I taught myself to solve a Rubik’s Cube over two weekends in early June 2026. All was going well until a few weeks later.

What motivated me to embark on a task I knew was going to be difficult? I had two motivations.

It had been on my mind for years as something I wanted to do, but I kept putting it off as it seemed too high a mountain to climb on my own. The Rubik’s Cube was massive in the 1980s, the decade of my childhood. While I can’t remember owning one, tv programmes regularly featured someone setting a new record, or solving it in a novel way.

Secondly, a Y5 boy attended my after-school Curious Minds Club at the library with his mum. Before we started, she gave him a parcel which must have arrived while he was at school. He took great delight in unwrapping his speedcube and telling us about it. I thought, I can’t have a 10 year old boy who knows something I don’t. That spurred me on to have a go. I had some generic cubes in my many boxes of games. I retrieved them from the attic and made a start.

I quickly realised I could not learn by following illustrated instructions. Thank goodness for YouTube. I discovered Easiest Solve, and was hooked by his emphasis on ease not speed. He uses stories and images, not notations and algorithms, and goes nice and slow with lots of repetition. Just what my brain needed.

I worked through all eight of his beginner videos. Over two weekends, making my own notes for the hardest steps, and with hours of practice …. I could do it. All by myself. Consistently and correctly. I could even do the final step with my eyes closed. A lifetime’s ambition ticked off. I was mildly proud of my best time of 2m, 28s, although not tempted to learn speedcubing to bring it down below one minute. It was enough that I could solve any scrambled cube at will.

All was going well until mid-July. Since June, I hadn’t been picking up a cube as often. One afternoon, I mixed up a cube. Everything went well until step seven. I just couldn’t solve it. I returned myself to the start of step seven many times and every time it went wrong. I tried a different cube, as if that would change my luck. Of course it made no difference.

I was convinced I was doing it right. I started to panic, thinking that I would never solve the cube ever again. If you are a catastrophiser you will be able to relate to my state of mind. You might agree that catastrophising is a bad thing to be good at.

I watched Easiest Solve’s step seven again, and it was obvious where I was going wrong: at the second move, I was going counter-clockwise, when I should have gone clockwise. Putting myself right, I was able to solve the cube. My sense of relief was mixed with dismay at how quickly I had forgotten something I thought I had learnt. My muscle memory was much shallower than I had imagined.

In golf and other sports, professionals can suffer from the yips. They suddenly lose the ability to perform a skill they have mastered, due to a mental block or involuntary muscular spasm. My problem was one of forgetting something I had recently learnt. I will call it learning decay before reaching true mastery. It did definitely feel like I was blocked and full of anxiety. Perhaps the yips comes closer than another word.

I added ‘solve cube’ to my daily paper to-do list. I make myself sit down every day, scramble a cube, and solve it. I have my notes for step seven next to me. I’m now at the point where I don’t need to check them, but I still feel the need to keep them close.

Perhaps by making the Rubik’s Cube a daily task I am turning it into something prosaic, like remembering to put the tablet inside the dishwasher. But as I went to all the effort of learning it, I don’t want to lack that knowledge at my fingertips.

The technique of writing the digits of Pi down the left-hand side of my daily to-do list is how I have memorised the first 48 digits. I group them in threes and list them out: 141 592 653 589 793 238 462 643 383 279 502 884 197 169 399 375. Writing them every day helps embed the memory.

What an incredible invention the Rubik’s Cube is: it’s more than fifty years old and there are still plenty of children (and adults like me) who can’t resist the urge to pick one up and test themselves against the 43 quintillion possible configurations. But when you reach the top of the mountain you will stumble back down if you don’t keep practicing your new skills.