A Sight For Saw Eyes

We’ve started doing jig-saws. I was thinking it was another sign of getting old but then I remembered that Laurel and Hardy film “Me And My Pal” the one where everyone gets drawn into doing the jig-saw at the cost of Oliver’s wedding. There’s something addictive about them whatever age you are. I think that the humble jig-saw taps into something fundamental, possibly even primal, within us.

As a species, we’re constantly look for patterns in things, it’s how we learnt to hunt animals and find other food, avoid predators, figure out the seasons, work out a social order, all that kind of thing. This seeking for patterns is also responsible for getting a lot of superstitions and religions started, mistakenly seeing patterns where actually there aren’t any and filling in the gaps to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, some people are still doing exactly that today even at the expense of logic and rational thought. Anyway, before I go off on too much of a tangent...

Think about it, doing a jig-saw is about finding patterns, filling in the gaps, completing a picture to make sense of it. And once you get started not completing it just seems wrong and wrong at a very deep level. And then there’s that slight sense of anticlimax when the picture is completed. I think that’s because instead of a dead mammoth at our feet we’ve ended up with a picture of some kittens, or a ship, or a landscape, or maybe a dead mammoth if that’s what it’s a jig-saw of, but it’s not food to last the tribe a month. You know, I do think I might be on to something here.

Anyway, whatever it is, Mrs Kitsch and I have been doing a few jig-saws of late and here’s the latest one, another map, this time of the British Isles and Ireland. And only two pieces missing.

I didn’t take a picture of the jig-saw of two kittens we did last week but that’s all the excuse I need to do that one again. And while out charity shop shopping yesterday I bought another kitten jig-saw, this time larger and with even more kittens on it, so no doubt I’ll be blogging about that one at some time or another. And before you start judging us, think about how you spend your leisure time - or possibly time when you should be doing something useful - reading the letters page of the Radio Times, watching grown men kicking a ball about on the telly, sleeping on the couch during Question Time. That’s right, not feeling so superior now are we?