I REMEMBER standing in the playground watching in awe as my mathematically-minded friends twisted and turned and, in a flash of colours as bright as a glimpse of a kingfisher, they completed a Rubik's Cube.

I was hopeless. Couldn't even get all the colours aligned on one side. Lack of application didn't help. No point in concentrating on something you know you can't do.

This week I've stumbled - belatedly - upon the 21st century version of the Rubik's Cube. It's called sudoku, and it's absolutely everywhere - Internet, email, mobile and old-fashioned newspapers, where it began.

And, extraordinarily for a bear of very little binary brain, I can do it. Just about. An elementary one takes me more than 20 minutes (Carol Voderman's been boasting she can do a "diabolical" in 21 minutes) and I haven't dared tackle anything harder.

Some people have been addicted for five weeks now, which explains why I was the only person in the country following the General Election. Everyone else was bifurcating a sudoku.

Sudoku is, of course, Japanese, although its origins lie with Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler who, in 1783, devised something nasty called Latin Squares. A Japanese puzzle magazine introduced a new version to its pages in 1984 and made up a name: su, meaning number, and doku, meaning single or bachelor.

That's because every row, every column and every 3x3 on the grid must contain the digits one to nine once only.

It's like a crossword, without the words. In fact, it's a perfect puzzle for the 21st century because you need no general knowledge, no vocabulary, no lateral thought, and no mathematical skills. But you probably do need a mathematician's ordered mind.

But I can do it. The Sun Sundoku's are easiest (even Big Brother's Jade Goody can do them, says the paper); the "diabolical", "fiendish" and "advanced" ones in the broadsheets are a frightening bafflement.

So popular, though, is sudoku that yesterday The Guardian printed one on every page of its magazine, boasting that each had been handcrafted by "a black-belt sudoku master on the upper slopes of Mount Fuji".

You may well conclude that the world has gone sudokuing mad, but here's a first one. A Rubik-incompetent like myself knocked it off in 21 minutes; Jade Goody could probably do it in ten and Carol Voderman just by looking at it.

See today's Northern Echo for the first grid. Complete it, cut it out and send it in. The first correct one drawn out next week wins a bottle of wine. The more entries, the more pressure on the editor to come up with a dailyechodoku.

* Each vertical and horizontal line, and each 3x3 mini-grid, must contain the numbers one to nine once only. No skills, only logic, required. Send to: Echodoku, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF.