I like jigsaw puzzles. Adrian likes almost any activity that he can do together with someone. So sometimes we do jigsaw puzzles together.

We do it together, but we have very different approaches. I focus on eye-catching, easily defined areas – distinctly coloured features, well-defined edges of things. I pick out pieces that appear to be part of that area, look at them to figure out what goes where, and gradually put them all together. Then I pick the next suitable area or feature and do the same thing.

Adrian’s approach is all trial and error. He doesn’t really look at the details of the pieces, neither colour nor shape. He just goes through all possible matches, methodically, one by one, until one piece clicks. Then he repeats that with the spot next to the piece he just put there. Like me, he works with one well-defined area at a time, because his approach only works if he has all the possible candidate pieces in a little pile. But he barely looks at the pieces, so what’s on them almost doesn’t matter. In fact he prefers the featureless single-colour areas – the empty skies and such – because it’s easiest to sort out all those pieces in one go.