I have been doing crosswords almost since I learned to read and write.
They have always been a feature in our house.
My father spent every evening he was at home sitting on one side of the fire doing the crossword in the Daily Telegraph with my mother on the other side of the fire with a tatty and dilapidated Chambers dictionary looking through this for the solutions with which he was stuck.
(My mother I now see acted exactly as the modern electronic “Crossword Solver” does.)
These were the most peaceful and happy times in the Dwyer household and the times of the best memories.
Dad by the fire and doing crosswords was not on one of his frequent benders.

Underneath the cryptic crossword in the Telegraph was a simple one, pretty soon Dad would pass this on to me, very likely to shut me up, and as time went on I began to get some of the clues out.
I have a very strong memory of one of the first ones I solved.
The solution was for a 10 letter word, the clue a cryptic:
B-O-U-N-D.. I remember looking at it in total mystification, why on earth would they want me to spell bound?
It was of course as I said it to myself that the penny dropped.
The solution was spellbound.
I remember I laughed out loud, captivated by the compiler’s visual pun.
I was hooked.
I have been doing crosswords all the time since then.
All the way through college I used to buy the Irish Times, and I am ashamed to say open it first at the back page to do the Simplex and then as my technique improved, the more difficult Crosaire.
A particular favourite soon emerged, Everyman in the Observer, this I have done with amazing regularity for about the last thirty years.

As someone who spends times doing crosswords I have had to search to find some justification for this really fairly time wasting activity.
I regard Crosswords as mental gymnastics.
They are push ups and mental callisthenics for our sluggish and under-utilised brains.
This was just a theory of mine until lightning, in the form of a brain haemorrhage struck me.
After a few weeks of drama when I was very ill, life began to get back into its natural rhythms and I headed off to get the Observer again.
I picked up the crossword only to discover that I was totally unable to work out a single clue.
I was horrified, I suddenly began to realise that I was not the person I had been before, in fact the illness had destroyed so much of my brain that I was not at all as bright as I used to be.
After much initial upset I decided to come back fighting.

I had a strong memory of reading a long article about Patricia Neal, an actress very much in her prime being struck down by a stroke.
Her husband, the author Roald Dahl, being faced with a woman little better than a vegetable, decided to do something about it.
He was aware that we only use about 10% of our brains in our ordinary life, after brain injury we need to employ some of that unused capacity to compensate for the parts damaged in a stroke.
He consequently set up a very intense programme to retrain Patricia , as far as I remember this even meant re-teaching her how to walk, and to everyone’s amazement he was largely successful.

So there was I with only one skill, and that a fairly minor one lost during my illness. Surely I told myself I could get this back.
So I continued to buy the Observer each Sunday.
I would keep the untouched crossword until the following week and then try to work the crossword out backwards from the solution.
After some weeks the clues began to get possible and after about six months I was back where I was before, managing to get the whole crossword out most weeks.
This was a huge relief and a very important factor in my eventual complete recovery.

A couple of years later I was doing some voluntary work with “Headway” a society which offered help to those who had suffered brain injury.
We had a brain consultant over from London to talk to us and she asked us about our own experiences.
Somewhat shamefacedly, because it seemed so trivial, I told her my crossword story.

Her reaction amazed me.
My technique of retraining my brain was exactly being used, even down to using crosswords as the tool for this training, in her clinic in London.
My exercise was textbook perfect in recapturing my lost skill, and very likely in the process I relearned many skills that had been lost while I was suffering the initial brain trauma.

Some years after this I remember reading an article by Nuala O Faoilean in which she said that of all activities she thought that doing crosswords was the greatest, and most unproductive time waster.

Ah Nuala, You’re wrong, where would I be without them!