So now you spend your days bent over little squares of numbers, frantically rubbing things out and mentally composing letters of complaint to the editors of an awful lot of newspapers.

There you are, with all the nines, threes and sixes filled in, and half your brain is wondering if you will ever pluck up the courage to expose your vulnerabilities on the letters page of the Irish Times.

"Madam. Why, oh why, oh why are your Sudoku puzzles all squashed up at the bottom of the page, making the game even more uncomfortable than is usual?

The whole country knows that there is no difference between your easy, medium and hard puzzles. The distinction between them is purely arbitrary. Yours etc, Angry of Ranelagh. PS Your crosswords are a doddle."

The thing about Sudoku is that you need a dark pencil . . .

with an eraser on the top . . .

and a nice big square, printed clearly on white paper. One would not have thought that too much to ask.

In the interests of partiality, it should be stated here that the Sunday Tribune Sudoku is not badly presented at all. Plenty of room, with good contrast. The Daily Telegraph is alright. And the Daily Mail is very good, with three Sudokus in its Coffee Break section.

Was there ever a Tea Break section, and if so when did the change take place?

These are the questions that occur to one, maddeningly, when stuck in this infernal game. Some time in the '80s, I'll be bound.

Also there is the problem of playing Sudoku in public. It is a terrible thing to be hammered . . . absolutely hammered . . .

at Sudoku by a fellow passenger who is much too nice to boast. Ronnie Corbett once starred, in a television series called Sorry, as a rather mild man who used to complete the Times crossword at home every morning and then buy another copy of the paper, in order to complete it in record time on the train. He drove all the other commuters crazy. I am beginning to think that the same approach has been adopted by some commuters here.

It is rather frightful to have a Japanese man looking at you with growing concern when he sees how bad you are at Sudoku. He was too polite to intervene, although you could tell that he was longing to. And then there are the old-age pensioners who put on their glasses to notice that you are stuck in the bottom right-hand grid, when there is a line with just one digit missing up near the top. (If you don't understand any of this, then you are very lucky. ) Then there are the Sudoku books . . .

don't laugh. Carol Vorderman seems to have taken over Sudoku, in much the same way as the Gate has taken over Samuel Beckett . . . silently, irrevocably.

Who gave Sudoku to Carol Vorderman, and when? She is an infuriating woman whose talents lie exclusively in the area of mathematics. "Fill them in yourself.

Hooray!" (From Carol Vorderman's How To Do Sudoku' page 175, and that's not the worst of it, by any means. ) Playing Sudoku is like working a mobile phone, or understanding computers. No one teaches you how to do it, you are just supposed to know, in your role as a modern human. But the thing is that loads of us do not know, and we have nowhere to turn. Even when we're doing six Sudoku puzzles a day. Every day.

When we should, perhaps, be working.

The worst part of total ignorance is that even when you get it right, you don't know how you did it. Those wonderful free-fall minutes when you filled in all the threes are inexplicable, gone forever, never to be replicated. Perhaps Sudoku is a form of meditation. If it is, it is a damnable one. And I really hate Carol Vorderman, from the heart.