Martha Redfern, 92, from Crail in Fife, will be the oldest recorded entrant in The Times Crossword Championship. “I have qualified for finals in the past and I’m very glad it has been reinstated,” she says. “I used to go to Word Weekends, too. I enjoyed them enormously.

“My sight is failing a little now — I use a magnifying glass to do the crossword — so I spoke to one of the organisers, a very kind young man, and he said that he thought perhaps they could get the puzzles blown up for me at Cheltenham.

“I do the crossword every day. I find it therapeutic — if you’re cheesed off about something, you get out your puzzle and you’re lost; you don’t bother about anything else. I start it in the morning but if it doesn’t come reasonably quickly I leave it and finish it in bed at night.”

“I don’t have a routine. I get up at whatever time nature allows me to open my eyes. I have my breakfast and do a few little jobs, then I go through to my office where my computer is and the phone and thousands of books from when I was studying, and I start the crossword there.

“When I was in the Air Force a few of us used to do the puzzle in the mess at lunchtime. When I was married and we were abroad a great deal I might have missed a few days, perhaps if The Times didn’t arrive for some reason, but generally the ideal is to do it every day.

“Recently the setters have stopped making literary and classical allusions — I can understand why and I don’t mind that, but I have to be truthful (I shouldn’t really say this), on certain occasions they haven’t the complete accuracy of the old days. I mean, one doesn’t always know that the answer is right. Sometimes I do the puzzle in times2, well of course if you don’t solve that in two or three minutes then you are lousy, but I find they do have those literary and classical allusions as well.

“For my last birthday I asked for the latest edition of The Chambers Dictionary — my old one didn’t have all the modern stuff you need, IT and all that. Not that one is madly keen on some of it but you have to know it.”

Martha tried to join the WAAF during the Munich crisis when a recruitment office was opened in her home city of Edinburgh, but was drafted into the Army instead. “I went on to a career in the RAF but left to be a wife and mother. My husband Tom was a medical officer in the RAF, rising to the rank of air commodore, and we lived in a lot of different places. In those days a man with a wife got on much better than one without — there was a lot of entertaining and whatnot.

“I’m still living in my own house in a street with lovely neighbours who all care about each other. I know I will have to go into a home at some point but long may it stay away. I should have help but I don’t — it’s much better to do things for yourself if you can. Kate, my daughter, comes and dusts me out from time to time.

“I think you need to keep doing things, especially brainwork, and I enjoy life a lot. People drop in all the time.”

“I have ideas all the time. I’m in the middle of a long letter to Gordon Brown about inheritance tax — the thought that your autonomy has been taken away from you completely and your money can be spent without your say-so is iniquitous.

“I used to drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney. I gave up smoking 20 years ago and I would urge young people never to take it up — such a stupid habit.

“I don’t drink alone, only when friends are round, but I’m always ordering champagne because I love it. My favourite drink is champagne — I have one bottle left at the minute and I’m going to give it to a friend of mine for her birthday. She’s 80, bless her.”