Solving time: 6:28
Another pretty easy puzzle with mild bits of general knowledge required if you want to get to the end quickly. I wrote in 1, 12, 15, and 28 without working out the complete (or in one case, correct) wordplay, just seeing the answer from def. and checking letters.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | SHIP CANAL = “way for sailors” – (chaplain’s)* |
| 6 | BURNS = poet – Blake’s The Tyger starts with the line “Tyger tyger, burning bright” |
| 9 | GO=move,A = back from hyenA, uNlEaShEd – Goa, a former Portuguese territory, is the smallest state in India. |
| 10 | OARSMEN = (San Remo)* – San Remo being on the coast adds a bit to the surface meaning |
| 11 | A,S,PERUS(U)AL |
| 12 | (s)TILL – when solving, I thought there must be some way I couldn’t think of by which the informal till=until could be interpreted as “not starting yet”. This felt more and more like a bit of nonsense drifting in from some inferior cryptic crossword until I thought of still=yet. |
| 14 | TITAN – 2 defs – the largest moon of Saturn and a rocket (or family of rockets, it turns out). It seems that Titan the moon is also known as “Saturn VI” – whether there is a connection between this and the use of Titan rockets for some unmanned missions when the Saturn V was no longer available, I don’t know. |
| 15 | CATCH=snag,ME=writer,NT=National Trust=conservationists – “catchment” as in the catchment area of a river, is “collecting water” |
| 16 | DO A RUNNER = bolt – (near round)* – the Times rule about living people means that we’ll have to wait a long time for the “Bolt = runner” which the content of this clue/answer gets quite close to |
| 18 | THOR=god,N=name |
| 20 | (t)RUTH – truth being “non-fiction”, and Ruth an Old Testament book |
| 21 | DOUBLE FLAT – 2 defs, one whimsical. Although it is theoretically possible for music to have a key like F flat, the key signature of which would include a B double flat, I can’t think of a real-life example (F flat being the same as E). My understanding is that double flats are used as accidentals in situations where the accidental is more naturally thought of as a flattening of a note already flattened than sharpening the next note down in the scale – so a B flat in a passage in C would become B double flat if the passage was repeated a semitone lower and written in C flat rather than B natural. |
| 25 |
|
| 26 | DE(TENT)E – in “cold war” terms, an warming of relations between two former opponents is a thaw. The “running water” is the River Dee. |
| 27 | e.g. = say,Y=”yes initially”,P.T. = exercise – beginners: make a mental note to try both P.E. and P.T. for “exercise” or similar if you don’t get the answer from the def |
| 28 | ERRONEOUS = wrong – RONEO = dulicate (verb), in reversal of SURE = confident |
| Down | |
| 1 | SIGMA – Greek version of the letter S found at the beginning of ‘species’ |
| 2 | IN A SPOT = (a piston)* – the anagram indicator is just “worked” (not “worked up”), leaving “up against it” as the def |
| 3 | CHEE(k),RING UP = to call |
| 4 | NEE=born,P(eeble)S – neeps are turnips in Scotland, often accompanied by tatties=potatoes |
| 5 | LOOK = gander (from criminals’ slang apparently, but not rhyming slang),AFTER = “with name of”, as in “called after” |
| 6 | B(oulogne),ARK=one vessel – bark = ship = another (vessel) |
| 7 | RO(MAIN)E – “romaine” is the US name for the crossword setter’s favourite lettuce – cos. |
| 8 | SING = give information, LET ON = reveal – “person not married or in a relationship” is one meaning of “singleton” and as pointed out below, “lonely heart” could also mean a singleton heart in a card player’s hand |
| 13 | CHATTER=gossip,TON=rev. of not – Chatterton has to be a “Young poet” as he died before his 18th birthday |
| 14 | TUDOR ROSE = (out orders)* |
| 15 | C(ollege),ON COURSE = studying |
| 17 | Today’s omission – a very old chestnut indeed! |
| 19 | ORLANDO – 2 defs – Orlando Gibbons the composer and a city in Florida, home of the Walt Disney World theme park. Did anyone else wonder whether Florida had a town or city called Stanley? |
| 22 | BADE=ordered,R=resistance – here’s the double amputee hero for anyone too young to know about him |
| 23 | TIERS – 2 defs, one being “people or things that tie” |
| 24 | SPAT – Taps being a bugle call signalling “lights out” in the US military, with a very similar practical purpose and the same commemorative use as our Last Post |
On ORLANDO, I did think of Grinling, though it didn’t fit, and wondered whether Florida had an Edward somewhere, though that didn’t fit either. That was after I’d exhausted (very quickly) my knowledge of the ape species.
Otherwise, a pleasant workout. CoD to SIGMA, a simple but elegant clue
Other than that it was a fairly quick affair, although I wasnt utterly confident about BARK, TIERS or SPAT but they seemed like they “ought to” work. Didn’t even notice that I had no idea what RONEO meant
Off at a tangent…
I’m working my way through puzzlebook 14 (2006 cryptics) and am baffled by the answer to 19A in puzzle 40 which I hope somebody can explain:
They say a widow’s offering is not unlikely to (5)
The answer is MIGHT which I can see means “not unlikely to.” Is this a homphone clue indicated by “They say”?
As long as Richard Browne is still happy to provide me with lists of the original puzzle numbers, similar indexes for future Times daily and Jumbo books will be created when the books appear and will be added to this page.
Many thanks for the link to the index and the onwards links to your write ups. I’ll enjoy seeing how my experiences with each puzzle compare to yours.
I’ve solved four of the first 41 puzzles (16, 33, 35, 40) 100% correct without aids. After the event they all struck me as straightforward and I wasn’t surprised to see your times were between 5 and 7 minutes.
The one I’ve found hardest so far (no. 30/23282) turns out, as I thought, to be a Saturday puzzle.
Like Keriothe I had 25A as working=ON, daily perhaps=PAPER and was pleased by the “perhaps”. Didn’t know the poet (solved from wordplay) or the composer (solved from checkers) – why are setters so obsessed by these obscure folk?
Last Sunday’s Mephisto has still not appeared on the Crossword Club site.
Did you ever look at the TLS puzzle blogs? There must be some audience for puzzles like that. It’s a little too much for me, only because it centers on more recent material.
“This crossword built its reputation on references to things you would find in the mental lumber room of the average Oxbridge graduate or senior civil servant; they knew their King James Bible, their Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens. Now we are a much more homogenous society without that exclusive elite, so we have dropped a lot of the educational and literary references we used to have. The puzzle is now more a straight battleground of intelligence.”
Though not an Oxbridge graduate or senior civil servant, I used to quite like rummaging about in the mental lumber.
in the SE corner.
24dn went in quite late because although the answer had to be SPAT I couldn’t justify it until I recalled seeing a film about the US military called TAPS and remembered this is the name of a bugle call, the equivalent (at one time) of Last Post in the British army.
The corresponding 4-letter word in the NE also took time and my caution at writing in my first thought BURN was justified by eventually coming up with BARK as a better solution.
The unknown poet at 13dn held up progress in the SE and resulted in a very slow finish.
I understand “Tyger” is the original spelling used in Blake’s poem but it was spelt with an ‘I’ in whichever anthology we used at school when I first met it and I wasn’t aware of any other possibility.
A smattering of interesting new titbits (Orlando Gibbons, taps, roneo) kept the interest level up.
I thought 25 across was on = working, paper = daily rather than a DD.
‘Romeo’ is UK-centric, but I must have picked it up from Muriel Spark or something. On the other hand, I wasn’t really conscious that ‘romaine’ is US-centric, since it is the vox propria over here.
There is a bit of an misunderstanding of 8 down in the blog; ‘reveal lonely heart, perhaps’, obviously refers to a bridge hand, where ‘singleton’ is customarily used to describe the presence of only one card in a given suit. I’m surprised Jim didn’t get you on this.
COD to TUDOR ROSE for bringing back memories of Sunday lunch in Virginia Water.
Clearly it has been used in written word enough times for it to exist, but where should a crossword draw the line with popular corruptions or mis-spellings. I vaguely recall clues pointing to slang words such as PINTA or CUPPA but these would have been clearly signposted as slang or vernacular. At what point does a common corruption such as BRUVVAZ for instance, enter the dictionary or the crossword ?
19 came reasonably early. I associate GIBBONS with only 3 names – Stanley, Stella and Orlando.
Ones I didn’t understand today were 7d and 23d…
COD to SIGMA. Incredibly, and again within a day or two, last in RUTH!!
I liked the SIGMA clue.
Found a sufficient challenge in a majority of the clues to prevent this being an easy solve for me. I read the lonely heart as a clever bridge reference. No problem in seeing CHATTERTON. I know as much about him (English Poet died young) as I do about TITAN (moon of one of the planets) so both equally obscure/clear (take your pick) as far as I am concerned
I was moved to post by the trouble I had with 23dn, where I found myself torn between two plausible answers, neither of which turned out to be correct.
After first reading of clues I tentatively wrote in ‘Scrum’ thinking it was a cryptic def. (front row, second row, back row, all of whom must ‘bind down’ so could be thought of as binders). Then when I got 28ac and realised it must end in S, I changed my answer to FILES, now reading the clue as a double def, which I was now 100% confident about.
It struck me as very unusual to find two ‘wrong’ answers, both of which (in my view) seemed to fit the clue 100% – was really just wondering if anyone else had a similar experience.
As you can imagine this played havoc with my SE corner on an otherwise relatively simple puzzle. With 21ac now finishing in F, I was particularly proud of myself for inventing the answer “double gaff”. This not only seemed to fit gaff=variant of gaffe(something accidental) and also gaff=where one lives (accommodation), but also sums up my solving efforts today rather nicely.
A double flat in music would be used in a key like D-flat major for a flattened degree in the scale – you would not write the flattened sixth in this key as A natural, for example, but as B double flat, even though it is the same note on a piano. This is called an enharmonic spelling.
baseball while doing them. The chap who supplies my eyewear is from Goa. He says he’s Goan.
Some hackles raised here…..
http://www.colaco.net/1/GoaNiz.htm
Back to baseball…and to download today’s, Thursday’s.