Times 24790 – Have with You to Saffron-Walden!

46 comments on “Times 24790 – Have with You to Saffron-Walden!”

1. Seem at last to be committing some new words to failing permanent memory – SETT and RIGADOON have come up relatively recently, I think, as has ASININE, or some variation on it, which I used to asume had a double S. Didn’t see tree connection in 23ac until reading the blog, for which thanks. 34 mins.
2. Edward Elgar cashed in on the choral craze in late Victorian Britain by setting Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf to music. The most famous part of the work is the concluding piece, ‘As Torrents in Summer’ – Elgar at his best.

   Gentle start to the week – 35 minutes. SE corner trickiest. COD to AGAINST, ’though 13 dn was clever.

   1. I meant SW – another senior moment.
   2. And what about Coleridge-Taylors “Hiawatha’s Wedding”? It used to be very popular with choral societies but has gone out of favour in recent years. Most famous bit is the tenor solo “Onaway, awake, beloved”. Like “Torrents in Summer” often sung out of context.
   3. Thanks for the pointer to As Torrents in Summer, which I don’t recall hearing before. It reminds me a bit of Sullivan’s setting of The Long Day Closes. I’ve sung in performances and/or recordings of The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles and The Kingdom (all with Boult conducting) but, sadly, never King Olaf.
      1. You always make me envious, Tony. I enjoyed singing Gerontius tremendously more than 25 years ago at Worth Abbey under Rudolf Piernay (a magnificent bass in his own right), who, I read the other day, went on to teach Bryn Terfel.
3. I know we’re two countries divided by a common language, but don’t teachers in the US also get off work early ‘due to inclement weather’?
   1. The pedant who taught me English at school would have insisted on “owing to inclement weather school will be dismissed early today”. I still have bumps on the head as testimony to the forcefulness of his methods.
      1. I must have been taught by your pedant’s son. Oops! Younger brother, of course …
4. The top half was easy though I didn’t know SETT as a paving block. The lower part was more of a struggle with ARIZONA, NEW ZEALAND and LAYABOUT putting up resistance in the SE and CINE CAMERA giving bother in the SW along with WIDEST which I’m ashamed to say defeated me. 35 minutes with one cheat. Hangs head in shame. Where did Mr B leave that dunce’s cap?
5. Yet another on-line cockup. 17 min with the mandatory typo, and one wrong after bunging in “INSIDE FOR” as a space filler (it sort of captured the ambience of the clue) without going back to check. Got fixated on, and wasted ages on 23 ac, being sure that a “plane say” = “plain” and although entering LIMB in desperation was basically lost. Less panic, and more detatchment may have resulted in a half-way decent time. COD to OGDEN NASH, for no other reason than being a favourite non-PC rhymster. On the art of seduction: “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker”. Cuisine: “parsley is gharsley”
6. 15 minutes, but with a tougher feel than recent Mondays. BOOK TOKEN is perhaps another in a recent trend towards nearly not cryptic clues, but I thought there were some impish tricks up this sett-er’s sleeve – “that is” = ID EST (and not ie) in 24, and “Maybe” as part of the anagrist in 16. I knew the badger’s home, but thought the paving stone was with a single T. LIMB I entered on the “what else could it be?” rationale – for some reason, I never associate plane with tree despite their ubiquity in London streets and their annual carpet of candy floss deposited on my former workplace car park.
   Currently between jobs myself, I of course deeply resent unemployed person = LAYABOUT!
   CoD to INSIDE JOB.
7. 34 minutes. I got 1ac straight away, then had a quick glance through the crossing down clues for any low-hanging fruit. This didn’t yield much but the king was obviously HARRY so I bunged that in. When I solved the rest of the clue a bit later I didn’t notice the mistake which must have held me up for about 15 minutes in the NW. What a muppet.
   I didn’t know SETT in the “block” sense. It’s also “the particular pattern of stripes in a tartan”, apparently.
8. Under 30 (rather unexciting) minutes so cannot have been that difficult. Slowed by NW corner, especially NEGATES (whether N,E = ‘any’ is a homonym or homophone I leave for the experts to tell me).
9. Nice start to the week at 9m 35s even though it seemed to take a while to get started! Did’t know sett in the sense of block so that’s one to remember.
10. vinyl1’s reference in 15d to “A nice way to greet a Bishop”, reminded me of the possibly apocryphal story about the Most Rev. Anthony Fisher, Bishop of Parramatta in western Sydney. He is known as being a little bit pompous. On one occasion an old school friend of his greeted him with “Hello Anthony”. “It’s Bishop Fisher” was the alleged reply.

    A year or two ago I won a book token as a prize in the Saturday prize crossword competition. The vouchers could only be redeemed in England but I live in Sydney. The Times generously exchanged the vouchers for a cheque.

    Lots of nice clever clues today, I thought. COD = 12ac

11. 27 minutes with at least ten or so spent on WIDEST (you were not alone jack), WOODSHED (why? when I had two working hypotheses, one involving “wood” and the other “shed”) and LIMB, which I didn’t understand till coming here; I thought a limn must be some woodworking terminology. Otherwise some gimmes amidst the trickery. I liked HASTEN for its “travel with expedition”, but COD to OGDEN. My favourite being his limerick (oft attributed to anon):

    A crusader’s wife slipped from the garrison
    And had an affair with a Saracen
    She wasn’t oversexed
    Or jealous or vexed
    She just wanted to make a comparison

12. The sun is shining, England scraped home in India yesterday and the first tulip is out. With a gentle 33 minute all correct solve, what else could one ask for on a Monday morning? This despite trying to make ‘gin’= ‘it’ in 7d. CODs to ‘inside job’ and ‘skywriting.’
13. 27 minutes. Enjoyed this very much. It is perhaps not so surprising to find these two American WORDSMITHs in the puzzle: OGDEN NASH was a very popular humorist when I was a student in the 1960s; so were E.B. White and James Thurber, I recall. LONGFELLOW’s The Wreck of the Hesperus was well known to my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and was recently brought out for an airing on BBC Radio 4.
    Some very neat clues today, I thought: the plane in 23, the trip to the ruins of Athens in 21 and, dare I say, the gift for literature?
    1. Surely Longfellow is best known for his Song of Hiawatha:

       By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
       By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
       Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
       Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis…

       and all that?

14. Under 36 minutes, woo-hoo! At this rate of improvement I should get down to about 10 seconds by mid-year.
15. Once again a very fine effort with some excellent surfaces.. eg 1ac, 12ac, 21dn and 16dn though of course a megabyte may or may not contain information, which is different from data
16. For some reason got clobbered on this one, firstly in SW and then disastrously by slogan which took me forever. Don’t agree with vinyl1 that Ogden Nash is unsuitable for an English puzzle. Is Shakespeare unsuitable for Americans? Nash is regal in his way, the Yorick of rhymesters. Someone once wrote for him:
    Though I searched down every alleyway and corridor of time [or somesuch]
    I don’t think I’d ever find the rhyme
    that Ogden
    got bogged on.
    After which, bathetically, COD to 9, the clue where I was mired for too long.
17. Pleasant little 11:09 amble today (and that included checking time – I’m learning!). 2dn surely dodgy homophone, not homonym?
18. An enjoyable 30-minute start to the week. Thank you setter and blogger alike. I thought there were some super clues, viz WORDSMITH, HATCH, MEGABYTE and best of all HASTEN. Last in SKYWRITING. Has anyone seen this done in real life? I’ve only ever seen it in cartoons and TV ads.
    1. Yes, in the US one can sometimes see genuine skywriting.
    2. I remember seeing the SLOGAN “BACK MAC” being skywritten 50+ years ago, when Harold Macmillan was the MP for Bromley (and probably the Prime Minister at the time).
    3. Fairly common in the Perth sky. Perhaps because there are rarely any clouds to get in the way.
19. 19:35 online, an enjoyable solve and I agree that this was slightly trickier than usual for a Monday. 4-letter answers can often be a good way to get started but only LEST went in on first run-through today.

    Excellent blog today Vinyl so thanks for that.

20. Congratulations to the setter on a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle. I took 40 minutes, exactly par for me, so neither too hard nor too easy. No obscure words except RIGADOON, which was here a month or two ago.

    Morris Bishop wrote of OGDEN NASH

    Free from flashiness, free from trashiness
    Is the essence of Ogdenashiness
    Rich, original, rash and rational
    Stands the monument Ogdenational.

21. 18 minutes 27 secs.

    My favourite from Ogden Nash:

    The cow is of the bovine ilk;
    One end is moo, the other milk.

    1. And my favourite…
       “When pouring ketchup (catsup) from a bottle
       First a little will come, then a lot’ll.”
22. I seemed to be on the setter’s wavelength today and zoomed through this in, for me, the relatively quick time of 19 minutes. I enjoyed the literary references and it was good to have two American greats. “The Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery” is a title that is difficult to forget. My favourite short is “I like eels,except for meals and the way it feels” (I may have misquoted that slightly – but the gist is there) Maybe tomorrow we’ll have James Thurber and Ed Gorey.
23. This one took less than a pint to complete, SETT last in, twigged to all the devices pretty quickly.
24. Easy puzzle with too many writers and a bad homophone. Not one to remember.
25. happy to finish today. just had a brief question: whenever i see a clue of the form “A on B” (in an across clue), my natural inclination is to juxtapose the elements as AB. however, today, for example in 1ac, the juxtapositioning was BA, and now i think about it, that seems to have been the pattern recently. is this a hard and fast rule or is either arrangement permissible?

    ak

    1. A on B is always BA in an across clue, interpreted as “addended to”. In a down clue A on B can be either AB or BA, the former interpreted as “on top of” or “above”. Some clue writers think this is an exceedingly nonsensical rule, but that is the situation as far as I’m aware and I’m standing by it, either in front or behind.
26. It’s his rhymes that knock me out. Translucent pearls. ‘Curl up and Diet’ ends:

    … So I think it is very nice for ladies to be lithe and lissome.
    But not so much so that you cut yourself if you happen to embrace or kissome.

27. About 20 minutes, ending with SETT, which I didn’t understand at first, and then only finally remembered due to its prior appearance here. Ditto, RIGADOON. I agree with vinyl about being mildly surprised when certain Americans appear, as with NASH and LONGFELLOW today. LONGFELLOW’s most recalled poem over here, recited by schoolchildren, at least when I was one, is Paul Revere’s Ride. I see from citations above that non-US folks are more familiar with many of his other works, which doesn’t surprise me. Also familiar but hardly well understood any more is the opening line of The Village Blacksmith: “Under the spreading Chestnut tree, the village smithy stands”. The spreading American Chestnut trees were wiped out about a century ago, by disease. But when seen in old photographs, they are remarkably large, beautiful trees. The tree survives today only as a sapling, which dies, due to the same disease, before maturing.
    1. I know this one well and I’m sure that many years ago when I learnt it at school I knew it was by Longfellow, but that’s a fact that had slipped completely out of my mind until you mentioned it.

       I suppose Hiawatha is sensitive stuff these days so no longer taught, but I was brought up on it.

28. A comic poem requires at least one preposterous rhyme; Ogden Nash is the master and this is my favourite:
    one set of glasses won’t do.
    You need two.
    One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and
    Keats’s “Endymion” with,
    And the other for walking around without saying Hello
    to strange wymion with.
29. Couldn’t 10a equally be ‘STOP’ , which has the same double meanings? I also thought 6a a bit loose: BEAT for ‘strike’ certainly, but surely BE AT for ‘attend’??
30. I’m surprised no one mentioned that ‘Hiawatha’ is one of the most parodied poems in the language. I just discovered that Lewis Carroll did one, of which the following is just a bit:

    Hiawatha’s Photographing

    From his shoulder Hiawatha
    Took the camera of rosewood,
    Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
    Neatly put it all together.
    In its case it lay compactly,
    Folded into nearly nothing;
    But he opened out the hinges,
    Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
    Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
    Like a complicated figure
    In the second book of Euclid.

    There’s also one about H making gloves (‘First he turned the skinside inside’ or something).
    The meter is based, I believe, on ‘Kalevala’, the Finnish epic.
    (This is what one gets out of a BA in Eng.Lit.)

    1. As you say, Longfellow’s poem uses Kalevala metre (“Vaka vanha Väinämöinen” and all that).

       G. A. Strong’s The Song of Milkanwatha runs something like:

       When he killed the Mudjokivis,
       Of the skin he made him mittens,
       Made them with the fur side inside,
       Made them with the skin side outside.
       He, to get the warm side inside,
       Put the inside skin side outside;
       He, to get the cold side outside,
       Put the warm side fur side inside.
       That’s why he put fur side inside,
       Why he put the skin side outside,
       Why he turned them inside outside.

    2. Indeed. Even the great British statistician Sir Maurice Kendall had a shot at it, so to speak.
31. 8:38, with a couple of minutes at the end agonising over the rather weak LIMB – the two meanings seemed too closely related and I felt there really ought to be a better answer.

    My favourite Ogden Nash is the same as rosselliot’s:

    Candy is dandy,
    But liquor is quicker.

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