Sudoku solution – The Guardian 21 May 2026 Hard level sudoku

Indexé : 2026-05-21

[00:00:03][music] [music] >> Hello fellow Sudokens. Welcome to Zen and the Art of the Guardian Sudoku puzzle. It's Thursday the 21st of May, 2026.

[00:00:16]I hope you are keeping well and enjoying life as best you possibly can. Memory is a strange thing, isn't it?

[00:00:25]Uh it can work well and work badly on the same person.

[00:00:31]I've experienced as many people have the uh the the the experience of going into a room uh and then suddenly forgetting why on earth you've gone into that room. You've gone there to do something and you just can't remember why. So you just had it in your brain just a few seconds ago.

[00:00:48]Uh and uh I you know, quite often forget people's names, people that I met years ago and I can't remember their names. I remember them, remember all kinds of things about them, but I can't remember their names.

[00:00:58]Uh when it comes to music, um I have I heard so many songs over the years and thousands and thousands of them are imprinted on my brain and I can remember the lyrics of so many songs and I can remember the parts of different instruments, what they're doing, you know, in in much of my record collection, thousands and thousands and thousands of songs uh kind of imprinted on my brain and yet so many things that I forget, so many easy things. I forget. Last week I even forgot it was uh Friday. Two weeks ago I forgot it was Friday and I forgot to go to work cuz I actually didn't realize it was Friday.

[00:01:37]Um >> [gasps] >> I mention this because last night I got a a YouTube suggestion of an old radio uh play which was Tony Hancock, uh a British comedian popular in the 1960s, really. And I think maybe yeah, 60s mostly.

[00:01:57]And um it's called Sunday Afternoon at Home. Now, when the cassette recorder first arrived, uh it was a wonderful thing. The portable cassette recorder really came around in about 1970, something like that, 70 71.

[00:02:14]And uh they were really popular with everybody. Everybody had a portable cassette cassette recorder, cassette tape recorder uh for audio for those people who are too young to know what they are.

[00:02:25]Um and uh I had one. And uh when I got one, of course you needed some things to go in it apart from your own, you know, recording your own voice. Uh you could get some music tapes, etc. And my aunt bought me Tony the a Tony Hancock um Sunday Afternoon at Home.

[00:02:46]And uh my mom said, "What a weird idea.

[00:02:48]Why did Why do you expect a 10-year-old to enjoy?" First of all, it's like must be 10 years before and it's kind of adult humor, I guess.

[00:02:56]And it's you know, maybe recorded 10 years before. He was not popular. I didn't know who Tony Hancock was. I'd never heard of him when I was a kid.

[00:03:04]Never heard of him. He was like popular 10 years before that or something. He'd already died. I I think he committed suicide, actually.

[00:03:11]Uh but he said he he'd already died by that time.

[00:03:15]And my aunt bought me this tape.

[00:03:17]And boy, did I love it. Boy, did I love it. I loved it. It was so funny. I played it over and over and over again.

[00:03:26]And you know, of course the tape machines fizzled out and came out of use and got old tapes got thrown away.

[00:03:36]And I don't think I've heard that audio since the early 1970s, since before 1975 was the last time that I've heard it.

[00:03:46]So, >> [sighs] >> here we are in 2026.

[00:03:50]And I and and uh I I listened to this audio last night.

[00:03:54]And do you know I could recite it almost word for word, almost the whole half an hour. I could recite word for word with the timing and everything. It I went wrong only a few times. The whole thing was just there imprinted on my brain.

[00:04:12]Because I loved it so much. I played I played it so many times over and over again. It's just stuck there in my head.

[00:04:18]I guess that's what happens with music as well. It's if you play it so many times it just gets stuck in your head. So, although we issue learning by rote as being, you know, not a very good thing to do, sometimes learning by rote could be a good thing because it does stick in your memory.

[00:04:34]The one The one joke that used that cracked me up so much when I was a kid because my mom was a was not a good cook, right?

[00:04:40]>> [laughter] >> And when Tony Hancock it's Tony Hancock and Hattie Jacques.

[00:04:45]And Tony Hancock says I thought my mother was a good cook, but at least I was Sorry, I thought my mother was a bad cook, but at least her gravy used to move around.

[00:04:55]Yours just sort of lies there and sets.

[00:04:58]>> [laughter] >> Hattie Jacques says, "That's the goodness in it." And Tony Hancock says, "That's the half a pound of flour you put in it."

[00:05:06]>> [laughter] >> It just when I was a kid it just it made me laugh so much. It gave me a a stomach ache from just laughing. I thought it was wonderful. And I still laughed last night.

[00:05:17]All these years [snorts] later. I As I was going through I was laughing. Even though I could recite the whole tape The whole thing is in my head.

[00:05:24]It was still as funny. Well done, Tony Hancock. Great comedian. Sad loss to the world.

[00:05:31]Here we are. Guardian hard level puzzle.

[00:05:33]Let's get stuck into it cuz it might take a long time based on recent experience.

[00:05:40]Start with the digit twos.

[00:05:46]>> [cough] >> Three up, three down.

[00:06:00]>> [sighs] >> We're assuming that it's going to be pretty easy at the start and then we'll get stuck at the end.

[00:06:09]That's likely to happen.

[00:06:10]Three blocking these squares here, three blocking this square, three blocking this square.

[00:06:20]Three blocking like this, so three in one of these squares blocking down.

[00:06:30]>> [snorts] >> One blocking up here.

[00:06:44]>> [sighs] >> Oops. Extend that blue blue line up.

[00:06:48]The thin blue line or in this case quite a fat blue line really.

[00:06:59]Okay, digit one is finished.

[00:07:02]Should we go in order? Why not?

[00:07:05]>> [sighs] >> That's the end of digit three. Let's just go back to two in case anything changed there.

[00:07:25]No.

[00:07:40]Uh four blocking across here, so four in one of those squares blocking down, four across this way, that way.

[00:07:50]Actually, I just noticed we can get the four there.

[00:07:54]Okay, that's the end of digit four.

[00:07:57]Let's go back to digit two just in case.

[00:07:59]Still desperate to find digit two. No.

[00:08:02]Okay, on we go. Five.

[00:08:06]Five.

[00:08:08]Oh, oh, no, there is one down there. I was about to say we don't have any digit fives, but we do. We have one and that's enough to find another one.

[00:08:15]And another one there.

[00:08:17]And in fact, over here.

[00:08:22]And we can finish this off with seven and this will be eight.

[00:08:29]And on this side through No.

[00:08:37]Six.

[00:08:39]And this must be nine.

[00:08:43]Missing here is eight blocking up here and seven to go there. Top shoot completed already.

[00:08:52]All right, let's go back to going in order again. See what we get.

[00:08:55]Still don't know the twos. Five.

[00:09:07]Uh, no, but I can see five and two block here, so that's a pair of two and five in those squares.

[00:09:13]Uh, makes this seven and eight, so eight across there.

[00:09:17]There's the eight, there's the seven.

[00:09:20]And down here now, um nine.

[00:09:31]Okay, so this is seven and eight there.

[00:09:39]Five.

[00:09:40]>> [sighs] >> That's the last six.

[00:10:12]Something down here was missing.

[00:10:15]Uh five, I think.

[00:10:21]Okay, five blocking down here and five in one of those squares blocking down will give us five there.

[00:10:58]Are we at the tricky bit now?

[00:11:02]Uh two five >> [sighs] >> Okay, I think that's as far as I can take it without the pencil marks, so let's go ahead and put in the pencil marks now then. So, twos go there and there and there.

[00:12:35]Fives go there and here and there.

[00:12:46]Sevens go there and there.

[00:12:54]This is seven and eight.

[00:12:57]Eights go here.

[00:13:09]Nines are there and there and here.

[00:13:20]All right, so let's just finish it off then. So, let's make sure we got everything. Twos everywhere. Okay, fives not everywhere yet. Yes, we have five seven not every something's not finished.

[00:13:32]Here we go. Seven can go in any of those squares and so can eight. All right, seven and eight can go in any of those squares.

[00:13:41]Uh seven can go down there.

[00:13:51]And eight is done, I think, and nine.

[00:13:55]Yeah, okay. So, what are we looking for?

[00:13:59]>> [sighs] [sighs] [snorts] >> Oh, this looks like it might be a tough game.

[00:15:58]>> [sighs] >> Oh, dear.

[00:17:15]Okay, there we have it. XY wing.

[00:17:18]Uh going to start here on seven to the eight, eight to the five, five to the seven, right? Seven is our starting point. We go to eight.

[00:17:38]Eight is here. Eight goes to five. That goes over here and the last digit is seven or the starting digit seven. So, it means that this seven can be removed.

[00:17:46]So, that has to be an eight.

[00:17:49]Here's a seven here. So, our friend, the XY wing, does it for us again.

[00:18:04]And it looks like that's going to be enough to finish the game.

[00:18:28]And nine to fit in there. So, here we go with a another Guardian hard level puzzle that needed some kind of Sudoku technique at the end to finish. This seems to be the pattern of the Guardian recently.

[00:18:41]Uh thanks for joining me this morning.

[00:18:43]Uh hopefully I'll be back with at least one more game today.

[00:18:46]Um I have got hospital appointment today, but that's a bit later, so it should be okay. Thanks for joining me.

[00:18:52]Take Bye-bye. Take care.