaper, I would swoop on "the funnies" and normally make a start on the crossword - the quick crossword, not the cryptic one.
By the end of my stay in London, I was acing the quick crossword in The Evening Standard.
Even now, whenever I get onto a Qantas flight, I search out the magazine and try to get out the easy sudoku before the plane takes off, before making a start on their jumbo crossword.
But the cryptic crossword has always been something that makes no sense. I pondered how to learn how to do them, these strange words which come out with and completely different answer. I remember one of my parents saying that only certain people knew how do to the cryptic crossword.
Again, in England, I had a friend who bought the Torygraph The Telegraph on a Sunday, despite his politics. He only ever bought the paper for its cryptic crossword.
I remember eating breakfast with him as he puzzled over his page of the funnies.
"Do you do the cryptic crossword, Pand?" he asked.
"No, the clues you don't make any sense. I think you either get them, or you don't," was my response.
"You can learn, you just have to know a few tricks."
Not that he taught me them. He made mention that some crossword setters have their own quirks, but cryptic crosswords are a learned skill - a bit like sudoku, which I can fly through the easy ones with no issue now.
I also remember that somehow, I managed to get a clue out. The answer was scimitar.
Anyway, move forward twenty-five years and thanks to the joys of the internet, I've discovered the Minute Cryptic on Instagram. Somebody who posts one clue a day and gives a description of how to solve the bugger the following day.
It's awesome.
After watching his daily videos for a few weeks, this morning, I got the clue out of my own.
It's great.
It doesn't hurt that he's a bit cute too.
I feel like my life has been transformed. I'm feeling a bit more more worthy.
What's next? Piano lessons? Singing lessons? Life drawing classes.
But learning how to do cryptic crosswords feels like a good thing.
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