Every morning of my life, I follow the same gruelling workout routine. I get up late, slouch downstairs in my pyjamas, make a mug of instant coffee, light my first Marlboro Red of the day and then settle down at the kitchen table to tackle The Times cryptic crossword.
Only when I’ve solved it, and scanned the obituaries to see which of my contemporaries has become the latest to join the choir invisible, do I begin to feel strong enough to turn to the news pages, with their endless reports of war, famine, natural disasters, assassinations, government scandals and relentless economic gloom.
I hasten to say – shameless plug alert – that by this time I will already have a fair idea of what’s in the day’s papers, since I always read the first edition of tomorrow’s Daily Mail last thing at night when it appears on the matchless Mail Plus Editions app sometime between 11pm and 11.30pm.
There are two reasons why I do the cryptic crossword first. Though I hate to boast, the first is that I’m pretty damn good at it and completing it reassures me that at least a part of my brain is still working (albeit not a particularly useful part, with precious little relevance to real life).
Much to the annoyance of poor Mrs U, who often struggles with her copy of the puzzle for hours on end, too proud to ask for my help, I generally solve it within 20 minutes or so, and it seldom takes me more than half an hour.
Genius
It’s a knack I may have inherited from my maternal grandfather, Dermot Morrah, who was a veritable genius at the crossword, with the sort of mind that would comfortably have qualified him to compete in the world’s most baffling TV quiz show, the BBC’s Only Connect. I well remember him lying on his deathbed in hospital after suffering a stroke, when a nurse came up to him and saw the blank grid on the sheet beside him.
‘Oh dear, Mr Morrah,’ she said. ‘Having trouble with the crossword today?’
He told her that he had already finished it but just hadn’t bothered to fill in the answers.
Completing the cryptic crossword reassures me that at least a part of my brain is still working… albeit not a particularly useful part, with precious little relevance to real life, writes Tom Utley
‘You’re pulling my leg,’ she said.
To prove he was telling the truth, he then rattled off the solution to every clue from memory. The nurse was suitably impressed.
Well, I’m not as good at it as he was, and I never will be. But I’ve always reckoned that solving cryptic crosswords is one of the few things we get better at when we grow older, as we learn to spot the various conventions beloved of compilers (the word ‘way’ in a clue, for example, may indicate the letters ST or RD, short for street or road, while ‘eccentric’ can point not only to an anagram, but to ‘cam’, as in camshaft, or ‘card’, meaning an eccentric person.) All of which brings me to my second reason for tackling the cryptic puzzle as the main event of my morning workout.
Dementia
Haven’t we always been taught that doing crosswords is an excellent way of exercising the brain as we age, keeping it sharp and staving off dementia?
I keep doing them because dementia is the cruellest of diseases, which I fear more even than the lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver that I richly deserve, having spent a lifetime ignoring the experts’ warnings against smoking and drinking too much.
Imagine my dismay, therefore, when I read yesterday (after completing The Times crossword, natch) that people like me, who do crosswords every day and find them easy, may actually be dulling our brains.
Said a report in The Daily Telegraph: ‘If you make a habit of doing your daily crossword or Sudoku to the point where it’s hardly a challenge and simply a habit, this could cause your brain to stagnate.’
The paper goes on to quote Dr Cheryl Lythgoe, a nurse consultant at the private healthcare provider, Benenden Health: ‘Our brains are similar to our bodies in that they need constant challenge and stimulation,’ she says.
‘Once the brain becomes efficient, then it gets lazy again and doesn’t form new neural connections. Constantly repeating the same mental challenges leads us into a passive familiarity, where we can lose our creativity and mental speed.’
We just can’t win, can we? Indeed, doing the crossword daily appears in a long list of other things the experts now say may be bad for us. They include walking as our only form of exercise, keeping the curtains closed all day, wearing slippers or loose-fitting shoes, asking a partner to open a stiff jar and failing to brush our tongues when we clean our teeth.
We are also warned against neglecting to wear sunscreen, even on days when the sun isn’t shining.
‘Even on cloudy days or when you’re sitting by a window indoors, an SPF 30 cream is recommended,’ says Dr Amit Arora, consultant geriatrician and president elect of the British Geriatrics Society. ‘Unshielded UV rays degrade the collagen and elastin fibres in the skin, which can lead to uneven pigmentation, fine lines, wrinkling and sometimes raise the long-term risk of more harmful conditions such as melanoma, a skin cancer.’
Blimey! Is nothing safe?
But then we’re all well used to reading scare stories about our physical and mental health – often put forward by one academic study only to be contradicted soon afterwards by another.
One minute drinking even a single glass of red wine is said to be dangerous. The next, enjoying it in moderation is pronounced to be good for the heart.
Covid jabs are life-savers, says one group of experts. Oh, no they’re not, they are lethal, says another (admittedly much smaller) group.
Indeed, my favourite scare story was a headline proclaiming: ‘Your shower curtain could kill you.’ (I can’t remember the full explanation of why these innocent-looking bathroom accessories might have homicidal tendencies but I think it had something to do with their propensity to harbour germs).
Advice
Well, I can’t stress too strongly that nobody should be guided by me. I will only observe that I’ve somehow made it into my early 70s, recklessly ignoring
all the experts’ advice on how to stay healthy, having taken a grand total of only four days off sick in 50 years of work.
Meanwhile, the average worker, we learned this week, now takes no fewer than 9.4 days off for reasons of ill health, either physical or mental, every single year – more than twice as many as I’ve taken in half a century.
Oh, well, perhaps they all smoke more than I do, drink more, have more vicious shower-curtains or suffer worse crossword addictions than mine. All I can say is that I find that highly improbable.
Whatever the truth, I plan to carry on starting my day with the crossword, as I’ve always done, blithely ignoring the experts’ advice on how to stay mentally fit. In my book, it’s the only way to stay sane.
