24061

Author   foggywebPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: didn’t look at the clock, but guessing around 40 minutes.

Not too bad a start to the week. Got quite a few on first read and I don’t think there were any new words for me today (maybe there is – I’ve just looked up cheeseparing). I also picked up on quite a few slang words.

Across

3 ROLL,[k]INGPIN – “small bread item” was the give-away here.
9 CH,ALICE – last one in – not particularly difficult, though. It’s rare to see this type of wordplay in the Times, I think: splitting churchwoman into church woman to get the answer.
11 EP,HE,SUS – they had a church there – Paul wrote an Epistle for them.
15 ANCESTRAL – anagram of Lancaster.
17 TON,BRIDGE – TON=NOT reversed. Tonbridge is a own in Kent.
21 SEVEN-YEAR ITCH – anagram of ‘Vices – they’re an’ – my parents celebrated their 28th anniversary this weekend – perhaps they are about to experience the fourth itch.
24 C,LEANER – a daily is, for example, a cleaning woman.
25 AN,DANTE – still quite poor at musical terms, luckily one of the few Italian writers I’d heard of fitted in and made a sensible looking word.
27 A/C,HE – a/c is an abbreviation of account (=bill).

Down

1 JOC,U,LA(R)ITY – JOC sounds like ‘Jock’, U sounds like ‘you’.
2 SPAR,TAN – came to this quite late – I think I was originally looking for someone’s name.
5 LEER,Y – I don’t think I knew this. Collins has it as slang ‘suspicious or wary’. Fair enough, LEER was the only word meaning look that I could find.
6 NO HOLDS BARRED – the hold is the space where cargo is stored – I believe the phrase originally comes from wrestling.
7 PAST,EUR(=rue reversed)
8 NOSE = sounds like ‘knows’ – more slang.
13 BLUE CHEESE – not sure how this works – blue could be waste (as in waste money – yes, more slang). Just found cheeseparing (meaning penny-pinching) in Collins. I guess this is the reference.
16 C,LEVEL,AND – an area in NE England.
20 BOT,A,NIC[k]
23 ECHO – Echo is the letter E in the phonetic alphabet.

34 comments on “24061”

  1. 13 mins here which is about as quick as I am ever likely to get! This was a welcome relief after the travails of the weekend puzzles.

    Nothing to add to foggyweb’s comments, except to note that ache=pain raised some eyebrows a couple of weeks ago.

  2. 20 minutes today, which must be approaching my personal best if I knew exactly what that is. I am not entirely happy with 13 as the cheese is called Danish blue, not Danish. The reasoning behind 23 caught me out.
  3. Didn’t clock it (unfortunately). Easily a personal best. Nearer to 5 minutes than 10. Banged a few in without fully understanding at the time, but all ok on revisiting. 1 Dn last in, but only cost about 10 sec. I sense impending doom.
  4. Back to an easy Monday, after the last two weeks. I took just under 17 minutes, though I thought I might be faster at the start when I solved and entered 1a, 1d, 11a, 21a and 27 all in under a minute.

    Having nothing better to do I then spent a similar span of time solving the last 6 or 7 clues of the 3rd puzzle in Times Crossword Championship Final (all in the NE corner), putting my time for that puzzle alone at well over an hour.

  5. 6:15 for this – should have been about 5:30 but it took a while to realise that the reason 9A was hard was “JOUULARITY” at 1D.
    1. Foggy has the right version – to “blue” something (usually money) is to waste it. To reasons why it cannot be “blew”: First, there is no “sounds like” indicator to get us from “blew” to BLUE. Second, the clue has “waste” in the present tense, and “blew” is past tense – to match “waste”, it would have to be “blow” instead. Not drastically important in terms of getting to the answer in this case, but seeing points like this can save you from wrong answers.
  7. 3.51 – something of a landmark, as it’s the first time I’ve been under 4 minutes. I didn’t really think I’d ever beat my previous best (4.22), which had stood for more than a year, so it was quite a shock to find I’d done so by half a minute. It might be just about possible to save another ten seconds, but I’m not expecting it to happen for a very long time.
  8. 6 minutes here, I think that’s the quickest since I started timing myself. A few clues that spoke to my expertise – I liked the clueing of ROLLING PIN
    1. Be interesting to find if others with a PB (or close), or indeed the setter, had tertiary training in the physical sciences. I cannot see an obvious reason in the answers (only Pasteur for us chemists).
      1. Not me. In fact I had to look up “physical sciences” on Wikipedia before I understood what you meant. At O-level I took a combined “physics with chemistry” syllabus in order to avoid having to do both in full.

        Beyond O-level all my education has been related to languages and business/finance.

        I think there were fast times purely because it was just a very straightforward puzzle.

      2. I was in a rush to get my comment off and get to coffee this morning, so I could have elaborated. I was talking more of overall experience…

        From having degrees in chemistry, PASTEUR comes to mind immediately for 7.

        I’ve also played in orchestras and wind symphonies, so ANDANTE and NORMA come by with a minimum of effort.

        10 years in the US and I know CLEVELAND, INLAND REVENUE and NO HOLDS BARRED

        25 years in Australia means a lot of hearing NO SWEAT

        so it was a puzzle that seemed like it was written for me.

  9. I thought my 10:55 wasn’t too shoddy until I came here. Well done, Sabine – makes Lewis Hamilton look pedestrian.

    Fair puzzle, but very guessable. I enjoyed CHALICE, which is a sweet clue.

  10. I’ve never posted here before but I just wanted to say that today’s puzzle is the first one I have ever completed in a decent time. I have been tackling the puzzle everyday for a couple of years and though gradually improving I nearly always have a couple of clues that I just can’t get. That’s where you guys come in! I’m sure that daily reading of this blog is helping me improve, so thanks very much and keep up the good work!
    Carol.
    1. Welcome Carol. Now that you’ve taken the plunge don’t hesitate to join in. I wish something like this had existed when I learned – and don’t despair, you will get there if you persevere.
    2. Welcome again. I can remember spending quite a lot of time at a stage where I could get something like 25-28 clues in lots of crosswords, but couldn’t get the last few. I decided later that this was mostly a matter of confidence – once you solve the last few clues a few times and know that you can do it, it becomes much easier. (Though even now, a last pair of short answers that happen to cross can give me some jitters.)
      1. Thanks for the welcome. I realise it was a particularly easy one today but it wasn’t that long ago that I could only get about 2 clues per day. I don’t think I’ll ever be championship material but really feel like I’m improving. Despite the frustration it causes me on a daily basis The Times is my favourite crossword. I do the Sunday Times every week too and usually find it much easier. Here’s hoping for another easy one tomorrow.
        Carol
  12. A fairly quick 40 minutes here, that would have possibly have been a very quick time if I hadn’t plumped for LITTLE BOY PEEP for 12ac, which in my defence was close, if not close enough. I didn’t get the wordplay until after finishing for 26ac / 13d / 20d (and I’ve still no idea why BOT = maggot), but definitions were obvious enough to get anyway.
  13. I thought my 6:07 was pretty quick too but Sabine’s 3:51 is staggeringly quick. Congratulations.
    Although easy this was a very pleasant solve. 6d and 21a are worthy of mention but my COD nom goes to 12a.

    I’d vote for a policy whereby the easiest of the week was on a Monday. Then people like me could make sure conditions were right for attempting a PB, less experienced solvers would know they had a fighting chance and, if it was tricky, we’d all know we had some really hard ones on the way.

    1. Thanks to you and everyone else who offered congratulations. I’ve actually managed to destroy two long-time records in one weekend, having also for the first time got a score of over 400 at WordTwist, a kind of online Boggle variant I’m dangerously addicted to.

      I agree it would be really helpful to have some idea of a puzzle’s difficulty before embarking on it, particularly with the super-easy ones where you have a chance of a PB, and the super-hard ones where you would know to set aside a decent chunk of time and (in my case) arm yourself with a coffee and a stiff drink.

      1. More congratulations from here. I’m not so much in favour of knowing the difficulty in advance – your record doesn’t mean quite so much if you know in advance. My best time for any cryptic was for a Sunday Times puzzle which I’d heard was very easy – that probably accounts for about 15 of the 25 seconds by which I think I beat my Times record.

        If you’re solving competitively, part of the skill is a (mostly subconscious) change of style between harum-scarum “write an answer every 10-15 seconds to keep up” and “spend more time than usual thinking about each one, or you’ll get to the end of your first pass with no answers at all”

        1. I agree about not wanting to know the supposed difficulty in advance. In fact I think it might work against me if was told a puzzle was easy. Added pressure and all that. In any case what’s easy for some is not necessarily so for others.

  14. 7.32. Slow to get started and BLUE CHEESE and BOTANIC were entered in faith. Didn’t know the blue and bot meanings.
    Some impressive times today – especially Sabine – well done
    JohnPMarshall
  15. A PB for me at 9 minutes (I didn’t use a stopwatch, usually minutes alone are plenty for me!). Definitely a lot faster than Saturday’s…
  16. Oh dear another very quick one – say 15 minutes but probably faster. Some years ago it was the case that puzzles got gradually harder through the week but that quite helpful convention disappeared some time ago. There is a difficult one coming, I’m sure. I feel sorry for whoever is doing the blog tomorrow.
  17. 10′ 56″ here, my best ever. Didn’t know ‘blue’ meaning waste, and also missed the phonetic alphabet wordplay in 23d, but am happy. I spent a few hours over the weekend writing out tips on solving cryptics for a friend, and I think that sharpened me up. I’ve learned so much from this blog and its predecessor, and am enjoying the crossword much more these days as a result.

  18. With my coarse 5 minute timing resolution, this is towards the Observer Everyman end of things for me (struggling for hours over this 3 years ago was a good introduction to cryptics I think).

    Congrats Sabine – surely you’ve got to enter the champs next year?

  19. Congrats to all you speed merchants out there; very impressive times from all those with new PB’s. I got through in about 15 minutes, not a PB, but I agree a very straightforward puzzle with some entertaining clues. I was held up at the end because I had written in ‘In the cards’ for 26A, which is what we say over here in the US, not “On..”. That left me with _C_I for 23D; after a few minutes I guessed that it had to be “echo’ and that you folks must say ‘On the Cards’ instead. Congratulations again, regards to all, see you tomorrow.
  20. a personal best at 15 minutes…all seemed to just come together. the no holds barred clue or something similar was in a Jumbo recently

  21. One across that is.

    This might have been a PB for me too if I had timed it but I did not.
    Being fairly easy does not mean that it wasn’t entertaining – the opposite in fact.

    There are 9 “easies” left out of this blog:

    1a Only right (4)
    JUST

    12a A tad sad about lad – a rhyme for the nursery (6,3,4)
    LITTLE BOY BLUE. The setter clearly avoided the other meanings of “blue” here. I’m not sure that I would have exercised the same restraint!

    14a Final stage in quarrel (3-2)
    RUN-IN

    19a Doctor overcome by drink in leisurely walk (5)
    A MB LE

    26a Greetings may be possible (2,3,5)
    ON THE CARDS

    4d Chairman is heading for the water (9)
    OVER BOARD

    10a Tax collectors revealed nun in trouble (6,7)
    INLAND REVENUE. Anagram of (revealed nun in).

    18d Note was mislaid? That’s OK (2,5)
    NO SWEAT. Anagram of (note was).

    22d Girl not quite all there (5)
    NORMA (L)

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