A tough one, this, which took me past the 30 minute mark by 2.22, but hey, at least I was error free. At the time of writing, everyone else on a small sample has a single error, and I’ve already wasted some time trying to figure what this might be. For me, the main retardant factor was/were the many well-disguised definitions, leaving very little chance of bunging in from definitions. Just to throw you off the scent, there’s the odd barely cryptic clue which might well leave you floundering looking for something more complex.
It might help you to solve this thing if you are a charismatic Christian with a penchant for Yiddish, French and cricket, though I expect that narrows the field rather. Here’s how I extracted the wheat from the chaff.
Across
1 PICOT Decorative loop
At a stretch, you could make this apply to François-Édouard Picot, purveyor of tasteful pre-photographic pornography to French salons, but it’s really just a loop of some kind in fabric. Easy wordplay, thank goodness: CO, the conventional crossword firm, held by PIT, that sort of mine.
4 FORESIGHT Vision
As in seeing something before it happens. ORES are minerals, FIGHT is box. Insert part a into part b.
9 SQUARE LEG position in field
Easy if you’re into cricket, just giving you just, SQUARE, left L, and say EG. Roughly where the umpire stands when he’s not behind the stumps.
10 LIFERperson given sizeable bird
Bird is one of those many euphemisms for a prison sentence, here derived form CRS bird lime/time. Hidden and reversed in featuRE FILm
11 COZENS Tricks
I thought the wordplay was in the blink-and-you-miss-it category. You get the COS from “for informally”, deriving from “because”. ZEN is a branch of Buddhism (and a useful word in Scrabble).
12 EMENDATE Fix
Appointment provides you with the DATE to tack onto the back of E(nergy) MEN (people)
14 DRAG ONES FEETKind of &lit
If you want to go fast, you would have to take a revisionist attitude to dragging your feet. The revision of GO FAST? ER, NEED gives you the not-fast practice.
17 ALADDINS CAVE place of treasure
A boy’s gives A LADS. Watch is CAVE, public school slang for look out or beware, which you would know if you paid attention in Latin classes. The Romans used to warn people of the family dog with a mosaic including the words cave canem, this onefrom Pompeii. Tricky if the dog died: you’d have to rearrange al those little bits of stone, and cave gerbillinam probably doesn’t suggest the same threat level. Keep cave, by extension, means to keep a lookout.
When you’ve worked that out, set ALAD’S and CAVE around D(aughter) IN. Open sesame.
20 PINT-SIZE pocket
As in pocket battleship, a smaller version of the real thing such as the Graf Spee. “Unusual” telegraphs an anagram, count through the letters until you get to 8 and you’ll have ZIP SET IN.
21 BOWYER one provided for the Archers
The grammar works thus: one (of this profession) provided (material, sc bows) for the Archers. In the wordplay, the country cottage turns out to be a BOWER (especially if you’re being poetical) and Yen provides the Y, or I suppose strictly the ¥, to be inserted
23 CARPI Bones
Specifically of the wrist. You have three words all translating to CARP, two verbs and a noun. Add “one”.
24 OVERDRAFT a figure in red
Comprised of completed = OVER and sketch = DRAFT,a and not variations on DRAWN.
25 DIRIGISME state control
Desperate = DIRE, one is i (and all alone?) and device is GISMO, which for our purpose has to be cut short.
26 NASTY rank
Line is DYNASTY, from which you remove the leading couple of letters
Down
1 POSTCODE conclusion to address?
Not if you’re a kid and adding England, UK, Europe, the Earth, Solar sytem, Outer spiral arm, the Galaxy, the Universe to your address to make it really complete. Following POST, joke COD, ultimately lame E.Took ages to spot that definition and that LUD is not a word meaning joke.
2 CHUTZPAH Audacity
Means dam’ cheek in Yiddish. A boy kills both his parents and pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan. CHurch, state is UTAH, unknown Z and Power for the P. Assemble. Nice to have a whole state and not just its abbreviation.
3 TORONTO BLESSING Varied reactions of worshippers.
Some of us were rather hoping the rest of the world had forgotten this, and it’s quite a surprise to find it both in a crossword and the dictionaries. The Toronto blessing has a specific start date and place, January 1994 at Toronto Airport Vineyard Church, and was a form of Christian revivalism characterised by wild and unpredictable behaviour. According to taste, it was either a wonderful outpouring of the Holy Spirit which we just have to import into our Church, or an outbreak of hysterical behaviour which we certainly wouldn’t want to see at Evensong, thank you very much. Derive it (if you can) from TO RON (boy) + TO (again) B(ritish) LESSING (novelist, Doris I think).
4 FOLD Triple definition
Perhaps deliberately in close proximity to the previous clue. Fold can mean gather, as in pleat, Church, as in “other sheep I have which are not of this fold”, and close as in what a company will do when bankrupt.
5 RAGAMUFFIN little scruff
As in street urchin. Paper is RAG (especially if our dear sister paper, the Sun) MUFFIN is, in some confectioners universe, a roll*. You need to tear a space for the innocent little A.
* for the benefit of our Stateside friends, a muffin is not an oversized, over sweetened cake with blueberries in it, but a bready thing you get your fag** to toast over an open fire, and you then consume it with butter. I believe you call them English muffins. In the current UK, sadly, it’s more likely to be an oversized….
** oh, dear, I can see this getting awkward.
6 SILENCE IS GOLDEN Peace
…is the only definition I can conjure out of the clue. Or in the worplay is GOLD(EN) which in the proverbial sense is the equivalent to SILENCE. This might be a sort of strained &lit, or perhaps wordplay without definition. Not my candidate for clue of the day: needs more work, I think, though I’m open to enlightenment.
7 GUFFAW a loud laugh
Codswallop is, in one of its senses, nonsense, here represented by GUFF. Add A(nswer) and W(ith).
8 TURKEYFaiure
An old jailer is a TURNKEY. Remove his N(ame)
13 RENDEZVOUS Meeting
Chaotic signals a rather unlikely looking anagram. Use DOZENS RUE V(ery)
15 MAN YEARS such a lot of work
Split the answer 4,4 and you have MANY EARS, bags/lots of corn
16 SECRETLY in disguise
Flash provides the SEC(ond), count (more usually with on) gives RELY. Bottom of street in a down clue gives T. Assemble
18 SPICED with mace
The question mark shows we have an example of spice. An agent “tailed” (as in topped and tailed) gives SP(y). ICED for finished off turns up again
19 SNORER One sleeping soundly
Ie with a lot of noise. Almost a cryptic clue!
22 PEKE dog
Sounds like peak, top.
However, on the other side of the coin 3dn TORONTO BLESSING is news to me – so biffed it.
45 mins roughly held up in SE corner by 26ac NASTY and 16dn SECRETLY. And COD 15dn MAN YEARS.
horryd Shanghai
As the hour approached I used aids to check the unlikely “torpedo” or “tornado” BLESSING and in the process chanced upon the correct answer. The unknown COZENS then made itself a likely candidate and I checked that too.
Having effectively cheated at that point I gave up the ghost and decided to check another unknown, EMENDATE, that I’d constructed from wordplay, which proved to be correct. I also looked up DIRIGISTE, the only word I knew that fitted the checkers at 25ac but I couldn’t remember what it meant, and in the process discovered DIRIGISME.
But where things really unravelled was the SE corner where I had “OVER (completed), DRAW (sketch), N (figure – number) with definition “in red” and was so convinced it was correct I used a solver to look for solutions to the impossible 16dn (?E?R?N?Y) where the only hit was “zebrinny” (the offspring of a male horse and a female zebra) which may be of some use to me in the future, but not today unfortunately. Having ruled out the impossible I looked for errors and eventually came up with OVERDRAFT as an alternative at 24ac.
A Google search on TftT reveals that the blessing, EMENDATE and COZENS have not come up before and DIRIGISME only once, in 2008, when I was just starting out here but not as yet blogging, I think.
For what it’s worth, like our blogger, I can’t quite see 6dn either.
This started well enough for me but turned into something of a nightmare. I had also lost time looking for a pangram, hoping that any missing letters might be of some assistance with the unsolved clues but the setter had not obliged as J and X were never to be found.
Edited at 2016-03-17 06:16 am (UTC)
Edited at 2016-03-17 08:32 am (UTC)
Nice chewy puzzle. COD to MAN-YEARS, perhaps.
Thanks setter and Z.
Liked the rest of this difficult puzzle, with the 15/16/21/26 area taking lots of time by itself. LOI was SECRETLY which now has to be COD for the natty vampire image.
A tip of the hat to Zed too for sorting all this out – though I did note with concern the absence of a superscript marking after a certain proprietary board game.
On the “Tremeloes” clue, I think “Peace — or” can just about translate to “Silence is golden” if one adopts the pseudo-Verlainesque algebraic approach to parsing. (Interestingly, Collins lists the heraldic “or” as an adjective – “of the metal gold” – while Oxford gives it as a noun.)
Regarding the Canadian clue, the Vineyard group of churches, of which the Toronto church in question was a member till it was thrown out in the wake of all the laughing and roaring, was founded by John Wimber, who was instrumental in the formation of The Righteous Brothers.
As for the puzzle my experience rather mirrored Jack’s, and I needed a little help to finish the SE corner. Although I had NASTY, I couldn’t see how it worked till I came back to the puzzle later, and I too had “overdrawn” at first, which made the tricky SECRETLY even trickier.
And I was another “dirigiste” for good measure, so a comprehensive win to the setter – or. in Toronto parlance, I was well slain by the Spirit.
So I won’t.
Thanks for the blog, Z8. That must have taken a while. Do you think the Romans ever used their mosaics to spell out things like “Beware of the Dachsund”, like our neighbours?
Had vague memory of the Tronto thingy and trusted the wordplay for EMENDATE.
Overall not really my cup of tea but a reasonable challenge that I sort of enjoyed
Thought 6d was OK given the or = gold angle.
Guessed TORONTO once I had COZENS
Very nice puzzle (with one wrong) 35 minutes.
A Toronto Blessing sounds worryingly like a Glasgow Kiss. “Are you looking at my moose buddy? Well stitch that!”
I wasn’t exactly familiar with picot, cozens & emendate. I quite enjoyed the quirkiness of this puzzle and LIFER was a highlight.
As usual my attempt to spot a pangram got as far as crossing off the first Z.
Had vaguely heard of 3dn, but wordplay was clear enough, which was not the case for 6dn, though it was pretty obvious what was needed there.
A very good puzzle though, I thought: meaty and unpredictable.
Edited at 2016-03-17 08:14 pm (UTC)
Edited at 2016-03-17 11:51 pm (UTC)
What a waste of my time! I’ve never come across such self-indulgent clueing – not even in The Guardian!
Despite all that, very enjoyable puzzle, I thought.
Luckily I didn’t think of OVERDRAWN, but did think of both DIRIGISME and DIRIGISTE and had no problem choosing the right one. I don’t recall coming across TORONTO BLESSING before. Don Manley’s handiwork, I wonder?
An interesting and enjoyable puzzle.
I too suspect the work of the Don.
I also had dirigiste, overdrawn and zebrinny.
Doris Lessing was a guest speaker at my high school (Waterford KamHlaba) in Swaziland in 1990 or 1991. Although she might technically have been British, (through her parents – she was born in Iran), she was very much Southern African (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe mostly). She was one of two Nobel prize winners that I met at my old high school, the other one being Nelson Mandela in the time between being released from gaol, but before he became president.
Jezz in Hong Kong