Addicted to Numbers

Substance abuse, apart from chocolate, has never been attractive to me, maybe luck, maybe genetic, but I made it through my teens and twenties with only the barest of whiffs of other people’s joints in passive smoking passing. No so with meaningless number games.

My son was given a Sudoku board game for Christmas. We must be truly in a backwater because this was the first time I’d come across it, though apparently it is all the rage the world over. The challenge of arranging little squares of card numbered 1 to 9 into coherent and unrepeated sequences has grabbed me, tied me up and rendered me impervious to general conversation, behindhand with cooking supper, neglectful of bedtimes....must be an addiction.

The last time this fatal tendency had me by the short and curlies it was Minesweeper on the computer that was my undoing. Through my first pregnancy I spent disproportionate amounts of time clearing minefields by rapid fire assessmemnt of the numbers, constantly trying to improve my speed, without getting blown up by the slip of a mouse click. Who knows what the attraction is, but even now when my eight year old is beginning to explore the treacherous ground of computer games, I have to be careful not to get too involved with demonstrating the ways of Minesweeper...he probably absorbed all he needed to know in the womb anyway!

Luckily there are only 100 possible puzzles in the Sudoku box to work through, so there is a finite amount of time I can dispose of honing my numbers skills. The Minesweeper section of my computer I leave to my son now, the fatal buzz of clear space exploding out to a rim of numbers all his. I’m trying to put my numbers to use, harnessing them to learn numerology, which is a demanding combination of number ability and intuition, but for relaxation and down time, organising numbers into patterns for no reason whatsoever has got me hooked.