[Graham King]

Originally Posted by Ann Drysdale

Well, it's nearly the 20th, so here's my process.

Sharon posted a picture as a prompt, seeking pictorial responses. I am not equipped, technology-wise, to answer with a picture, but Sharon said I could do a word-response; a new piece that retained the two main images. Grids and circles.

The picture had two different faces. A collage of grid-shapes, all squares and corners and a long line of roundnesses underneth, all different sizes. I searched for something I knew and understood that used those two shape-thoughts to make a third.

Grids with different hole-sizes, roundies with different dimensions. I would make a puzzle-poem, using all the different words I found when I researched the thing that was now in my head.

Royals are potatoes; ware, mid and chat are sizes. Griffin, Tong and Cooch are specialist riddles for sorting them. The Griffin is an oldfashioned wooden one and the Tong is a huge industrial machine. But they all have interchangeable grids for doing their shuddery work. I loved researching this, especially when I found out what "cooch" means in Merkin.

That gave me the idea of presenting my poem as a nudgy sort of thing, with undertones of double entendre. Like the old cryptic poems in the Exeter book that is part of my British heritage.

The answer to this riddle is "riddle".

Very clever!
So a riddle is a large-holed sort of sieve? I may have heard of it but I didn't cotton on till you explained (for which, thanks!)