Usually we have too little time to cope with it the rest of the year round, but we've become more adept at solving the clues, so we've carried on solving it this year, sneaking in answers between other daily tasks. Even the Aged Parent, who falsely claims no skill at doing cryptics, joins in.

She's good at the sudden illumination. My wife uses a set of Scrabble tiles to sift around the anagrams. I'm the analytical one, and like to know why the answer is right. Between us, and with the help of a dictionary and thesaurus (one has to have the right tools for the job) we usually manage to finish, even if it is last thing at night.

I don't know why crosswords are so tantalizing - perhaps it's part of human nature to delight in puzzles, and the completing of them. After all, so many legends and fairy stories are full of the equivalent of crosswords: strange riddles that only explain themselves when you solve them.

Crosswords began life as uncomplicated beasts - on the 21st December 1913 to be exact. They were called, then, Word-crosses. They'd had plenty of ancestors, of course. Acrostics (which are as old as the Bible), have always been around, often in utterly convoluted forms, such as double and triple. (The first letters of the poem might reveal a word opposite in meaning to the last letters, for instance.)

The Word Square goes back to the Romans, if not further, and later turned into the Magic Square - or triangle, in some cases. As a puzzle it was very popular with the Victorians before the arrival of the crossword. The most famous crossword of them all, the Times cryptic crossword, was a late starter. And amazingly enough it was first compiled by someone who'd never produced, or even solved a crossword in his life. Adrian Bell had ten days to learn the job, then went on to produce crosswords for forty years.

The speed with which people have completed the crosswords in competitions held by the Times over the years is phenomenal. One contestant, John Sykes, was clocked in at an average of eight and a half minutes over four puzzles, in 1972. He claimed to have done one at home in three and a half minutes, but the official record for this is held by Roy Dean, who in December, 1970, completed one in just under that time. (On the other hand, in the year of Our Lord, 1966, one lady from Fiji finished a puzzle set in April 1932.)

If The Times' crossword is the most famous, The Observer's is reckoned to be the toughest - although some think The Listener's are worse. (The English Listener, that is.)   The Listener crosswords have appeared in the shape of a heart; as a chessboard, (with clues according to the chess pieces' positions); in a hexa-pentagonal shape; with clues in the form of mathematical equations; without any black squares at all.

There are many other variations on the theme, such as the Alphabet crossword, in which every letter of the alphabet is used only once. Then there is the crossword with no numbering, so that you have to figure out the place to put the answers.

There are puzzles with numbers instead of words; or puzzles with two identical grids, but no indication as to which set of answers fits which grid. There have even been puzzles in which the black squares, (or the marks between words in some cases) produced a picture - as in one by "Afrit", where two letter Qs are printed to form his eyes.

And there was the puzzle sent to The Times by Sir Max Beerbohm in 1940, which was full of red herrings. Only six clues out of nearly 50 actually had any answers at all!