click on what, precisely?

It's easy to have too much of point-and-click games, but once in a while, as a change, they can be fun. I'm currently playing Submachine Zero: Ancient Adventure, which has much better drawings and sound than quite a few I've discovered.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck. Can anyone help? So far, I've found three red jewels and a stone, and a room with what looks like a block of stone with a pole in it, but I can't get past the second door with the sliding spikes.

I know in these games that it can be difficult to remember or describe exactly what actions lead to which results, but if anyone else would like to have a go and perhaps give me a pointer in the right direction, I'd be grateful.

sums can be fun

I enjoyed writing about Scottish food recently, but that wasn't the sort of topic I had envisaged for this blog. I'd intended to write about more personal stuff here, preferably positive and happy stuff, and leave the more general topics to my other blog, The Valley of Lost Things.

Obviously, there are no hard and fast rules, and it may be that I find the upkeep of two blogs to be too demanding, but nevertheless that's what I'm still aiming to do.

So what's today's little item then? Well, it's not very personal, but it does make me happy. I've been getting more and more interested in kakuro recently (otherwise known as cross sums). It's a number puzzle, a bit like sudoku because you fill in the numbers one to nine in a grid, but it also involves a little bit of mental arithmetic.

The Guardian has a kakuro puzzle each day, graduating from easy on a Sunday :) Monday morning to hard on a Friday. Even better, though, is the website dedicated to kakuro, with a new free online puzzle every day.

You can buy kakuro software there if you wish, and there are other kakuro sites with puzzles you can print out or software to download, but one puzzle a day is enough for me.