unpredictable

What a joy today to see the sun. Even though I wasn’t out in it much, it was lovely to have the light streaming in through all the windows.

And no, despite my blip, I didn’t spend the day doing a jigsaw. I completed this a day or so ago and, as I was about to take it apart, I was struck by the patterns made by the pieces. The pieces of this jigsaw are so different from anything I have seen before - ‘curved and unpredictable’ is how Margaret Drabble would describe them. Absolutely! Very tricky to match a space with a piece but, as every piece is different, there is only one place each fits in and when they do get to the right place they click in, often surprisingly, but always very satisfactorily. 
 
Thinking about this took me back to Margaret Drabble’s book - The Pattern in the Carpet: a Personal History with Jigsaws. I read this a long while ago and loved it, but strangely that was before I ‘discovered’ jigsaws a year or so ago. Looking through it now a lot of her thoughts ring true with me. Jigsaws as a ‘pursuit that lies somewhere between creation and imitation and discovery and reverie’. As an avid reader and writer, I understand her when she says this activity ‘exercises a different area of the brain’ - ‘a quiet chance to look at wordless patterns’. I think I have taken to it also because I like organising, I like things to be tidy - ‘making order out of chaos’ is just what the activity is all about. She also talks about jigsaws of paintings and how through the activity ‘you become intimate with the painting‘, ‘you learn about the brush strokes of artists’. 
 
That is why I have chosen this blip, to show the intriguing patterning of the pieces and the way Monet applied the paint in the original. (The whole jigsaw in in Extras)
 
‘Putting a jigsaw away can be a sad moment’ - indeed!