24902 – My kingdom for a horse (but not a black and white stripey one)

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Not a lot under the hour, I’m afraid; time just slipped away. This was a strange mixture of the very easy and somewhat obscure. I wonder if anyone solved 1ac at first glance without any checkers? That and 8 across made it difficult for me to close out the NW quarter so I abandoned it for a while, went looking for easier pickings elsewhere and certainly found them in the lower half where in the last four Down clues the setter seemed to have run out of steam. My last one in was 16dn which was not helped by all the checkers being vowels. I have my doubts about one of the clues, but we’ll come to that in the blog…

* = anagram, “—-” = sounds like

Across
1 S,JAM,BOoK – This was gettable from the wordplay but I needed to check it as it was unknown to me. In South Africa, it’s a long stiff whip originally made of rhinoceros hide.
5 S(AGE)LY
8 CAR,TOUCHE – I’ve met the word before but had no idea what it was so once again I had to rely on the wordplay and ignore the definition.
9 ZE(B)Ro,A
11 A,WAKE – ‘Come to’ is the definition. A nice misdirection here might make one expect the A to come at the other end of the word.
12 ENIGMATIC – (Energy IM ACTING)*
13 ARTI(STI)C – IT’S reversed inside.
15 PIE(skeweR)CE – Can someone please persuade me that this clue works?
17 A,I(Recognised)-CON
19 ROUGH CUT – Double definition, one cryptic.
22 RIG,M(A,R)OLE – Rat and Mole are two characters in Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I knew the word meaning a  drawn-out process but I’m not sure I knew it is also a long, rambling story.
23 Deliberately omitted.
24 TROT,H – I think the word only survives in the traditional marriage service.
25 S(TEAM)BOAT – TEAM inside BOAST*. A packet is/was a mail-boat. In my student days there was a pub at Strand-on-the-Green called the Old Steam Packet but it’s not on Google so I assume it’s either defunct or has changed its name to the Egg and Lettuce or some such. I shall have to investigate further. Later: I found it on deadpubs.co.uk – it’s now a Cafe Rouge and they haven’t preserved its historic name.
26 FLORAL – (ALL FOR)*
27 EVERTON – NOT REVEaled reversed. It’s a soccer team.
Down
1 SICK AS A PARROT – I thought this saying originated in the world of soccer, possibly with some sort of reference to the dead parrot in Monty Python. It certainly came to prominence in the 1970s but Brewer’s quotes an example of its use dating from 1682. Perhaps a team manager had been reading The False Count by Aphra Behn and kept the phrase in mind for future use.
2 A,B(R)EAST
3 Deliberately omitted.
4 KICKED IN – Double definition, one cryptic.
5 STEP-IN – Any garment (or shoes) that requires no fastenings.
6 GAZ(UM,P)ING – One is gazumped if one agrees to purchase a property and then the vendor accepts a higher offer. This is another term that came to prominence in the 1970s but actually dates from earlier – in this case the 1920s. Its origin is the Yiddish ‘gazumph’ meaning to overcharge.
7 L,mOBSTER
10 ANCIENT BRITON – (INNOCENT BRAT I)* Cymbeline was a mythical king, apparently. I knew his name only from the title of a Shakespeare play that I have neither read nor seen performed.
14 STOMACHER – More ancient stuff. This time a V-shaped garment worn in the 16th century. I’ve never met this word before.
16 NOVEL,ESE – “Ease”. Shoddy writing.
18 RAG DOLL – (DOLLAR, Good)*
20 C(HERO)OT
21 CONSULt
23 S,OM,ME

16 comments on “24902 – My kingdom for a horse (but not a black and white stripey one)”

  1. 46:30, with 9, 6, & 7 LOI. I thought of Debra (dea(r) around br) before finally coming to ZEBRA, perhaps because a zebra isn’t a horse in my book (v.’Gregg’s Book of Horses’). Does 15ac work? Well, we got it, didn’t we? Is it a legitimate clue? I’ll defer to the elders; I, anyway, thought it was stretching things. I’d never heard of GAZUMP, which, like ‘shtum’, is evidently a Yiddishism that never crossed the pond. We’ve had CARTOUCHE sometime this year, or I’d never have got it. Jack, I admire your ability to get SJAMBOK from the wordplay; I’d never have been able to, but luckily the S A B checkers somehow triggered a faint memory.
  2. Stuck for a time on 1 ac. and 4 (too keen on mucked in), and finally on 21, for a 34 min. overall. Most of this went in pretty fast and 1 dn. on not halving my time. Thought a cartouche was a road by the sea so on the wrong track there; hesitant with the step-in … not the whole shilling as they used to say. Still, I like the line across of 13 and 15; sounds like a shop in Camden Market…
  3. And regarding 15, if you do what the clue says you act out its solution, which seems good enough as a definition given the accuracy of the second way in – ?
  4. 25 minutes again for the third day running. I enjoyed this puzzle, partly because I enjoy deriving words like SJAMBOK and STOMACHER from wordplay and then checking them out. If you do too, you should try the Crossword Club Monthly puzzle.

    CARTOUCHE has a number of meanings. Probably best known as an Egyptian hieroglyph it’s also a casing for a firework. It appeared recently in one of the bar crosswords.

    A ZEBRA is only a horse in the sense that both are members of the Equus tribe – so a bit of a stretch but the wordplay is so obvious it hardly constitutes a major problem

  5. 17 minutes. SJAMBOK went in second with only the B as a checker, so doesn’t quite meet the challenge. Pity it’s not Scrabble!
    Isn’t 15 a sort of &lit? It went in more easily for me than the SE, where even STEAMBOAT was a hold-up. My first shot at EVERTON, trying to break into the corner, was PELETON, in the hope that the cryptic would emerge later both to confirm the answer and (as it turns out) to correct the spelling.
    I don’t think I have ever kicked anything with my sole, so a bit of licence at 4 down, I think.
    ZEBRA is , after all, species Equus, and my grandchildren recognise a horse in pyjamas when they see one.
    CoD to the mildly elegant ENIGMATIC
  6. DNF: defeated by the NW. SJAMBOK completely beyond me; CARTOUCHE I ought to have spotted/worked out from wordplay (for some reason, ‘cuneiform’ emerged as a possibility); and though I thought of feet (‘solely’) never got as far as KICKED IN (probably didn’t believe it could begin with ‘k’).

    Thanks for a great blog, jackkt, and thanks to the setter for a stiff, but fair, challenge: I’ve had a good (if ultimately unsuccessful) work out.

  7. If a cop kicked in a door with his toe he would do himself more damage than the door. “Solely damage that door Danno”. Anyway, it gets my COD.
    1. I guess that shows a) I’ve never had to kick down a door and b) I’ve watched too many cop reality shows where they use one of those battering ram thingies. Whatever happened to the good old shoulder charge, as practised by Dixon of Dock Green’s younger colleagues?
  8. 41 minutes, but with STARBOK. I didn’t like it, but had considered and rejected SJAMBOK (patently not a word) and couldn’t come up with anything better. Hey ho.
    As Jack says, this was a curious mixture of the very easy and the obscure. I don’t mind the obscurity in itself because the wordplay was clear but somehow I found it a bit grindy. Probably just tired.
    I read PIERCE as an &lit.
  9. Needed two sittings to finish this one last night but enjoyed it – GAMUMPING, NOVELESE, CARTOUCHE, STOMACHER and SJAMBOK from wordplay which seems like a lot, but the wordplay in each case left little chance for error.

    Last in was ZEBRA, and it’s a pity “stripey” wasn’t added before horse

  10. After a smooth start I got stuck on several and took 45 minutes to finish. STOMACHER was completely new, but SJAMBOK I did recognize once I’d teased out the wordplay, which took some time. GAZUMPING was another late solve, mainly because the definition was not exactly transparent.

    I liked some of the inventive, and quite tricky clues.

  11. Another nice offering today. The long 1d was a great help in getting SJAMBOK. A weird word, but at least it was one I’d heard of – though I thought it was an animal like the springbok. Once I’d got the NW corner the rest of the puzzle went in smoothly, though not particularly quickly. 32 minutes
  12. 9:43 for me. I too found this a strange mixture of the very easy and the rather more tricky, though the only unfamiliar word was AIR-CON (unheard-of in Yorkshire when I were a lad). Since you ask, I solved 1ac straight away without any checkers, though it took me a few seconds rather than a glance. Last one in was ZEBRA.
  13. The more ancient among us will remember accusations of police brutality in the early 1960’s, when suspects alleged that officers of the South Yorkshire force had used sjamboks to elicit the “correct” answers from them during questioning. I remember visiting Hillsborough with Manchester United soon afterwards and joining in the chants of “rhino whips” directed at the duty police (who were NOT amused !)

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