Wordle 24th January:
B
E
G
I
N
S
T
A
R
T
T
E
A
C
H
D
E
A
T
H
I looked up from my phone as the train started to slow down into the station. Four guesses, not bad - especially for a word with as many common letters as "DEATH".
I set my phone on the table and stood to pull down my satchel from the rack. A sharp-eyed man in his 40s or maybe 50s, sitting across the aisle with a small white dog on his lap, leaned over to see what I was doing and nodded sagely to himself. I like to think he was also a Wordler, maybe impressed with my score. Perhaps human contact in public spaces isn't dead.
Monday passed uneventfully. The budget for Q1 is nearly finalised. I ate at the Vietnamese place for lunch.
Wordle 25th January:
O
L
I
V
E
O
P
E
N
S
O
M
E
N
S
The Wordle answers seem to be themed this week. That's interesting; maybe they're doing themed weeks. I'll have to watch out for the next one. Fruit, maybe. APPLE, GRAPE, MELON, LEMON... I suppose the last two would be quite hard to tell apart, too many shared letters. All rather fun. I wonder what tomorrow's will be.
Wordle 26th January:
S
K
U
L
L
G
H
O
S
T
H
A
U
N
T
B
R
A
I
N
T
R
A
I
N
Maybe I was wrong about the theme. I was racking my head for spooky words but it's back to something much more mundane.
Someone at work started a Wordle Slack channel, where we all post our scores (in colour code, of course - to avoid spoilers). I'm easily in the top half of players there, even despite a couple of poor guesses today. HAUNT shares the T location, and BRAIN omits the T altogether. But I was so convinced it must be something on brand. Oh well - I suppose a GHOST TRAIN is a thing.
Wordle 27th January:
S
L
A
C
K
A
B
A
C
K
T
R
A
C
K
Very strange. I posted about the Wordle themes in the Slack channel but nobody else seemed to know what I was talking about. I hypothesised they're doing them in pairs - after all we'd had TRAIN with TRACK, DEATH with OMENS - and Malik from Engineering said his answers didn't have anything to do with each other, they were just random words. I'll have to keep gathering data to show him what I mean. Maybe these Engineering types have difficulty seeing the bigger picture pattern between successive days.
Wordle 28th January:
L
A
T
T
E
V
O
W
E
L
W
H
E
A
T
A
W
A
R
E
A
S
K
E
W
Took me a while, this one - nice word, that sneaky W on the end. Barry Gellmann got it in 2, which is frankly disgusting.
Wordle 29th January:
S
W
E
A
T
B
O
U
G
H
R
E
A
C
H
C
R
A
S
H
Did the Parkrun in the morning and promptly fell asleep on the sofa without even showering! Alice was angry. Said I'd stink up the cushions with my sweat. Told me, "Robbo, it's gross, you treating the sofa like a dog bed". Generally being very petty and hysterical. We argued. Didn't even get to the Wordle until mid-afternoon.
Wordle 30th January:
B
E
A
C
H
T
A
S
K
S
P
R
O
U
D
A
V
O
I
D
A very strange thing happened this morning. I happened to see Malik doing the Wordle as he waited for the coffee machine. I don't know the man well, but we'd just chatted the previous week over Slack, so I greeted him warmly. I peered over his shoulder as he played - I'd done it on the train as usual - just as he typed in the final word and got all greens. And you know what his word was? JEWEL. Different to mine. Very odd. I thought they did the same one for everybody, and he said yes, that was the whole point, why, what did I get that morning? I hummed a bit and avoided answering.
Wordle 31st January:
P
E
A
C
H
L
E
A
S
H
H
E
A
T
H
D
E
A
T
H
Something is wrong. I got the same word as last week. I thought it couldn't be the case, which is why I spent so long trying other variants. Eventually I tapped it in and hit "Enter" and one by one the boxes turned silently around, like a little row of faces turning to look at me. I immediately put the phone face down in my lap and made accidental eye contact with the man with the white dog, who was looking at me intently from his seat. He blinked, slowly. Then he stood and walked down the aisle into the next carriage, white dog wobbling along behind him on stubbly legs.
What is going on? Did he hack my Wordle? Is that something you can do?
Impulsively I stood to follow him and just at that moment we started to slow down into the station. People started getting up and pulling luggage down from the rack, standing in the aisle, facing the door. I pushed past in a panic, my own bag forgotten, clutching my phone like it was a vital piece of evidence. As I elbowed a woman in a heavy woollen coat and ornate coloured mask she burst out in a wordless, indignant sound, which I hardly heard at all. My eyes were glued to the end of the carriage, the door to the next carriage.
Except there wasn't one. The carriage just ended. I belatedly remembered I was in the last carriage. Where had he gone? Where was the little white dog? I stood there swaying as the train pulled to a halt and everyone started to get off. It was a good thing it was the end of the line, because I stayed there for so long the cleaning staff had to ask me to leave. I couldn't focus on anything that day at work, kept losing my train of thought in the middle of conversation. Mr Kanagawa suggested I take the afternoon off but I jumped horribly when he spoke and refused to contemplate it. I ended up staying late, sunk deep into a spreadsheet, deaf to the world, and taking a cab home.
Wordle 1st February:
I woke in the middle of the night. Maybe a sound in the night. A car outside, or something. I turned in bed and realised it was empty, that Alice wasn't there. I remembered she'd left a note about going to her sister's. I checked my phone, which told me it was 3:15am. I rolled over and closed my eyes. There was a bird singing outside in the dull night, a bright sound, very loud. It sounded wrong for a bird to sing in the dark. Was it nocturnal? Or was it the city lights and sounds and air that had made it confused?
The sheets were sweaty so I threw them off and got out of bed. Opening the window the bird's song was even louder, piercing. I squinted out onto the street but couldn't see it, wherever it was. Behind the birdsong was the gentle wash of traffic noise, that white-noise seashore sound, the sound of nothing. A train passed by on the main line. A freight train, I think - it took a long time to go by, rumbling with a steady ch-chk, ch-chk on the track.
Train track. Death omens.
There was a sinking feeling in my stomach, like being on an aircraft that suddenly drops in turbulence. I clutched the windowsill until my knuckles were white. 3:15am. That was past midnight. Late enough. I grabbed my phone from the bedside table and pawed it open, had to try my passcode three times before I got it right. My fingers were shaking. I opened the browser and clicked the bookmark to load the Wordle website. Barely blinking, jaw clenched, I typed:
H
E
L
P
Not enough letters. I need 5. Crap. I dropped the phone, picked it up, swearing.
H
E
L
P
S
What do you want me to do?
S
A
F
E
R
OK, an R. You can do this. Breathe, Robbo, breathe.
G
U
A
R
D
Was Alice OK? Why wasn't she here? Had someone else left the note?
H
O
U
S
E
No, no, no - that doesn't have an R in it. Obviously wrong. Two guesses left.
R
O
T
O
R
Final guess. ROBOT? No, there was no T. But two Os. I had to get this correct. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that something terrible would happen if I got it wrong. I couldn't afford a margin of error. I opened another tab and found a crossword solving app. I fed it RO??? and asked it what words fit there. 99 results! But most of these had an A, or an E. The only things which fit were very unusual words like ROOKY or RONCO. It couldn't be that. There just didn't seem to be anything that fit.
Unless...
I typed slowly because I knew it would refuse my guess, knew it would register as not being in the dictionary, knew I was being paranoid, but still when I pressed Enter and watched the letters turn to face me one by one I greeted them without a trace of surprise:
R
O
B
B
O
Evening Standard, 1st February:
SUBURBAN COMMUTER TRAIN DERAILS: 10 dead, 53 injured. Network Rail blame vandals who stole material from the tracks, making them unstable. INSIDE: We hear from one regular commuter, Robert Walshingham, who tells us how he narrowly avoided being on the service in question because he was working from home...