The first time I came across sudoku was during a lecture, when two people in the row in front of me were trying to complete a puzzle in The Times. I was being very rude by trying to read over their shoulder, but then again waving a copy of the paper about during a lecture is pretty rude anyway. I couldn’t really make out what was going on.

When The Guardian introduced it I was able to read the instructions, but my father had already filled a bit of it in so I didn’t bother trying. I had a go at a clean one last week, but I could only fill in one number for definite. I can’t be bothered with all this it-could-be-either-3-or-7 business.

Anyway, yesterday my father came to me carrying the newspaper in one hand and a piece of graph paper with numbers scrawled all over it in the other. He was excited; after what had presumably been hours he had completed the sudoku. But it was the easy version apparently. He waved it in front of me, but I didn’t even look at it. I can see why some people complain about sudoku. A filled-in eighty-one number grid isn’t very interesting really.