I made it through this in 18.45, which suggests a puzzle of moderate challenge, though I expect many to have queries about the naming of that delicious scent that fresh rainfall produces on contact with the earth. And some might be abso-blooming-lutely flummoxed by one of those Greek words for a figure of speech. Others might struggle with one of those Irish words which is pronounced nothing like what is appears to be. But for the most part, the wordplay is sufficiently generous to allow a fair if slightly suspicious stab at the entries. Unusually (I think) I counted three examples in this puzzle where the setter gives letters in plain sight.
Definitions underlined in italics, [abc] indicating excluded letters and the rest hopefully self-explanatory.
| Across | |
| 1 | Finish off flash young boxer? (3,2) |
| MOP UP – Flash is a brief MOment, and a young boxer (dog) is a PUP. Respace. | |
| 4 | Branch of govt supporting key area of London (8) |
| DEPTFORD – Branch of govt is DEPT, the abbreviation of government encouraging the abbreviation of department – nice touch, that! Supporting gives FOR, and the required musical key is D. | |
| 8 | In truth, Canada’s misrepresented somewhere far from Britain (7,2,5) |
| TRISTAN DA CUNHA – Actually as far from anywhere as it’s possible to be, with a history of habitation through sheer obstinacy. I remember it blowing up in 1961, its entire population camping out in the UK until returning a year later. Do read the history! For our purposes, it’s an anagram (misrepresented) of IN TRUTH CANADA’S | |
| 10 | Former con mostly had something for free (9) |
| EXTRICATE – former: EX, con mostly TRIC[k] and had: ATE | |
| 11 | Pipe coming from back of integrated shower (5) |
| DRAIN – The back end of [integrate]D plus a shower of RAIN | |
| 12 | Just joking about this is disgusting — it’s of zero value (6) |
| NOUGHT – I think this references the adding of -NOT! at the end of a statement: Google’s nascent AI says “it adds a bit of emphasis to a negative response, often with a playful or slightly sarcastic tone.” We insert UGH for this is disgusting | |
| 14 | Irish politician’s experience encompassing new computer-based tech (8) |
| TANAISTE – It’s the deputy to the even less spellable Taoiseach. Experience is TASTE and the N[ew] computer-based tech of the age AI is inserted. First appearance in the Times crossword? | |
| 17 | Swift movement of water I created when swimming (4,4) |
| TIDE RACE – Anagram (when swimming) of I CREATED | |
| 18 | Odd spots of dirt over the length of trimmed fabric (6) |
| DRALON – The odd letters of DiRt plus ALONG for over the length of with its last letter trimmed off. | |
| 20 | River — one in Russia not near any cities? (5) |
| RURAL – R[iver] plus the mighty URAL mostly in Russia and the border between Europe and Asia. | |
| 22 | By all means, stay overnight! (2,2,5) |
| BE MY GUEST – Two versions, the second perhaps more literal. | |
| 24 | Revised tutorial has to cover a US state (5,9) |
| SOUTH AUSTRALIA – An anagram (revised) of TUTORIAL with an insert of A US. One of the Orange one’s targets for an added State – not! (Yet?). | |
| 25 | Guy journeys round British islands (8) |
| HEBRIDES – Guy journeys: HE RIDES round B[ritish] | |
| 26 | Scorer in South American cup match (5) |
| SATIE – The creator of such scores as the ethereal Gymnopédies formed from S[outh] A[merican] cup match: TIE. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Different name adopted by old creative force (6,6) |
| MOTHER NATURE – I completely misread this as an anagram, which postponed solving until all crossers were in. It is in fact different: OTHER N[ame] taken in by MATURE for old. I know that now! | |
| 2 | Particular bar order maybe featuring starter of oysters (5) |
| POINT – Perhaps as when the PC takes down your particulars. Bar order is PINT, insert the first of O[ysters] | |
| 3 | Favourite deep or sweet, earthy smell (9) |
| PETRICHOR – Apparently an Australian coinage from the Greek πέτρα rock and ἰχώρ blood of the gods. Construct from favourite: PET plus deep: RICH and OR as is. Then hope it means what the clue says, which it does after fresh rainfall. | |
| 4 | Disclaimer of note I included in business transaction (6) |
| DENIAL – N[ote] plus I included in DEAL for business transaction. | |
| 5 | Put dull piece of cloth on table? (5,3) |
| PLACE MAT – More usually cardboard or raffia. Put: PLACE plus dull: MAT. I’d prefer matt or even matte. | |
| 6 | Provide money for taking over institute (5) |
| FOUND – Provide money is FUND, which takes in O[ver]. | |
| 7 | Drill tries to cut through concrete (9) |
| REHEARSAL – Tries is HEARS as in court, cutting through (into?) REAL for concrete. | |
| 9 | Surfing location in Tenerife can ultimately get turbulent (8,4) |
| INTERNET CAFE – An anagram (turbulent) of TENERIFE CAN and the last of [ge]T | |
| 13 | Experienced strange urge, no end (9) |
| UNDERGONE – An anagram (strange) of URGE NO END | |
| 15 | Divine home’s invaded by soldiers — that’s concerning (2,7) |
| AS REGARDS – ASGARD, familiar from both Marvel and Norse universes as the home of the gods has R[oyal] E[ngineers], soldiers included. | |
| 16 | Cover evidence of injury, except on rear part of head (8) |
| SCABBARD – Evidence of injury: SCAB, except: BAR plus the last letter of [hea]D | |
| 19 | Times ignoring introduction of injunction is a-flipping-mazing? (6) |
| TMESIS – “The separation or splitting up of a word into parts by one or more intervening words” (Chambers). The example given has a question mark suggesting definition by example. TIMES without the first letter of I[njunction] plus IS as – um – is. | |
| 21 | You’re talking about eating eventually? (5) |
| LATER – Hidden (eating) and reversed ( about) in you’RE TALking. | |
| 23 | Periodically excels at providing razzle-dazzle (5) |
| ECLAT – The odd letters (periodically) of ExCeLs plus AT as is. | |
Searched for a surfing location with water using the anagrist before the penny dropped. NHO the far-away place. Liked BE MY GUEST, I know we’ve had it before but I still have a giggle. I always thought NOT was a way of reversing a positive comment, as in ‘he’s really a good guy — NOT’, but, who can argue with AI! Liked SATIE. Was looking for a poet for the bottom half of SCABBARD before some more money dropped inside my noggin. Not too difficult for a Thursday.
Thanks Z, great info’ in the blog and love the title.
Look, I love the blog, and the crossword, and think Z does a fantastic job, and yes, it IS a good title but I personally hate it because I can’t stand the Pina Colada song. And now I’ve got an earworm.
Still, you can’t let my grumpiness get in the way of a great blog so I’ll just say that and shut up!
Even though I DO love getting caught in the rain! (See exchanges below).
Thanks for that A. I’d already read your comment and replies, very amusing.
Hope the earworm is gone by the morning — and it’s cold and wet.
Around 45 minutes. Fortunately I knew most of the more difficult words. Knew TANAISTE and SATIE from earlier crosswords. Knew DRALON. NHO of DEPTFORD or TMESIS but easy to get from wordplay. MOTHER NATURE was a write-in.
Thanks Z
A real test, which I failed, but a superb puzzle. The surface readings are perfect, almost without exception.
I came here to complain about the apparently unknowable south Atlantic location but it seems it has some relevance for British solvers so I’ll give it a grudging pass. Had to look it up in the end and, as always seems to happen when I cheat, was punished by pink squares for a different clue. I opted for DROLEN for the fabric.
If yesterday was a points decision to the setter, today was a knockout. Have to drag myself off the canvas in time for tomorrow’s beast.
Well played setter and thanks for the blog Z.
I was tempted by DROLEN.
I was tempted by drolen, but put in drolon (cutting LONG short).
First encountered TMESIS just a few weeks ago in a cryptic I test-solved for Joshua and Henri. The reaction of most of the team was such that I thought J&H might change it, but they (wisely, I’d say—now! Ha) didn’t. I’ll have to tell them about this clue. It’s almost close enough in time to be an interesting coincidence.
NHO DRALON. Guessed there must be a DEPTFORD.
“A Dead Man in Deptford” was Anthony Burgess’ novel about Christopher Marlowe. Started it but never finished it.
Presumably Marlowe didn’t make it to the end either…
No, he didn’t! 🤣🤣
If it wasn’t for TMESIS, TRISTAN DA CUNHA, DRALON and TANAISTE this might have been relatively straightforward – but it wasn’t. 38.41, happy just to fill it in. I endorse Galspray’s remarks about the excellent surface readings, thank you Z.
From Not Dark Yet:
My sense of humanity has gone down the DRAIN
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain
She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind
I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
45 minutes. Another 15×15 mostly completed within half-an-hour but then I hit a wall and needed another 15 to polish off four stragglers.
One of these was REHEARSAL delayed by having an incorrect checker from misspelling the remote island. I knew the reference immediately as I remember the news story from 1961, but I plumped for CUNAH rather than CUHNA.
AS REGARDS was another straggler, spotted eventually from definition but I missed the wordplay because I NHO ASGARD. By contrast PETRICHOR came from wordplay and I NHO the word.
TAINAISTE was also from wordplay although I was aware there was another unpronounceable / unspellable Irish political title to go with TAOISEACH. This one has come before a couple of times, most recently last July when both it and the PM appeared within two days of each other. This time it took them a week!
TMESIS? Who could possibly have guessed it existed if they didn’t already know? Interestingly on its last appearance in a 15×15 in 2015 I didn’t mention it amongst the ‘unknowns’ in my comment.
Another slight delay was there not being enough squares to fit in ‘Draylon’. The dictionaries don’t offer it as an alternative to DRALON but the web is not short of commercial images and sites spelling it with a Y.
Failed. Defeated by the crossing TANAISTE and AS REGARDS. The ‘Irish politician’ was an NHO (for which I thought of IT, not AI, as the ‘new computer-based tech’) and the ‘Divine home’ just didn’t occur to me but no excuses, I should have been able to work them both out.
Exactly the mistakes I made, plus the TMESIS one as well
34m 00s
NHO PETRICHOR (is that not a service station?) nor TMESIS.
But a nice swing round the world from DEPTFORD to HEBRIDES via TRISTAN DA CUNHA and SOUTH AUSTRALIA and all accomplished from the comfort of an INTERNET CAFE.
Thanks, Z.
12:55. I thought this was going to be one of those all too familiar days where I fall at the last hurdle, today’s hurdle being TANAISTE. Like BletchleyReject I got stuck on thinking “computer-based tech” was going to be IT. I also spent time thinking “experience” might be “see”. But finally AI came to me and the rest fell into place.
Another fail here. Beaten by the unknownS, TANAISTE, PETRICHOR & TMESIS, which I stared at but just couldn’t figure the wordplay.
I liked INTERNET CAFE.
THANKS Z and setter.
13.53 – good puzzle with a nice amount of chew to it.
PETRICHOR was an ever-present in the mid-2000s internet world of putting definitions of unusual words on artful photographs to make you look, like, deep, man. As such, I know it well.
I was another trying to make TANITSTE work, although even by the standards of Irish politicians that didn’t look right. The tempting ‘over’ held me up on the fibre, which I’d not heard of and was pleased to have winkled out.
Vaguely heard of TRISTAN DA CUNHA, and once I had the crossers, I was pretty confident as I’ve come across a couple of people with the surname CUNHA. TMESIS rang a bell, but I abso-flipping-lutely never remember what it means.
Thanks both.
Totally breezeblocked by the unknowns TANAISTE and TMESIS, otherwise 10′.
Thanks z and setter.
I loved this. So more than usual thanks to the setter and thank you Z for a very entertaining blog.
I think it was probably a near PB for me although I don’t really do times. I’ve never fully adapted to keyboard entry so I download each puzzle into my note-taking app and complete it with a magic pencil. Maybe one of these days I’ll try doing it with straight data entry and see what happens.
I knew 2 of the challenging words on the edge of my brain although I needed a jog from the checkers to bring them back to full memory (TMESIS and TANAISTE). PETRICHOR I have never heard of but it was easily constructed from the checkers and wordplay and once assembled the Greek bits made absolute (if oblique) sense – although I was surprised to learn it was an Australian coinage. I am so grateful that I now have a name for that wonderful smell that comes after rainfall, especially as I am one of those people who are ‘wired wrongly’. A lot of people say things like “I got up this morning and the sky was blue and the sun was shining and my heart just leapt for joy”. Well to me that is just a pleasant start to the day. I get that spontaneous feeling of happiness whenever it is grey and rainy, or even better blowing a gale in a thunderstorm. I don’t know why, but it’s not something I have any control over. So when people talk about taking a holiday to “get some winter sun” I just think “Why?”
I love it when a crossword teaches me a new word, reminds me of some outer reaches of my vocabulary and allows all uncertainties to be easily resolved with checkers and wordplay. Just how it should be. In my rain-drenched world anyway.
Thanks again.
What a lovely comment!
And what a lovely thing to say in response. Glad you liked it. It was just spoken from the heart as soon as I found the word PETRICHOR!
I’m not averse to a bit of sun but I absolutely love a long walk in freezing rain with my dogs. On the other hand I never feel anything other than terrible when I wake up in the morning, whatever the weather.
Yep, I’d love one of those walks.
I agree about waking up but I do find that the grey and rainy mornings are easier to deal with. And I also find it miraculous that we should have evolved the cup of strong tea as an ideal antidote to that early morning feeling!
It takes me about an hour and two cups of coffee to start feeling human.
Ah! A coffee drinker. I find tea and coffee drinkers are a bit like cat and dog owners. Unshakeable in their preferences.
I like both! I drink coffee first thing in the morning and sometimes after lunch, and tea at any time of the day.
I also have two dogs and two cats!
Bang goes another carefully formulated theory!
34 minutes with LOI TMESIS chexked, having been dismissed as impossible. I have heard of the Irish Deputy before. I can remember my eldest son nagging to go to an Internet Cafe when on holiday. I was expecting somehere populated with bright young things, flash coffee machines and zappy technology. It was like walking into a nerds anonymous meeting. That was when my lad gave up ideas on going into IT and instead became a lawyer.
Decent enough puzzle apart from the impossible one. Thank you Z and setter.
DNF, breezeblocked by TANAISTE, AS REGARDS and DRALON, where I went for TANITSTE, IN REGARDS and DROLON respectively (hadn’t heard of the Irish politician, Asgard or the fabric).
– Was helped with 4a by having gone through DEPTFORD on the train the other day (it has the distinction of being the oldest railway station in London that’s still in use)
– No problem with PETRICHOR as it’s one of the words Susie Dent talks about a lot
– Likewise knew TMESIS because I remember it coming up on an episode of QI once
– Only belatedly realised that LATER was a hidden
Thanks Zabadak and setter.
COD Satie
Under 15 minutes.
Both TANAISTE and Taoiseach are in the UK this morning for a meeting with Keir Starmer et al ‐ ahead of a visit to the White House next week.
Btw, both T titles are easily pronounced by anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Irish (or Erse, as it is quaintly called in Crosswordland).
Failed on TMESIS which was one trusting of the wordplay too far for me. Shame because I constructed the equally unheard of TANAISTE correctly and it was all round a most enjoyable puzzle and on course for around average time.
I even justfied ALONG in the sense of All Along the Watchtower.
Thanks both.
Ha, that was the first thing that came to mind for me with ALONG too
A song of which Dylan said ‘I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way… strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way’.
I generally disapprove of covers of Bob’s work, but Jimi’s AATW is sublime.
Dylan also said: It was always Jimi’s song, I just wrote it.
Generous tribute!
Its Jimi’s version thats been in my head all morning but thought it might hit the spot in this hotbed of Bobbites
Hotbed of Bobbites is just about right. But I’m sure a lot of us are just as much Jimiites!
I’m much more of a Jimiite (which means absolutely no disrespect to His Bobness).
A different, and paraphrased, Dylan lyric came to my mind when jackkt mentioned in his post that he had not noted Tmesis as unusual or difficult when it appeared before:
“I was so much wiser then, I’m older than that now”
🙂 My Back Pages – great track. The Nice covered it.
I doubt if he ever sang one part of the lyrics (“None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”) the way Jimi garbled it (“None will level on the line, nobody offered his word”).
He never took umbrage at that, though. After all, John Wesley Harding came without a lyrics sheet (just some very clever prose by Bob).
Thanks for that wonderfully faithful transcript of both versions! Neither of which I had ever fully tried to interpret before. That part was always just rhythmical sounds to me which nevertheless conveyed a whole weight of meaning!
I must have been on the right wavelength this morning – 18.42 with a great deal of entertainment on the way, from the intricate “clue within a clue” of MOTHER NATURE to the viscerally evocative PETRICHOR and the donnish TMESIS. Many thanks setter and also Z for a fine exegesis.
A slow one. Quite a lot in there TANAISTE, TRISTAN DA CUNHA, DRALON, TMESIS… that were in my brain but needed teasing out. Wasted a lot of time with TRISTAN DA CUNHA anagram for no reward eventually being the last one in. It was just too tempting to ignore.
Tough, but glad I got through it.
Abject failure.
For some reason unbeknown to me, I had recently been thinking about the word for the smell of fresh rain on earth without success, so thanks to setter for the nudge.
Good to see that I am not alone in my ignorance of titles of Irish political office, other than that of the PM.
Ashamed to say that I had quite forgotten that Tristan Da Cunha had been reinhabited. Perhaps I confused it with somewhere else that exploded and sank without trace?
Had consigned DRALON to history as it was desperately unfashionable at the time we were setting up home.
Hope to be able to dredge up TMESIS if needed in future.
12:51. ‘The wordplay is sufficiently generous to allow a fair if slightly suspicious stab at the entries’ sums this one up perfectly. I liked it a lot, but that’s probably because I had just enough knowledge to scrape through. I’m not sure TRISTAN DA CUNHA is gettable if you haven’t heard of it (I had, although I certainly don’t remember whatever happened in 1961), and TANAISTE and TMESIS don’t exactly fall spontaneously out of the wordplay.
Actually I thought they both came out very easily from the wordplay. As soon as I equated TASTE with EXPERIENCE that was enough to bring the Irish politician in from the colder regions of my vocabulary, and as soon as I saw the definition by example I remembered the Greeks had a word for it and then the wordplay practically wrote it straight in.
That reflects my experience more or less exactly, but some memory of the word, however vague, is very helpful!
Like others, beaten by the NHOs TAINAISTE and TMESIS. I can now see the wordplay was fairly generous with both, but you’d have to be brave to go with either as guesses from that – esp the latter.
So I’ve learnt a new word, PETRICHOR, which had to look up. I knew TANAISTE from years living in Dublin, and even knew TMESIS and of course Eric SATIE, so 16 minutes to my DNF having failed on 3d.
30 mins.
Had to trust the wordplay to get some of these.
Thanks, z.
Couldn’t bring myself to believe TMESIS so threw in the towel after 20 minutes or so. Me of little faith.
TMESIS is a productive linguistic process in Cantonese. Quite fun to use, and gets impressed looks, even if the bits infixed are not exactly the Queen’s English.
14a Tanaiste. Cheated.
18a Dralon. Forgotten, if I ever knew it. Cheated.
DNF 3d NHO Petrichor. Not in Cheating Machine nor the Chambers cheater. It is in Wiktionary but I didn’t look there. Added to CM.
15d As Regards. Initially had unparsable In Regards. Had forgot about Asgard; at first reading vaguely thought it might be in Lord of the Rings.
19d Tmesis. Followed the instructions, initially dismissed as unpronounceable, finally looked up. Added to CM.
21d Later, missed the hidden, biffed.
18 mins for a puzzle that was very easy till TANAISTE and TMESIS, both NHO.
Can we put a stop to comments such as above?
Removed. Many are excluded automatically and I monitor regularly but some will always get through.
Oh no! I missed it! Was it rude?
No. Just tedious spam.
OK, glad I missed it…
35 mins
Had to look up the Irish word but otherwise nothing too tricky here once I sorted out where the H should properly reside in TRISTAN DA CUNA .
Thanks blogger and setter!
17:41. I checkred TMESIS was an actual word before submitting.
COD: MOTHER NATURE.
Flew through the top half, apart from PETRICHOR ad TANAISTE, which I assembled from wordplay later. The lower half was more of a slog. I always thought DRALON had a Y in it. Missed the hidden LATER so biffed it. The aforementioned TANAISTE was POI and TMESIS brought up the rear after a quick check to confirm it existed. 22:20. Thanks setter and Z.
DNF . No problems with DEPTFORD, PETRICHOR, TMESIS and TRISTAN DA CUNHA. Failed on the Irish politician, (it wasn’t the seen-before TAOISEACH). Like others I wanted IT in there, so AS REGARDS became IN REGARDS – didn’t parse and didn’t sound right, so I knew it was wrong but couldn’t do any better. And incorrectly guessed DROLON. Nice puzzle nevertheless.
I associate PETRICHOR with orange bulldust (fine, clay-y dirt, in the Red Centre) For instance in South Australia, which Zabadak mentions Agent Orange wants to annex as the 51st state. My brain is all over the place today.
Aside re 1ac: In 2010 my first ever published crossword included the clue “Wipe the floor with flash young boxer (3,2)”. It was original, I was very happy it. Then it appeared verbatim in The Times in the past few years… 28153 in 2021, which made me even more happy. But recently I came across a 1997-vintage Times crossword which had the exact same clue. Woe, woe, and thrice woe – it wasn’t original after all! I hadn’t seen it and remembered it – didn’t start doing Times puzzles until about 2007 – but there must be certain words and phrases that cry out for a particular clue.
Nice crossword, 37 minutes. The difficult words had fairly gentle wordplay and I suppose I really should have got the difficult Irish word from wordplay, but looked it up because I knew it was going to be some Irish word that I didn’t know. Both TMESIS and PETRICHOR I’d vaguely heard of, although I’d forgotten their meaning. Chambers doesn’t have PETRICHOR so far as I can see, but Collins does.
22:20
Very enjoyable. I did have EXONERATE (which obviously didn’t entirely parse) for some time, but changed it up when only 2d and 3d remained.
Somehow knew the spelling of TANAISTE though I didn’t know what it was – must have seen it somewhere before. NHO PETRICHOR but nice to know there is a name for it. Similarly TMESIS built from wordplay – a fascinating book which discusses all sort of literary devices such as this, is Mark Forsyth’s “The Elements Of Eloquence”.
TIDE RACE or RACE TIDE – I didn’t know which, needing UNDERGONE to convince me which way to go.
Heard of DRALON, TRISTAN DA CUNHA, ASGARD.
Failed to parse:
MOTHER NATURE – bunged in from checkers
LATER – also from checkers
Thanks Z and setter
A very enjoyable exercise, all done in 30 minutes. Like others, NHO PETRICHOR, but it was (eventually) gettable from the clueing. Classicists may have had an advantage with TMESIS. I have a distant recall of part of a line from an early Latin poet (Ennius?): … cere- comminuit -brum … (he smashed his head in) accommodating the construction to the sense.
FOI – TRISTAN DA CUNHA
LOI – PETRICHOR
COD – BE MY GUEST
Thanks to Zabadak and other contributors.
One pink square for NAUGHT on submission at 34:34.
TANAISTE helped by TAOISEACH having been in a recent crossword- I was expecting this word to make an appearance at some point.
NHO TMESIS.
Thanks Z and setter
Another Naught here. Annoyingly, parsed it exactly per the correct solution, but when I was a kid we used to pronounce it NAAAAT in a teasingly exaggerated way, so didn’t give it a second’s thought!
Every so often I get to feel that I’m quite good at these things and today was one of those days. I knew all the tricky bits, though needed checkers and NAI from the clue to remind me of the Irish politician, which was my LOI.
12:58
DNF: defeated by the two NHOs TMESIS and TANAISTE. Knew PETRICHOR though. Got NOUGHT just from the UGH; now that I know how the clue works, I still think UGH.
DNF (albeit in a reasonable time) and despite getting a few NHOs such as the Irish politician and TIDE RACE from the clueing. Dredged up TMESIS from hearing it somewhere recently (but not here it seems??). Failed on PETRICHOR as a NHO and didn’t see rich=deep in my alphabet trawl. Off to Tenerife on Tuesday by coincidence. Thanks Zabadak and setter
25.47 WOE
A DROLEN here. Reasonably confident with TANAISTE (taste for experience foxed me in the QC yesterday) and TMESIS; less so with PETRICHOR.
Love these ones as perfectly described by Keriothe
Thanks Z and setter
The good bit was a quote from the blog 😉
Really nice crossword, which I fairly whizzed through until hitting the NHO wall that others have discussed, but all worked out in the end for 27 mins of fun.
I gave up and hit reveal on PETRICHOR, DRALON and TANAISTE. The other obscure word, TMESIS was actually known to me because the one time my Dad and I completed a Mephisto, which was nearly 30 years ago, pre Internet but with various reference books, it was one of the answers and I’ve always remembered it. This is the first time it has come up for me in a puzzle since. Can’t say I’ve used the word much in the intervening decades.
Not only did I get PETRICHOR but it was my second one in. DNF though, as I failed to get a NHO DRALON. I also put ‘in regards’ to begin with before I thought of TANAISTE which made me realise it should be AS REGARDS.
DNF, could not get TMESIS. I got the “times with no i” plus “is” but could not make anything of a-flipping except that it was an anagram indicator (wrong!!).
Finished in 27 minutes apart from that. Had no idea there were any words starting tm!
Thanks setter and blogger
Ps also nho petrichor but was able to work that one out 🙂
My ODE gives TMESIS as the only actual word beginning with tm. The other entries under TM are either abbreviations, e.g. for transcendental meditation, or Tm as the chemical element thulium. One to watch out for!
👍
Is that sort of the reverse of the old “If you have a U haning around in a word you can’t crack, try sticking a Q in front of it” as “If you have an M don’t waste any time at all trying a T in front”?
34 mins. Enjoyed this one. There’s a sort of equivalent to tmesis in musical Mass settings, called a troped Kyrie.
Now that’s what I call interesting!
I survived this in 52 minutes, once I dared to enter TMESIS, but it was the only wordplay that seemed promising. Strangely, TRISTAN DA CUNHA was one of the first clues (no, the first clue) I solved, but I could not have told you where it is nor why I knew it. TANAISTE has appeared before, so I had a vague idea of what to expect and the wordplay helped me to pin it down. And PETRICHOR purely from very helpful wordplay, but what a delight. So a very pleasant, if not entirely easy, puzzle.
Enjoyed it, but another TMESIS and TANAISTE failure.
Great blog.
A great result — 15’54” — wrecked by a stupid typo. Grrr. Tbh I checked TMESIS and PETRICHOR, but they were my planned answers, honest guv!