28030 Thursday, 15 July 2021 Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive

Author   ZabadakPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I liked this rather well, despite or perhaps because of its somewhat quirky nature and occasional oblique use of the crossword language. I don’t think there’s much in the vocab to frighten anyone though the composer is perhaps (undeservedly) in the less familiar column. The longest words have, in my opinion, a pleasing quality to them, the sort of words you’d want to slip into conversation if you remembered them in time. The surface readings of the clues are consistently excellent, for the most part looking like perfectly normal strands of English rather than contrived crossword clues, but the wordplay is also spot on.
I slipped through in a gentle 18.46, with a fair bit of time checking at the end to make sure I’d correctly divined the answers and their constructions, which helped in at least one instance where I was unsure of the spelling. The resulting conclusions I’m happy to present with clues in italics, definitions therein also underlined, and SOLUTIONS standing out in bold capitals.

Across
1 Figure doing poet harm? (8)
METAPHOR It helps to understand an implicit “of speech” to catch this type of figure. Doing is your anagram indicator (Chambers has “to beat up, thrash, assault” as informal meanings of do), so play with the letters of POET HARM
5 Old boy with fly catches first of common carp (6)
OBJECT O(ld) B(oy) plus JET for fly (we’re jetting/flying off to Bulgaria ‘cos it’s on the green list) and “catch” the C, first of Common. Surface: yes indeed, you can fly fish for carp.
9 Rocks and water guarding top-class freezer (8)
ICEHOUSE ICE as in G&T on the rocks, water is then a verb producing HOSE surrounding the “Mitford” top-class U.
10 Target six clubs with German backing (6)
VICTIM Six is VI (be thankful the setter resisted the temptation to put sex clubs), add C(lubs) and German for with, MIT, reversed (backing).
12 Look, media queries regularly reveal a compulsion to match colleagues (4,8)
PEER PRESSURE Look gives PEER, media gives PRESS, and the even letters (regularly) of qUeRiEs provide the rest.
15 Poor old American introduced to lady without notice (5)
LOUSY O(ld) US for American into LadY without the AD notice.
16 Shame about a diver’s descent (9)
PATERNITY A slightly lateral definition: paternity is inter alia is your origin on you fathers side, so a description of your descent. Shame is PITY (pity/shame about the clue), insert A TERN for a diver/diving bird. I’m assured it’s something they do.
18 Poet with horrible old retro GI uniform (5,4)
OLIVE DRAB …which Chambers says is the olive green of American military uniforms. Reverse (retro) everything of BARD (poet) EVIL (horrible) and O(ld). Already the third time O(ld) has turned up.
19 One gives nothing away about computer game returns (5)
MISER Cutesy definition. About is RE, and the computer game a SIM, the whole reversed (returns)
20 Pass over present that may divert sailors (12)
CROSS CURRENT Simple enough: pass over: CROSS, present: CURRENT.
24 Ideal location: best one’s in centre of square (6)
UTOPIA Best: TOP, one: I, centre of square:UA. Insert first two bits into third.
25 Smart bear nicking king’s desktop device (8)
INKSTAND I think the setter intends smart as indicating fashionable, hence IN. Bear gives you stand when you treat both as verbs. “Nick” or insert K(ing). As I recall, Yogi was “smarter than the average bear”, but tended to nick pickernick baskets.
26 Having a go at tiresome job for judge (6)
TRYING I have this as a triple: Having a go at, tiresome and job for judge all translate thus.
27 Mirror orders occasionally incomplete logo (8)
RESEMBLE You only need the alternate (occasionally) letters of oRdErS and then most of EMBLEm, logo, for the rest.

Down
1 Help individual to crack nuts (4)
MAID Somewhere along the line from female servant to lady who does, help morphs into maid. Individual gives you just the I (one, again), which cracks, breaks into MAD for nuts.
2 Turn up suitable bucket (4)
TEEM Many days recently it has teemed and/or bucketed down with rain (it was Wimbledon) Suitable is MEET, a rather old-fashioned meaning but fair enough. “It is meet and right so to do”. Oh, and reverse (turn up)
3 Convert polyester for weaving (9)
PROSELYTE Pick the right ends for the definition and the anagram indicator. Convert is here a noun, the answer deriving from the “woven” letters of POLYESTER, slightly to my surprise.
4 Design super robots to save energy making rackets (12)
OBSTREPEROUS In which I was saved from an error by counting the available Os and Es . It’s an anagram (design) of SUPER ROBOTS plus E(nergy)
6 Composer twice drinks litre before start of symphony (5)
BLISS Arthur, in this case. Among other things, Master of the Queen’s Music from 1953 to his death in 1975. Twice gives BIS (musical notation, and what the French say when we would use their other word encore). BIS “drinks”, takes in L(itre) before the S from the start of Symphony.
7 Fan like this in part of the UK visiting the Orient (10)
ENTHUSIAST Todays matryoshka clue. Like this, THUS inside N(orthern) I(reland), still part of the Brexit tangled UK, and then both in EAST for Orient.
8 Medic in row with CID logs in here (10)
TIMBERYARD Those logs. Medic is MB, in TIER for row, then YARD for CID via Scotland Yard
11 Growth expert organised Anglicans gathering underground (12)
PROTUBERANCE Expert PRO, organised RAN, CE Anglicans (Church of England) “gathering” TUBE for underground, what Londoners call their subway/metro network
13 Dracula’s health indicator? (5,5)
BLOOD COUNT Oh yes! Amusing double definition, the first a plausible version of Dracula in popular imagination.
14 I tot up minutes perhaps in modest study of scores, etc (10)
MUSICOLOGY I plus SUM reversed (“up”, this is a down clue) then LOG for minutes, perhaps set in COY for modest.
17 Recall past rock group is boring in church (9)
REMINISCE REM is the rock group (don’t be put off by past, it’s part of the definition) the IS “bores”, penetrates, IN CE (that version of church again)
21 Shoot scene running round island (5)
SCION I’m more used to scion as a descendent, child of, but it’s also shoot as in a bit of a plant. SC(ene) plus ON  for running round I(sland)
22 Counter bachelor’s gibe (4)
BARB  BAR for that sort of counter, plus B(achelor)
23 Woodcutter has a nap, ignoring hole (4)
ADZE Familiar enough for those of us trying to get rid of a tricky Z in Scrabble. A nap is A DOZE. I don’t think I’ve seen the O represented by “hole” hereabouts, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. Ignore it, anyway.

58 comments on “28030 Thursday, 15 July 2021 Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive”

  1. Better times are here again Time 31:30 minutes. Fortunately I saw 1ac METAPOHOR (FOI) straightaway, and the sinister side was done and dusted in under ten minutes.

    However, I slowed to the right – then they arrived thick and fast.

    LOI 27ac RESEMBLE – that sort of mirror – not the Red Top or the one ‘on the wall’.

    COD 16ac PATERNITY

    WOD 9ac ICEHOUSE – all the Great Halls had one for keeping the champagne and pineapples, as Trollope pointed out.

    I wonder if there ever was a person called Olive Drabb? Who the Dickens would know?

    On edit: Ancestry show a few in America – the best of which is, I kid you not,

    Vera Similitude Ruth Less Olive Drab b. 1905 California.

    Whoever next!?

    Edited at 2021-07-15 02:00 am (UTC)

    1. >>>I wonder if there ever was a person called Olive Drabb?

      For me, the term always reminds me of the hapless Olive from “On The Buses” who was indeed a rather drab personality. (Only UK TV addicts of a certain age know this, apologies to everyone else)

      As for the puzzle, I thought this was one of the most difficult 20% I’ve encountered recently – though possibly I got up too early, after too late a night. Nowhere near completion (especially SE corner) after an hour’s head-scratching,

      Stuff I learned today:
      OBSTREPEROUS = loudly bad-tempered, not just bad-tempered
      MEET = suitable (completely unknown to me)
      CID = YARD (should have worked that out, I’m blaming sleep-deprivation)

      Best wishes, Denise

      1. Even as a kid I disliked the treatment meted out to Olive’s character in OTB. It was such mean, cruel, mysogynistic writing. And her horrible bully of a husband. Ugh. How was that supposed to be funny? I just found it nasty and depressing.
        1. Anna Karen, who played Olive, was unrecognisable off-screen. She was actually a very attractive lady.
  2. I didn’t know PROSELYTE and put my letters in the wrong order. It didn’t help that I thought convert was the anagrind and I was looking for a word something to do with weaving. Also, got the wrong end of the stick on ICEHOUSE, where I thought OUSE was the water and wondered how H was top class. I also had to use the letters to make sure how OBSTREPEROUS was spelled. Didn’t know that meaning of SCION either, but the wordplay didn’t allow anything else.

    Edited at 2021-07-15 02:28 am (UTC)

  3. Glad to be back on track after ending my almost Italian unbeaten run with a careless ‘resin’ yesterday. I ended with OBSTREPEROUS, after attempting to spell it with an an aitch and running out of letters. Last one PROSELYTE, where I was looking at the wrong end of the clue. PROTUBERANCE is a fine word and one I often use, especially in internal monologues…

    Thanks to the ever elegant Zed and of course the setter, whoever ze might be.

  4. Lovely blog, as always – thanks, Z. I enjoyed this one, with a rare sub-Kevin and sub-ulaca time.

    Like others, I carefully checked the anagrist to spell OBSTREPEROUS. And I was helped by knowing PROSELYTE and SCION from my theological interests. I also like the matryoshka-style clues.

  5. I seem to have had much the same experience as paulmcl. I thought my pink squares were going to be for ICEHOUSE where I’d thought the water was “Ouse” and so had a doubtful H for “top-class”. But in fact my error was PROTELYSE. I had heard of the word but I read “Convert” as a verb and was thinking of “proselytise”. One of those errors where no matter how long I’d thought about it I’d probably have put in the same answer so at least I’m not left rueing my haste.
  6. Another puzzle on the harder side for me but I finished in 44 minutes which is a vast improvement on yesterday.

    I struggled with PROSELYTE – one of those words I vaguely know of but can never remember what it means. I remembered SCION as a shoot so must have met it in a previous crossword. OLIVE DRAB has baffled me before but not for long today after I’d given up trying to make OGDEN NASH fit the wordplay at 18ac. The second word in 8ac took a long time to surface.

  7. I derived ICE from rocks equating to diamonds rather than via G&T. Didn’t like ‘doing’ as an anagram indicator and have no idea why a hole should be round and, therefore, be taken as an ‘o’.
      1. Llantrisant – the hole with the mint!

        Edited at 2021-07-15 09:29 am (UTC)

  8. 33 minutes with LOI INKSTAND, disappointed that Yogi didn’t fit in. COD to REMINISCE, not that there was much danger of losing my religion with all the references to the Church of England. I groaned when I saw a computer game referenced, expecting to be clueless, but I did know of SIM from when my children were younger, although they preferred Football Manager, FIFA and no doubt Grand Theft Auto when I wasn’t looking. I found this quite tough and was pleased to get here in one piece. Thank you Z and setter.
  9. 9:22. I liked this, a bit quirky as z8 says. I did about half of it very quickly indeed but then slowed down.
    I like matryoshka clues too, but I don’t like Russian dolls. So full of themselves.
    1. That’s one of the reasons I do the Cryptic and the Concise in the ToL. The first readers’ comment I came across was interesting: “CsP” say the Times’ crosswords are computer generated these days. I would have thought not!
      1. I don’t believe so, but setters do indeed get a lot of software support these days. The grids are filled in by software, or suggested at least. And for any given word, lists of previous clues can potentially be accessed. How far they are, I would not know. But there is probably a little bit of recycling going on. That would bother me more if I could remember a given clue for more than a day or two.
        1. I agree with your last sentence. I may have already told you this but a birthday card I received from a friend in the UK back in May had on the front something like:
          “xxxx knew he still had a photographic memory, but it no longer provided a same-day service” !
        2. 5 weeks used to be my clue-retention estimate, 10 years ago. I always did the crossword on paper in Rupert’s Australian organ, where it was published about 5 weeks after its Times outing. I was often travelling, would buy or find (in airports) a Times, and do the crossword. 5 weeks later I’d usually be about 3/4 of the way through the puzzle before I realised it was one I’d already done.
          I consider that a real bonus – you can keep doing the same crosswords over and over again, no need to wait for the latest offerings from the setters.
          2. I had the same experience visiting Australia. The hotel I was staying at in Sydney provided various newspapers for free in the dining room, and I was over halfway through the crossword before I thought that it seemed a bit familiar. But I didn’t put two and two together until the next day when the crossword had 1A with one of those words that only comes up in a crossword about once every two years, so is sufficiently memorable. So then I checked a few more clues and realized that The Times crossword must be licensed by the Australian paper.
            1. One fellow in Australia always comments on my every-other-Sunday blog with a lag of a couple weeks.
  11. I spent 11 mins on the last 5 clues, 4 of which were in the SE corner. Still, I enjoyed the puzzle. One query, though: “mirror” = RESEMBLE?
    COD to BLOOD COUNT and OLIVE DRAB. With the latter I was looking for the name of a poet for too long.
    PROSELYTE was good, too. As Z indicates, it was very easy to pick the wrong anagram indicator and thus lead you astray.
    Belated PS: TIMBERYARD struck a chord with me. I am currently re-reading “The Woodlanders” by Thomas Hardy.

    Edited at 2021-07-15 08:58 am (UTC)

    1. >>>With the latter I was looking for the name of a poet for too long

      I had a grid with 5|4 and the first word begiing “O”…
      …that’s gotta be OGDEN NASH!

  12. Had no idea what an ADZE was, so relied on the wordplay. The ‘yard’ in TIMBERYARD didn’t come until I figured out PATERNITY, and I spent a while trying to make an anagram out of ‘o retro gi u’ for 18a until I got the B at the end and realised otherwise. SCION was my LOI when I remembered that ‘scene’ can simply give you ‘sc’ and the penny dropped that the ‘running’ actually was doing something in the clue.

    FOI Metaphor
    LOI Scion
    COD Proselyte

  13. 18:17 getting becalmed after a good start and finishing with SCION. I tried in vain to understand why 8D was TIMBERSHED until I discovered it wasn’t when I couldn’t solve 16 and 19A. Bunging in CISE for the last 4 letters of 17D didn’t help either. I liked BLOOD COUNT.
  14. The setters make puzzles for us
    Our OBJECT is TRYING to suss
    A fast solve is BLISS
    I can but REMINISCE
    My brain just stepped in front of a bus
  15. I did like BLOOD COUNT – as I had never thought of the vampiric link before. Christmas cracker stuff! LUMBERYARD seemed more natural for us Yanks (semi-Lit), but TIMBERYARD it was. COD to OBSTREPEROUS lovely anagram. Time 14.44

    Edited at 2021-07-15 09:40 am (UTC)

  16. It has just come back to me – we used to go to a bar in Icehouse Street, Lang Kwai Fong, Central, Hong Kong before the ‘Handover’. Lord Ulaca?

    Edited at 2021-07-15 09:49 am (UTC)

    1. Best known watering house on Ice House Street is the Foreign Correspondents Club, whence I have just returned after an unsuccessful quiz night. American state flags, for goodness sake!
        1. Chile is identical to Texas, which always startled me when I pass the Chilean Embassy on Eaton Place
  17. Some great stuff. Liked BLOOD COUNT and plenty else. A happy 30 mins with no quibbles.
  18. Strange coincidence: in the latest (next week’s) issue of the Radio Times for that 3×3 thing at the back where you have to get words by tracing round, the letters are there for POLYESTER, but they break the other rules. So 3dn was easy.
  19. Finally getting round to commenting after a period in the wilderness. 46 mins but another with PROTELYSE which I wasn’t happy about so I looked it up. Boo hoo. I quite liked this today, tricky in parts and some good mind stretching. FOI OBJECT, LOI RESEMBLE, and I also saw ROCKS=DIAMONDS=ICE. Thanks z and setter.
  20. Convinced it was OBSTREPOROUS. Held me up for ages. LOI SCION never heard of that meaning.
    34 minutes after completing half of it 10.
  21. I got off to a flying start with MAID, TEEM and METAPHOR. ICE for rocks went in with a posited CREAM, which I wasn’t happy with as it ignored the water. OBSTREPEROUS confirmed my misgivings, but HOUSE didn’t appear until the very end as my LOI. In the meanwhile BLOODCOUNT raised a smile and I gave up trying to juggle polyester into a word for weaving when PEER PRESSURE, OLIVE DRAB and LOUSY put me right. I also enjoyed the Matryoshka clues, which I duly assembled from the instructions. There was a long pause at 8d while I searched for some cops that might store timber. 25:21. Thanks setter and Z for the usual erudite and amusing blog.
  22. In my childhood there was a Yogi bear bar – a foil-wrapped chocolate lolly for kids. On TV in about 1970 during the 4 PM cartoons, the ads said: “Smarter than the average chocolate bar”. Funny the memories it brings back.
  23. Good puzzle, first rate clues. Yes, I was hoping for Yogi bear, Pooh being one of very little brain. Z’s heading was MEET, given that yesterday was Bastille Day and old Wordsworth thought the revolution promised some kind of UTOPIA. He also had high hopes of Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti but that hasn’t worked out too well either. 17.41
  24. … again, this time struggling in the SE corner, where BARB and RESEMBLE refused to fall. A nice crossword though with the matryoshka ENTHUSIAST getting a particular nod, not because it was tricky but just for its construction. Thanks to setter and blogger.
  26. ….somewhere behind those eyes ?” (“Electric Blue” by ICEHOUSE, a grievously underrated Australian band). Having REM in the same puzzle was a bonus.

    FOI METAPHOR
    LOI RESEMBLE
    COD PATERNITY
    TIME 8:19

    1. Started out being called “The Flowers” which presumably didn’t cut it. So changed their name. Can’t help myself is my favourite of theirs, but yeah, they were good.
  27. I got Olive Drab — I’ve seen it before in the Times — but I went with “Proletyse” which sounds better to my ear than “Proselyte”.
    Also needed aids for “Scion” — didn’t know it as a shoot.
    Good puzzle nevertheless.
  28. 13:47 this afternoon. Another in a succession recently of interesting and enjoyable puzzles, with a good number of concise and clever clues.
    I was totally misled by 18 ac “Olive Drab” where I was trying to sort out the name of a poet from an anagram of “o, retro, GI and u”. I still think she sounds like a writer of consistently poor doggerel.
    COD probably 17 d “reminisce” and nice to see, for the first time I can recall, one of the all time great rock bands making it into a 15 x 15. Or maybe somebody knows differently?
    Biffed the “ink” part of 25 ac “Inkstand” so thanks Zed for the explanation and for a fine blog and to the setter.
  29. I think I made this harder than it was, but there you have it. A carelessly biffed LUMBERYARD held up OBJECT and pushed me just past the half hour mark. Thanks, z, for clearing some things up.
  33. Another trying to anagram 18ac into an unknown poet, mostly due to somehow overlooking the enumeration. Found a few of the long ones a bit impenetrable, so tricky and slow overall. Backformed proselyte from known proselytise, and no other unknowns
    Tricky but nice. Thanks setter and blogger.
  34. 15.29 a slow start but things came together and I picked up speed when I stopped thinking quite so hard about each clue. An engaging puzzle with some enjoyable misdirection.

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