Greenland… Land of Magpies by Chris Boyd
Greenland: where better to escape from everyday life? Or so I thought in early August, as I looked forward to a group walking holiday in the Tasiilaq area, having crammed mightily to finish the harder puzzles of issue 68 before setting off.
We arrived 24 hours late due to cancellation of the previous day’s flights from Reykjavik because of bad weather, and tucked into an introductory boiled seal dish with a display of heartily insincere relish. I’d brought some Guardian crosswords for those idle moments between glaciers and icebergs, and noticed another member of the group (Richard Chamberlain) with a sheaf of Times puzzles. Though we naturally chatted about our mutual interest, it wasn’t until waiting for the plane back after a superb (but tiring) trip that Richard spotted me poring over Magpie #68 and said, ‘you do the Magpie!’.
So Greenland, incongruously, turned out to be the venue of my first encounter with a fellow subscriber. We compared notes on our solving modi operandi and favourite puzzles (studiously avoiding discussion of the current issue), while our partners bemoaned the frankly negligible travails of being ‘Magpie widows’. The likely impossibility of setting crosswords in eastern Greenlandic (or ‘tunumiit oraasiat’, a language of long words liberally sprinkled with q’s and u’s, not usually together) was also debated. We wondered aloud whether it was wise for two subscribers to share the same flight back, given the Magpie’s small circulation. Fortunately, we arrived home safely, well before any kind of Iceland-associated crash. I look forward to meeting more subscribers in improbably remote places.
One of many picturesque icebergs
Mysterious sign in Greenlandic
Magpie 68 outside Kulusuk airport
November 6th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
What an utterly implausible story - how could anyone moan about their partner doing the Magpie?
And what a very good photograph of the iceberg (and indeed of the Magpie in a cold climate). Thanks Chris
November 6th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
A couple of years ago I was on the tube during morning rush hour and, somewhere between Oxford Circus and Picadilly, I saw, across the passage and through the hordes of commuters, a lone hand clutching a battered and creased Magpie. All I could see was the cover (held to eye level), and above it some greying hair and a puzzled frown. I’ve no idea who it was, as the person got off at the next stop, and I didn’t.
OK, this is nowhere near as good a story as Chris’s, but it just shows that… well, I’m not sure what it shows. But I knew that I wasn’t alone.