Missing Pieces - Gray Malin 500 Piece Puzzle (13 April 2020)

By the middle of April we were deep into the first lockdown and I was going a bit mad. Anyone saying that things would soon return to normal was, I was sure, delusional. So far all of my gloomy predictions had come true and I was now convinced that civil disobedience and the collapse of order were imminent. The signs were everywhere. Markings on Highbury streets showing how far apart people should walk. Clissold Park benches covered in tape to prevent anyone stopping to enjoy the spring sun. More ominously a testing centre had opened up round the corner from us - a big white tent staffed with elaborately masked up medics resembling, to my mind, the triage facility from Steven Soderbergh’s chillingly prescient Contagion.

The Gray Malin Snow Double Sided Puzzle (‘awe-inspiring aerial photographs shot from doorless helicopters, creating stunning celebrations of natural form, color, and repetition’) was actually the second puzzle I’d purchased since March, the second puzzle I’d ever bought. The first (Frank Lloyd Wright Saguaro Cactus And Forms Foil Stamped 1000 Pc Puzzle) had arrived the day after Boris Johnson had announced the first UK lockdown and two days before the Stay at Home measures legally came into force. Foresight again.

But by early April, puzzles had been selling out all over the internet and supply and choice was limited. When I ordered this new puzzle I pictured us sitting together round the kitchen table, pooling our resources, celebrating as one when a child located a skier or placed the top of a fir tree. But its arrival was met with a collective shrug and no-one seemed to share my enthusiasm for this wholesome team activity. I did open it on the kitchen table and everyone did help with it, but never together. We took turns, each completing a few pieces at a time when passing through the kitchen before returning to bedrooms, sofas or home offices.

At first I was jealous of friends and their families who seemed to be treating lockdown as a massive bonding opportunity. On Instagram I saw evidence of family fancy dress nights, parents and kids dressed up as Victorian dandies or red-and-white striped Wallies or superheroes. Others organised kitchen discos or spent their days swotting up on sports facts for inter-family Zoom quiz nights. Board games were almost as hard to get hold of as puzzles but my friends’ families seemed to be perfectly content with a post-supper game of charades or pictionary. As a family we had been scarred by a particularly acrimonious game of the French classic Mille Bornes a few years earlier - the closest my wife and I ever got to a divorce-causing row - and we didn’t attempt a single board game night at any point during lockdown.

So lockdown was spent together in our house, but alone in our own spaces. My wife had her office, the kids had their bedrooms and I prowled around, spending most of my time in the kitchen or in our bedroom, knocking on doors every few hours to see if anyone needed anything or wanted to hang out, which they rarely did. But we did discover that there was one shared activity which we were good at - eating together. While breakfast was a moveable feast, we almost always ate lunch en masse, carefully timed between zoom lessons. And in the evenings we gathered round the counter for pre-dinner aperitif (crisps or olives) before sitting round the table as a family, telling each other about our days, how school was or wasn’t going, talking about who we wanted to see and where we wanted to go when lockdown was over, the unfinished puzzle waiting for our attention at the end of the table.