A work colleague gave me a printout of today’s Edinburgh Evening News crossword. Having failed to make much progress when I tried the same paper’s puzzle for the first time ealier in the week, I set to work on the cryptic clues (it’s a double crossword – two puzzles, one quick and one cryptic, with different answers for each but on the same grid).

I was very chuffed as I completed it in one sitting, and I only had to check one word in a dictionary: sisal.