Revisiting — An Elegant Sufficiency

We always appreciate the “lasts for the year” feature when we buy admission tickets but however well intentioned we might be to return, we seldom take up the offer. Somehow, the year skips by and by the time we’re ready to go again, we realise the offer is long out of date. On Friday, however, we had arranged to meet friends at Bletchley Park and we knew that it was less than a year ago that we were there with Bill and Wendy. Surely we had put our tickets in a logical place?

Maybe that was the case, but if so, we were working to different logic. We searched high and low but could not find those pesky pieces of paper. Never mind, we felt we’d had good value regardless and we’d simply buy again. I had one last thought - we’d bought them online, so perhaps there was a barcode or something that might still be valid? My Hero found the email and made a short call to the ticket office with the details.

TaDa! Single use, one-day tickets were issued without further question - how very impressive!

As a result, on Friday we found ourselves back in the Director’s office, feeling equally impressed by the place as we had been on our first visit and noticing so many things we’d missed: There is so much to see, to look at and read, but mostly, to think about.

Because this is most certainly somewhere that gets the grey matter working.

That the people working here were fuelled by tea, custard creams and bourbon biscuits makes it all the more impressive. Oh…of course, I’m forgetting the vast quantities of tobacco, because the evidence of chain smoking was on every desk too.

The essentials were spilling out of the handbag: the ID card, Cold Cream, the Womans Weekly, a silk scarf, ten Players Navy Cut and a box of matches. I do love the way a picture is painted of the people who worked here using just a few props to set the scene.

Once again, we puzzlers were ready to take on the challenges we were set. We followed the explanations and did our best to work out how it was all done.