My plague journals run from August 2019 until August 2022, three years of curfews and lockdowns, vaccines and staycations. Plus 606 crosswords, or 202 per book, being the marathon I solved along the way. The trilogy is dog-eared, its grids and margins loaded with my earlier scribble: the anagram wheels and nib-testing squiggles, the fugitive ideas and to-do lists – my life, in short, squashed to fit.
That was July 2019, a job lot at Dymocks. If alien overlords arrived at the weekend, at least I had a life’s supply of puns and other treats, a chance to hide in my storm cellar to chew untold deceptions. I began Book 1, Puzzle 1, on August 1, never realising the alien force was just months away, via a questionable bat in Wuhan.
Still, the trilogy lends a glimpse of the blur we’ve all endured. We still endure. Late 2019, tackling a pesky homophone, I noted how some acronym called COVID began to hog my newsfeed. By March 2021, I was decoding charade clues and other formulas in a bid to limit the doomscrolling.The crosswords kept me sane. Or to quote Book 1, Puzzle 194, 14-down: Violent upheaval in which many stay calm, remarkably .