I am feeling a little pleased with myself this morning. On a Sunday morning I like to do the puzzle page in the paper, my paper of choice being the Sunday Express. There are four on one page – one sudoku and three alpha puzzles where you have to guess the letters. I always test myself against the times and nearly always complete them in under 50% of the available time, quite a few times under 40% and occassionally under 30%.

This morning though there was a curved ball. The hardest puzzle is the Ultimate Alphabeater for which you get 40 odd minutes – today 46. In this, in addition to finding the letters, you also have to build the crossword by inserting the black squares. Sunday is always the toughest one of the week and you get one black numbered square and one or two letters to start with. Not today. They forgot to give the black numbered square so it was impossible to build the grid. I like a challenge though so after completing the other puzzles on the page I went back to it and after one false start I managed to solve it. I am not precisely sure how long it took but I still think I beat the 46 minutes.

Not here to gloat though. I thought I might be able to help other Express puzzlers out. If you want to try today’s puzzle I think you could solve it if I told you that 21 is a black square. That is the first one I found and lead me to the solution.

If you know any Express readers pass it on.