Rubik's what?...

Didn't you just love the seventies with its browns and creams and baggy high-waisted trousers. Yes, the seventies was quite a monochromatic time and the brightest kid on the block, in more ways than one, was the Rubik Cube.

I had to have one and bloody expensive it was too. If I’d have waited a couple of months I could have bought one of the copies that suddenly appeared on every market stall and every discount shop for a couple of quid, but that was me - far too impatient.

Patience with puzzles was never one of my virtues, still isn’t really. I can’t ever finish a crossword without losing interest the minute I can’t work out one of the clues. Bits of bent metal become even more bent when I try to disentangle one ring from another and round plastic ball mazes have been known to resemble flying saucers when, in a fit of frustrated pique, I’ve flung them across the room.

Anyway, Erno Rubik’s Magic Cube as it was called back then. Try as I might with my cube somehow I never mastered it. In the end I did manage to beat it after a fashion though, but only by taking the bloody thing apart and rebuilding it so that it looked liked I’d solved Rubik’s cube. It had a very interesting mechanism inside, but it was never quite the same after that. It went all loose.

As did I.