Holly experiencing Crossword Doers Brain Freeze Every Sunday, unless we have a very good excuse, there is a family breakfast followed by Doing The Crossword. There's a big fight to not be the person who reads out the clues and writes the answers because that responsibility is hell. Nobody listens to you the first time you read it, they blame your pronunciation for not understanding and therefore not being able to answer the question even if it is their specialist subject. Specialist subjects are those which other people think you should know about not necessarily those which you actually know anything about for example Jo works for Ikea therefore she has to answer any questions about any Scandinavian country, anything to do with houses/design/funny names or toolkits, or in fact anything beginning with I. It's really noisy and even though we seldom actually send the completed crossword into the weekly competition any spelling mistakes are greeted with loud recriminations "Well! We can't send that in now can we?!". Family who can't be at the table may be phoned at anytime to join in the chaos. This morning, by phone, we had Hannah accompanying us with her rendition of Scotland the Brave on the violin. She's on week 4 of violin lessons...
We've carried out the ritual Sunday Breakfast Crossword torture for as long as I can remember, and I love it. Every Sunday I get to be with some, if not all, of my family and enjoy the blether and banter that goes on. It gives us a weekly point of connection that reminds us who we are and the joy we find in each other.
