'Dear Araucaria, ... '

A charming and moving 10-minute documentary film, 'Dear Araucaria' about John Graham as a crossword setter is due to be released by Guardian Multimedia next month. Araucaria died in November 2013 at the age of 92, ending over 55 years as the Guardian's most prolific setter. The last Araucaria puzzle to be published while he was alive (Prize 26,107) appeared just 10 days before he died. However, a puzzle that he had been working on and had asked a friend to complete for him, as he could be longer concentrate sufficiently, was published on the first anniversary of his death, 26 November 2014 (Cryptic 26,427).

In the film, the only voice heard is Araucaria's, reading from some of the many fan letters that people sent him, written as from friends who felt they knew him personally from doing his crosswords over the years. He also talks about his way of working when setting puzzles, including in particular how he set the puzzle with which he went public about the fact that he had been diagnosed as having terminal cancer of the oesophagus (originally published in 1 Across, the crossword magazine that he had founded, and reprinted in the Guardian in January 2013, as Cryptic 25,842). This film will be available from 8 June here.
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Another Araucaria link: in February (puzzle No 26,495) Paul announced that he had entered for the London Marathon on 26 April, intending to run in memory of his friend Araucaria and to raise money for Sense, the charity for the deafblind.

Thanks to your great generosity he raised over £5,500 – a great tribute to your admiration for Araucaria and to your empathy with Paul in his masochism. Unhappily, in the last half of April, Paul was struck down by the dread lurgy that has been around all winter and has lingered on into the spring. This put an end to his training programme. He was advised by his doctor that it would be madness to run a marathon without enough training and was threatened with divorce by Mrs Paul, if he even suggested ignoring this advice.

All the money you subscribed, however, has gone safely to Sense and Paul has assured me that, to meet his obligation, he will mortify the flesh in this event next year. He is very grateful to you for your huge support for his cause.
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Those of you whose connection with the Guardian and Observer crosswords is solely online will have noticed recent changes and strains with the site. These have principally involved the crossword homepage and the online monthly Genius puzzle. 'Why couldn't what was working fairly well before not have been left alone?' is the common refrain in most of the griping emails that we have been getting.

As you may have heard me admit before, my capacity to understand computer software programs and their development is way below average. However, what I do understand is that the Guardian is in the middle of a massive upgrading and integration of all its online activity in order to give it the capacity to cope with the demands of the American-Australian-European centred international newspaper brand the group is rapidly developing into. Historically, the software to support the crosswords online was (unwisely) written in-house in isolation from the main Guardian systems, in to which it was then spatchcocked over time in an ad hoc way.

Work is going ahead as fast as possible on the crossword programs to make them converge with the main website development but, hard as it may be for online crossword enthusiasts to accept, in the great scheme of things the puzzles do not have the highest priority for the design and development teams faced with, say, getting the paper's amazing systems for reporting the general election results up and working properly all round the world, all through the night for Thursday 7 May.

Please go on complaining - but you may need a little patience, too.
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Congratulations to Margaret Heslop from North Adelaide in Australia, who is the winner of the April Genius competition.

If you have any technical problems with our crossword service, please email userhelp@guardian.co.uk. If you have any comments or queries about the crosswords, please email crossword.editor@guardian.co.uk. For Observer crosswords please crossword.editor@observer.co.uk .