I was going to write about something else today, something significant and substantial and other weighty adjectives beginning with S, but then I made the mistake over the third cup of breakfast of starting a crossword.
Now I’ve got one clue left — see above — and weighty adjectives beginning with S can wait because this one clue is gripping my attention like a mole wrench.
But therein lies the problem. With a cryptic clue there are at least two ways to get to the answer. With a simple synonym there’s only one. So if you don’t get it you’re stuck. And I’m stuck on fakes. 7 letters.
Furthermore, simple clues aren’t actually simple. They’re often ambiguous. Fakes, for example, could be a noun — these notes are fakes — or a verb — a soccer player often fakes an injury to get a free kick.
P-N-E-S. Punters? Pincers? Panders? Pingers? Punnets? There don’t seem to be many possibilities. But I have checked the P, the N, the E and the S and I’m confident I’ve got them right.
What an odd little thing a crossword is. It is a puzzle cooked up by a human brain in order to tease and exercise and occupy another human brain.
It achieves nothing. It improves nothing. It gets nobody anywhere. It’s an intellectual hamster wheel.
Think what could be achieved if all the brain power applied daily to crosswords and other synthetic puzzles were applied to the actual problems of the actual world, of which there is never any shortage. But no. We choose the hamster wheel of pointlessness. And we do so out of vanity.
The aim of a crossword is to complete the grid and the aim of completing the grid is to feel good about ourselves, to feel that we have achieved, to feel that we have won. It’s a patting of one’s own back, pinning a spurious medal to one’s own chest.
But the converse also applies: failing to complete the grid, having this one clue unsolved, is a blow to the ego, a vexation that won’t go away until I complete it.
I am the temporary prisoner of my own self-esteem. No-one else may know that I’ve fallen short, but I do and the knowledge troubles me.
Which brings us to a moral quandary. Should I cheat?
It isn’t hard to cheat at crosswords. A thesaurus would clear this clue up in a minute or two. And with the internet it is easier still. I could type in ‘‘synonyms of fake beginning with p’’ and I can almost guarantee that the answer, in all its embarrassing obviousness, would appear on the screen in half a nanosecond.
But could I live with the knowledge I had cheated?
The answer is yes. My evidence is the number of books that were published in the days before the internet specifically to help people solve crossword clues.
In other words, there has never been any shortage of people who are happy to receive assistance from a third party and then stare at the completed grid with a satisfied grin and say ‘I bloody did that’. And I am probably among them.
We are like the various drug cheats who have won the Tour de France or an Olympic gold and stood on the podium, arms aloft and with an entirely genuine grin smeared across their faces.
How good we human beings are at deluding ourselves and at finding ways to think well of ourselves. The power of our vanity is almost limitless. There’s a sliver of Trump in us all.
Enough. I cannot let this irritation govern my day. I am going to summon the internet to do what my own ganglions can’t.
... And it seems the only plausible answer is phoneys.
But that requires an O where I’ve got an N. That N is the last one in the word ‘‘reconnecting’’.
And reconnecting, of course, should be reconnection.
So behold, with a momentary orgasmic rush of gratification, the grid is complete.
What a clever little phoney I am.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
