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1993: Picture Puzzles


The two pages of this card were in different styles.

Front page

Front page of 1993 card

The “smiley” face here represents the word Happy, and the stylised Christmas tree the word Christmas.

Inside page

Inside page of 1993 card

Here the message is represented in the style of children’s picture puzzles. Each picture represents a word, which then has to be modified by the deletion or replacement of some characters to produce the required word or syllable. The explanation is:

                     a hand, with “h” deleted: and   
             a nest, with “n” replaced by “b”: best  
         two fishes, with “f” replaced by “w”: wishes
             the figure “4”, with “u” deleted: for   
    a glass of wine, with “w” replaced by “n”: nine  
a (Heinz) food tin, with “i” replaced by “ee”: teen  
    a straight line, with “l” replaced by “n”: nine  
    a (Dunlop) tyre, with “r” and “e” deleted: ty    
  a packet of (Be-Ro) flour, with “l” deleted: four  
             a frog, with “g” replaced by “m”: from  
          a brain, with “a” and “i” exchanged: Brian 
    a barber’s pole, with “b” replaced by “k”: Barker

Apologies, by the way, to my U.S. readership, who may have been puzzled by thinking that the tyre was a tire.

I had thought that recipients would have needed to be “of a certain age” to have recognised “Be-Ro” as a brand of flour, but it transpires that it is still sold (by Premier Foods Group Ltd). Thomas Bell apparently solved the problem of needing to remove the word “royal” from the name of his “Bells Royal” flour by abbreviating it to “Be-Ro”.


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Version 24: Revised 23 December 2018
Brian Barker