Schadenfreude (John Harrington, 1944 - 2019)

In early March the death was announced of John Harrington, the setter Schadenfreude whose engaging puzzles have challenged solvers since 1998. His puzzles have appeared in a number of publications, including The Listener and the Cambridge Alumni magazine CAM. Born in 1944, he described his life, in the A to Z of Crosswords, as “largely reclusive", spending most of his time "walking the footpaths, setting more crosswords and keeping an extensive garden under some sort of control”. 

I only recently came upon several of his fiendish puzzles when they appeared at the back of the quarterly issues of CAM. His most recent (and perhaps final) puzzle was entitled "No Show". The solver was required to enter the answers to the clues into a 13 x 13 barred grid so that a total of 19 unspecified cells remained empty. When this stage was complete, the empty cells had to be filled in to reveal "thematic members", the only faint clue as to the theme being the title. Finally, the unknown "titular character" had to be traced out in the completed grid using a knight's tour, in such a way that when the letters in the cells visited on the tour were removed, all the final grid entries, ignoring spaces, were genuine words. Seeing my struggle would have more than justified his choice of setter's name.  RIP Schadenfreude.

A road that need not have been taken

The poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, but when his father died 11 years later, his family moved east and settled in Massachusetts. In 1912 he sailed with them to England and they lived initially in Beaconsfield, west of London. While living here, Frost published his first book of poetry A Boy's Will.

A year later he met Edward Thomas, an English man of letters, and they became good friends, often taking country walks together. By then Thomas was an established critic and was encouraged by Frost to publish his poetry. On occasion, they walked to May Hill in Gloucestershire, a spot that has inspired English poets and composers. It was here that Thomas began writing his poem Words:

Out of us all
That make rhymes
Will you choose
Sometimes -
As the winds use
A crack in a wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through -
Choose me,
You English words?
...

After Frost returned to America in 2015, he sent Thomas a dedicated poem The Road Not Taken, which was intended to be a light-hearted tease about Thomas’s indecisiveness, for example over the best routes to take on their country walks. Unfortunately it seems that Thomas read more significance into the poem than was intended, and it may have influenced his decision in July 1915 to enlist in the Artists Rifles, despite being a mature married man with three children who could have avoided military service. He was killed in action at the battle of Arras on Easter Monday in 1917, soon after arriving in France.

(Note: I discovered this story after talking with my son Cameron about poets of the first world war, which he is studying at school. We had also discussed The Road Not Taken, which he had encountered much earlier in the classroom.)