24615 – A STING IN THE TAIL

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
 I hope I won’t be the only person to have found this difficult. I started out quite comfortably and for a while I thought I was heading for a respectable solving time (for me) of 30-40 minutes but it then became apparent  I was having difficulty cracking three of the four long answers. Having eventually worked these out and with the clock approaching an hour I then hit the brick wall that had been waiting for me in the SW corner where the combination of 21dn with no checkers in place, 22ac and 25ac delayed me for a further 30 minutes. I don’t rate this as a disaster from my POV because I was pleased to have unravelled some rather tricky clues and I didn’t use aids, but after a promising start it ended in disappointment. But thanks to the setter. It certainly wasn’t a dull one.

Across
1 BAD MOUTH – Ring = O mixed with (mud bath)*
5 DAMPER – I thought I was looking for a musical form or the title of a piece of piano music but it turned out to be one of the instrument’s working parts. Dampers are little pads of felt that stop strings vibrating as required. Their default position is against the strings but they are lifted off individually when a key is depressed and remain off until released. Alternatively all the dampers can be controlled at the same time by use of the sustaining pedal.
9 ROCKETRY – The T of ‘tulips’ in ROCKERY with reference to that tedious modern mantra ‘It ain’t rocket science”.
10 TIGRIS – The T of ‘Turkey’ followed by I(G)RIS.
12 APPROXIMATELY – This put up some resistance. It’s ‘request’ = APPLY around (taxi more)*. The definition is ‘about’.
15 YARDS – ‘For example’ = SAY around DR, all reversed. I was misled by ‘short’ for a while and wondered about querying it but on reflection I think it’s fine.
16 EXISTENCE – This took some untangling. ‘Back number’ is SIX reversed then TEN, all inside EC (European Community as ’twas at one time) and finally E for ‘English’.
17 PROCONSUL – PRO,CON,SULtan
19 This is one I’m leaving out. Please ask if baffled.
20 SHEPTON MALLET – M for motorway’ mixed with (lost elephant)*. This is a small town in Somerset famous for not very much though its proximity to the Glastonbury festival site may make it fairer game for some. Back in the 50s I had friends who lived there so it has always been on my radar but I suspect some overseas contributors may find the anagram difficult to crack until most of the checkers are in place.
22 WOODEN – WOO,DEN – My last in. I just couldn’t see it until I had the front checker in place. DEN for ‘office’ certainly didn’t leap out at me so I am consoled by COED and Collins not listing them as synonyms. Chambers does though and it’s really not a big leap anyway.
23 VERTEBRA – The first E of ’emerge’ sandwiched between VERT and BRA.
25 CHESTY – CHE (Guevara),STY. My last but two in. That the somewhat suggestive meaning took so long to occur to me I put down to years of clean living (!) Looking back at the last clue I now realise that if I had been solving them in strict order I might have already been thinking in the right sort of area.
26 INTEREST – The second meaning refers to simple interest on loans and investments etc.
 
Down
1 BARBARY APE – ‘Counters’ = BAR, BAR then YAP and the E from ‘bite’. The apes of Gibraltar and NW Africa.
2 DOC – The fish reversed.
3 ONEROUS – ‘Aggregate’ = ORE reversed inside ONUS.
4 TERGIVERSATE – Never ‘eard of it but worked it out eventually from GIVERS inside RAT all inside TEE. The meaning is exactly as in the clue ‘avoid the issue’ so those that knew the word may well have spotted it instantly.
6 ALIMENT – A(LIME)NT. ‘Nest-builder’ suggested a bird of some sort so I wasted time up that tree. This was one I eventually solved from the definition alone and worked backwards to think of ants nests.
7 PARTY ANIMAL – One of the very few gifts today, I thought.
8 RUSH – The drug slang misled me here, then I thought of REED which only fits half the clue and I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so more time was wasted here on what should have been an easy one.
11 MAGIC LANTERN – MAGI,CLAN,TERN – The definition led me straight to the answer and I didn’t even consider the wordplay until this minute.
13 PARSONS NOSE – S x 3 for ‘seconds’ mixed with (or one pan)* for the bit of the chicken I hope everyone throws away. It’s also called the ‘Pope’s nose’ which might be worth remembering for future puzzles.
14 MELBA TOAST – This seems to be ‘pound’= LB inside ‘flesh’ = MEAT then ‘one cooks’ = OAST. I’m a bit wary of it because I don’t think an oast cooks anything, it’s used for drying hops etc.
18 Omitted deliberately. Please ask if baffled.
19 DRAFTEE – D,RAFT,EE
21 TWOC – This ridiculous word cost me the best part of 30 minutes solving time and it was only after I worked it out that I managed to get the two answers that intersect. It’s an acronym apparently thought up by the police and it stands for Taking (or Taken) Without Owner’s Consent. I have now discovered that the following words are derived from it and are listed in Collins and or COED so are fair game for Times crosswords. You have been warned! Twocs, twoccing, twocced, twoccer, twocking and twocker. Chamber’s Slang Dictionary also has: twocer, twock and twok.
24 BYE – And it wouldn’t be a Times puzzle without a reference to cricket.

31 comments on “24615 – A STING IN THE TAIL”

  1. 38 minutes. It’s not often that an anagram gives me the giggles, but the image of a distracted elephant wandering down the M5 into Shepton Mallet really brightened my morning.
  2. I found this hard going too. However no problem with ‘twoc’ as twocking came up quite recently, possibly in inquisitor.
    Compliments for the blog.
  3. CHESTY was the one that held me up: I just didn’t split the red and the pen properly (note to self: red still means communist or a communist in Xwordspeak)and couldn’t believe big top would equal chesty. I still think I’m the only one with guilty adolescent memories of Chesty Morgan.
    Happy memories (though no elephants) of preaching at Shepton Mallet Baptist Church in my student days, so no problem there. TERGIVERSATE is one of those odd words that sort of sticks in the mind without any real appreciation of its meaning. Glad to be better educated today.
    I think TWOC is now rather out of date – my car was officially twoc’ed in November 1974, but abandoned (because only I knew how to make it go) in Birmingham on the day of the pub bombing.
    29 minutes total, felt like it should have been shorter. CoD to BARBARY APE, with a special award for deviousness to APPROXIMATELY and its casually tacked on definition.
  4. I have also seen twoc, or rather twoccer, before.. I remember complaining about it at the time!
    Overall I didn’t find this difficult – 16mins – but somehow a bit workaday. I am not sure it is the puzzle’s fault, can’t see anything wrong with it, in fact some of the surface readings are very smooth – more likely I am just feeling that way today.
    from here in the heart of Kent I can confirm that oast houses do/did have a heat source, a wood or charcoal fired stove or kiln, so technically I suppose they cook..
    1. Yes, I know there is a heat source but I understood it only serves to create the hot air that circulates and dries the hops laid out above in the same way that one might have warm air heating one’s home. It’s not cooking in my book.
  5. 12:09, which feels good but might have been quicker as I marked 1D in the grid as (3,7) rather than (7,3) so was looking for a short adjective and long animal name rather than the other way – BIG CRITTER or similar.

    I got SHEPTON MALLET quickly (never been, so probably from seeing a sign for it on the A303 on the way to my in-laws) and used that as my bridgehead for getting the other tricky long answers.

    I assume the source of the Tigris is in Turkey, making 10A an &lit/all-in-one.

    TWOC is a daft word but fun – I thought we might have had it in the Times puzzle in the recent past, but Google searches suggest not.

    What I like most about this puzzle is the perfectly fair indications that don’t come up routinely in crosswords – donors = GIVERS, and MAGI CLAN = “gift-bearing family” are the obvious examples.

  6. COD to ROCKETRY. As to performance I must tergiversate.
    (Actually couldn’t get 21,22,23 and failed to parse ONEROUS).
  7. Had all bar three (TERGIVERSATE, WOODEN and TWOC) in less than an hour, decided (wisely, as it turned out) that I’d get no further unaided (CHESTY had alerted me to the fact that this setter was of the quirky persuasion), got 4dn from aids and left the two in the SW unfilled. Should, perhaps, have got WOODEN, which might then have opened up TWOC.

    COD to CHESTY for giving me a Reg Varney style laugh.

  8. Well over the hour. Completely stymied by SHEPTON MALLET, TERGIVERSATE, ROCKETRY & most of the NE corner. Eventually put it down and finished it in a second sitting. I enjoyed it while the going was good, which makes me a fair weather solver, but I became increasingly frustrated with the village & in thinking tergiversate surely couldn’t be a word. Twoccing, on the other hand, has appeared at least once in the last ten years and I must have been particularly impressed by it at the time, because it has lodged like a bur(r) in my brain. COD to BARBARY APE, although I too enjoyed the MAGI CLAN.
  9. Failed in the SW corner, but kicking myself for it after reading the answers. Especially 25ac as I had in my mind Pen = Sty and Red = Communist but I couldn’t make the final leap.

    Glad to see how 3dn is properly parsed. I had ‘Stonerous’ as a type of aggregate, with ‘st’ being the weight that is cut.

  10. Those who work in hospitals will know TWOC as ‘trial without catheter’. Mr so and so can have a TWOC today.
  11. 29:10 .. SHEPTON (OE for ‘sheep enclosure’) MALLET’s fame probably depends on whether you regard four days of wandering around in the mud, drinking cider to a soundtrack of braying and bleating as time well spent. I’m talking about the Royal Bath and West Show, obviously, which for the farming folk of the region remains the high point of the year. My relatives among them tolerate the annual “hippie invasion” down the road with good grace and some amusement.

    Challenging and entertaining puzzle. CHESTY made me suspect the hand of an old friend of this site.

  12. Twoc, indeed! I won’t forget that one. Inspector Morse would have had no problem.

    About 50 minutes to do the rest.

  13. At first I thought this was going to be a bit of gentle relief following my mammoth struggles yesterday, but came unstuck with 14d / 6d / 10ac / 4d, and in the SW corner 21d / 22ac / 25ac blank.

    I resorted to aids to help with the first four, but the rest remainded resolutely unsolved. Came here to get 21d, at which point 22ac and 25ac fell into place immediately. Now trying to work out why it took me so long to realise that red = che (especially as I’d guessed the ‘c’), and pen = sty…

    While I struggled both yesterday and today, I enjoyed today’s far more, because of the clues that were solvable, rather than an hour of staring at a mostly empty grid…

  14. I found this extremely difficult. It took me just over two hours, admittedly with lots of breaks to do other things.
    Like others the SW caused the most problems, but there were difficulties elsewhere. Never heard of TERGIVERSATE or TWOC. Didn’t understand ONEROUS until checking here (so thanks). A number of fiendish clues that required painstaking unpicking (APPROXIMATELY, EXISTENCE, TERGIVERTHINGY).
    I liked MAGIC LANTERN but otherwise this was too difficult to be truly enjoyable. It’s been a tough couple of days!
  15. About 35 mins for all but those three in the SW (Chesty, Twoc, Wooden) which unfortunately beat me today. Would have liked to finish but overall this was a really satisfying puzzle with most answers requiring a good deal of thought but without much obscure/specialist knowledge.
  16. After 80 minutes or so resorted to aids to find the strangely named W. Country town, and then confirm that TWOC is a word. At least on the east side of the pond, that is. Overall, a very good if difficult puzzle, with a COD nod to APPROXIMATELY, which is a word that requires ambition to get into one of these crosswords in the first place. Regards.
  17. I have to concur with those who cited the satisfaction gained from having finished the thing to have been enough, tardiness notwithstanding.

    Did all bar the “magic three” in the SW in about 15, then gazed for at least another 15 at the little hole in the corner before tentatively going with CHESTY – didnt quite agree with CHE=RED, then finally realising WOO=seek to win, and immediately adding TWOC as a complete guess since I had never heard the word. Had previously spent a while trying to force the wordplay into any of KOOKEY, GOOFEY, LOONEY, reckoning that perhaps any word of the form _OO_EY (or EE) may conceivably mean gawky or awkward !!

  18. Came unstuck in the SW. Never heard of TWOC. Had an invetive solution for 25A TWENTY (=top, as in “double-top” in darts) red=tent pen=enclosing with=W and I couldn’t see why “a big” would be “Y” but I never came up with anything else. Oh well.
  19. I thought that this was very very hard. Like yesterday’s the clues were carefully and cleverly crafted and after 50 minutes had all but the three main suspects. Like most others above I had never heard of TWOC: once in, the other two were easyish.

    High hopes for tomorrow!!

  20. I took 40 minutes, a good 5 minutes of which was trying to get 10, having written RATE for 8, despite there being no obvious connection between ‘grass’ and ‘rate’. Eventually I saw TIGRIS and corrected my wrong answer for 8. I was also slow to realize that DAMPER could be a piano piece (nice bit of deception). 3 was a neat clue, and baffled me until I saw jakkt’s blog.

    TERGIVERSATE is one of those words one comes across only in crosswords.

    I’m not sure that ‘when’ in 18 is justifiable since it is otiose and interferes with the container indication. ‘As’ would be preferable since it would have one meaning on the surface (since) and another in the cryptic reading, complementing ‘in’.

  21. Scrabble enthusiasts might like to know that Chamber’s Scrabble checker allows only ‘twoccing’ and ‘twoccer’ whilst not recognsing ‘twoc’ itself.

    I forgot to query 14dn where I wondered about Melba toast being taken with salad as the clue has it. I might think of eating it with soup or more usually with pate or similar savouries that may have a salad garnish but otherwise I wouldn’t connect the two items.

    1. Wikipedia has “often served with soup and salad” so it must be true – though pate and similar seem more appropriate.
  22. Another slow one for me, 57 minutes, but again glad to have got there. Annoyed I didn’t see Wooden earlier – that would have got me Twoc and a more respectable finish. Very enjoyable quirky puzzle. Not too keen one ‘one cooks’ equalling ‘oast’ though.
  23. All but those three in about 35 min. Cheated to get WOODEN, then gave up. Considered TWOC but rejected the possibility, and would never have got CHESTY, as I continually read poorly written “E” as an “F”. Liked the lost elephant on the motorway, but COD to TIGRIS – very clever!

    Bye the bye: Some of us had problems renewing subs last year via Futurepay, where you were asked to reenter subscription details and were then billed twice. Well they are at it again! The secret in to ignore the subscription screen, and pester them ith e-mails.

    The problem would seem to be insufficient clearance time allowed between international charging and subscription expiry. Or possibly faulty reconciliation procedures. Very annoying and disappointing.

  24. It seems that every Times puzzle has a constant number of 4 entries I have never heard of before, and I’m surprised I can finish them at all (but eventually my brain does seem to acquire the right twist). SHEPTON MALLET required some help from the internet; it turns out I have been near there, but not actually there. After thinking MALLET while the grid was still empty, I finally, like vinyl1, settled for SLEPTON HAMLET which then refused to turn up on any map; after that failure it was easy to find the right anagram. My last two in were 22 and 21, but after thinking about DEN=office, WOODEN was easy to get and with the W in the middle of the “number” TWOC followed easily.
  25. I spent my Friday time allocated to crosswords solving Mephisto 2606 that the Crossword Club has still not put up on its web site, so didn’t tackle this or Thursday’s puzzle until Saturday morning.

    I though Thursday’s was tough and a bit arid whilst this was easier without being a give away and a great deal of fun. It took me under 25 minutes so no harder than average so far as I’m concerned. I found the clues nicely logical and the definitions neat. My last in was TERG…. worked out from wordplay and checkers. I had heard of TWOC – it has appeared if not here then in one of the better crosswords before.

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