I’m preparing for the upcoming Downton Abbey movie by rewatching the entire series, and AHA, there’s a puzzle! The Dowager Countess of Grantham and Mrs Crawley are having some sherry while doing a puzzle. You can’t make out the image, and they make no reference to the puzzle, but you can see that the pieces are wooden, and it seems the countess has done the edges first.

Mrs Crawley has her own little section to work on.

My grandmother, who was also a puzzler, once told me that Queen Elizabeth is a keen puzzler and that she has an enormous room with many tables with puzzles on them, and even though she is too busy to spend much time puzzling, she sometimes walks through the room placing a piece here and there. This may not be true (except for the part about Queen Elizabeth liking puzzles), my grandmother liked the kind of magazines with royal gossip where much of the content is entirely made up by the “journalists”.

I’ve heard that Queen Elizabeth likes puzzles elsewhere as well, although it’s difficult to verify – it’s not like she gives chatty interviews about her hobbies 🙂 According to a story in the Telegraph from 2010, it is even said that Her Majesty prefers her puzzles without an image on the box in order to make it more challenging.

Anyway, we seem to be in very good company 🙂