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I love jigsaws. Jigsaw puzzles have been part of my life for a very long time. My Mum and Dad loved jigsaws, too, and in the winter there was always a partly done jigsaw on the table when I was young. We did them together as a family, all six of us. Beginning a new jigsaw always excited us. Sometimes we would have to be told to go and do something else and this evoked a new verb in our house "to jig" meaning to do jigsaws as in "stop jigging and get ready for school!"

My mother believed in family activity and every Christmas there were always two presents under the tree which were addressed to the whole family from Father Christmas. One was always a board game to play on Christmas day afternoon and evening. The other was a jigsaw, for us to do together, in those flat days after Christmas, when the company had left and the excitement was over. This meant that we were not too sorry when Christmas was over for we had the joy of our new jigsaw.

The jigsaws that we did were not children's jigsaws but adult ones. We preferred those of a thousand pieces or more. One jigsaw that we had, when I was a child, was probably two thousand pieces and was huge, it took a up a great proportion of the dining room table. The picture was of steam trains on a bridge crossing more railway lines with trains on them, I believe the bridge was near Waterloo Railway Station, in London, England. I remember that as we took it out of the box each time and sorted the pieces it seemed as if we would never finish it, but we always did.

Jigsaws taught us some lessons too. We learned that ,even, two year olds sometimes see something that twelve year olds do not and that a four year old can be much better, at some things, than a ten year old. We learned that sometimes looking at things from a different perspective enables one to see those things better. We learned about working together to achieve a common goal, and also that achieving a goal can be both happy and sad at the same time.

I learned from doing jigsaws that life, itself, can be likened to a jigsaw in that it is all the pieces of life that make the whole picture. That only the right piece will fit in a given place and a wrong piece will not go in satisfactorily, however much you try to force it to do so. You also must have all the right pieces to complete the picture and pieces from another puzzle are no good at all.

I still enjoy jigsaw puzzles and so do the rest of my family. We do not have the opportunity to do them all together any more, since we are widely scattered accross the World now. However, whenever some of us get together there is often a jigsaw in evidence. Jigsaws are an enjoyable and fun activity in their own right, but they taught me and my siblings so much more than the simple action of fitting puzzle pieces together to make a pretty picture.

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