26 June 2020

One of the things I enjoy doing (usually in the evenings when my husband is either flicking furiously through every channel on the television, or sleeping through an entire program and then expressing surprise at the lack of plot and depth in the show, when it finishes…) is doing jigsaws in my iPad.

Yes yes – I can hear the purists bleating. You know who you are. It’s not the same, it doesn’t take as much skill, it’s too quick, blah blah blah.

But doing a jigsaw on the iPad has many advantages. Firstly, it’s really hard to lose pieces. It does happen, but they are usually just lurking somewhere on your screen and fairly easy to locate. The jigsaw puzzle program on iPad also clicks the pieces together when they are correct, and will even lock them into place when they are in the right position on the board. There are a number of cheat buttons too – one that shows you only edge pieces, and another that (gasp, shock, horror), gives you a hint as to a piece that will go somewhere. Not always the place you are looking for, but sometimes it’s just the boost you need.

But yes it’s a quick way to do a jigsaw, and you can choose how many pieces you’d like you’re jigsaw to be. There are a lot of free puzzles to choose from (although the really nice ones you have to pay for).

Now the reason for that long introduction is that I’m currently doing a jigsaw of a baby elephant somewhere in Africa. And it isn’t easy to do, because the colours all seem to be a sort of greyey brown.

But from memory of the time we went to Africa, on safari that WAS the colour of the earth and a lot of the animals. Sure there were greenish patches, but it was a brownish green colour.

In the UK the green is abundant. Lots of shades of green, and the colours of the flowers when they are blooming have a lovely backdrop. Not so much blue in the sky, but lots of green below.

In the north west of my country, red and blue and white are the colours that stand out. Red, red dirt. Really red. Very very blue sky. White tree trunks. If you think of colours and the north west, those are the ones that stand out.

And as a born and bred West Australian, I didn’t realise snow was such an intense colour. Such a pure blinding white. And if you’re looking down a crevasse, that blue ice colour!!! Incredible!

The colours of our world are individually wonderful, vibrant and significant.

Kind of like our people.