Crosswords have drifted through my life like lamb's fry and American football, things I feel like showing an interest in once every five years, but can probably do without.
I enjoy a good puzzle and love words, but I have the general knowledge of a gnat, and it is the latter that tends to hold me back in a crossword.
Indeed, if a crossword was the game of 500, and who is to say it couldn't be that, Stephen Hawking would go 10 no trumps and me, a mere six diamonds.
My dad introduced me to crosswords accidentally by subscribing to a lightly scabrous magazine called Australasian Post.
In there was a giant full-page crossword called Mr Whopper, an ironic name in view of the preponderance of whoppers elsewhere in the magazine.
This mammoth thing was compiled by the beautifully named Mr Wisdom.
I used to fill in a few squares while learning about life from the whoppers, so if my dad burst into the room, I could say, gosh dad, Mr Whopper is hard going this week.
As a university student, thinking my brain was the size of Brazil, I occasionally dipped into the Listener crossword, but that was far too hard.
More recently, my father-in-law has introduced me to the Christchurch Press cryptic crossword, which he does every day, often before he has rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
Crossword done, he reads out the oblique clues, waits three seconds, then peels off his answer.
I can only shake my head in reply.
You get to know the way they think, he says consolingly.
A friend came round to visit last week and spied a copy of the Listener on the lounge table.
She suggested we do the crossword together.
I told her I don't do crosswords.
Rubbish, she said.
One across.
Who made their West End debut in Hair in 1968? This is another reason I am weak at crosswords, I don't understand the question.
Marsha Hunt, I replied, she had a child by Mick Jagger.
My friend politely inquired as to how that would fit in with one down, a German-derived word for artificial.
Ersatz.
Could then perhaps one across be Elaine Page, she suggested politely.
I sulked for a while.
Then to get me back in the game, she asked me 17 across, New Zealand's only native land mammal, first letter B, last letter T.
I jumped up pumping my hand.
BAT! I shouted.
Good work, she said, I told you we could do this together.
Later on I got Denpasar as the biggest city in Bali, but only because the smell of the food market there remains on my clothes to this day.
And I also contributed 11 across, the gland just above the kidney.
Adrenal.
I know my kidneys.
But that was it.
If I had bid six diamonds, I would have got three.
I shudder to say this, but Kirk from Coro probably would have done better.
It was clear the 2010 Listener crossword is a walk in the park compared to the legendary compilations from RWH.
But we still got caught at the end with two to solve, a bolt on which a rudder turns, and a 1980s Soviet space station.
Neither of us are boat people, and neither of us were in outer space in the 1980s, so my visitor whanged the key words into Google on her iPhone and we were done.
Pintle and Salyut.
I can see how crosswords could be absorbing, an integral part of the day even.
It's just that I am a very busy man.
But they are definitely educational.
I now use pintle all the time when thrashing out issues at inner city cafes ("Really, the pintle on which this whole thing turns, is . . .").
And never again will I say when pigs fly in a pea green sky.
From now on, my pigs are salyuts.
