Sitting down, she picked up her wooden ruler and began to mark out a fifteen-by-fifteen grid of squares. Next, she shaded in a pattern of darker squares around a single line of symmetry, so each darker square had a twin reflected on the right. There wasn’t any particular pattern she followed, it was mostly her many decades of experience that guided her hand.

Once she had marked out her grid, all she had to do was fill in the blank spaces with words. This, she knew, would take her the next hour or so, and only once she was happy that she had an interesting collection of words intersecting with each other would she turn her mind finally to creating the clues.

As for the types of clues she liked to set, she eschewed the wilful opacity favoured by many setters, most famously represented by the near-impossible monthly puzzle that used to appear in the Listener magazine. She felt there was something a bit too ‘male’ about how they tried to show off how very clever they were. ‘Look at me,’ they seemed to be saying, ‘you’ll never guess how brilliant I am.’ Instead, like many setters, she aligned herself with the principles of Ximenes, the legendary setter for the Observer newspaper from 1939 to 1972. Accordingly, her clues had to have two halves, the literal clue on one side, the riddle on the other. And the two halves had ultimately to ‘play fair’ with the solver, with the small caveat that if a clue was ingenious or witty enough, she was prepared on occasion to break the rules.

This morning, however, the muse wasn’t with Judith. Having created her square of blocks and blanks, she couldn’t settle on the correct words with which to fill the grid. She lacked all decisiveness. It was Stefan, she knew. She couldn’t concentrate. She had to know that he was okay.

Judith reached for her tablet computer. She didn’t much like the device, but it was useful for photographing and then emailing in her crosswords to the papers, so she’d come to terms with it some years ago.

She held it up to her face, but the stupid machine refused to unlock, claiming it didn’t recognise her. Judith harrumphed, once again cursing at the indignities of being an older woman. The modern world treated her as though she were entirely invisible, and even her own bloody computer criticised her for not looking suitably like herself. But there was no point trying to fight with technology. Judith had learned that a long time ago in an incident that had involved a strawberry-coloured iMac, an electric cable that wasn’t quite long enough, and a trip to Accident and Emergency.

Judith took a deep breath and composed herself.

She held the tablet up and looked at it again.

Nothing happened.