ST 4390 (Sun 18 Jul) – Abelia bloomer

Author   talbinhoPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 5:30

The solving time includes some despairing head-shaking at the clearly flawed 2dn (where ABELIA is apparently an anagram of ‘I label’), plus further bemusement at 25ac which I also don’t understand so please clarify if you can. The standard plummeted this week, even ignoring the dreadful error.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.

Across
1 BRANDISH; (DIN)* in BRASH – makes a change from the ‘bran dish’ approach.
5 TRIPOD; rev. of DO (= ‘party’) after TRIPOD
9 OVERCAME; (MOVE + CARE)*
10 GOANNA; GO + ANNA
12 CLIVE; C + LIVE
13 PORCELAIN; (NO REPLICA)*
14 OSTENTATIOUS; (TATTOOS IN USE)*
18 BREADWINNERS; “BRED WINNERS” – although I generally like homophones (and the worse the better), I find it hard to admire them when one part is unchanged in the ‘sounds like’ reading.
21 RED + GROUSE
23 OPTIC; (TOPIC)* – those things on the bottom of upside-down spirits bottles in bars to decant 25ml shots.
24 ACUITY; [fo]U[nd] in A CITY – awful clue, with a grating superfluous ‘Showing’ at the start, dubious indication of the ‘U’ (‘found centre’, although this is fairly standard for the Sunday Times) and ‘metropolis’ where ‘a metropolis’ was needed.
25 BETRAYAL; BET,RAY,AL? – I can see Ray and Al, but is ‘Bet’ the third small boy?
26 TATTOO (2 defs) – not ideal that this word appears in the clue to 14ac.
27 ISOPTERA; (RAISE POT)*

Down
1 BRONCO; B[attalion] + R + ON + CO[mpany]
2 ABELIA; (I LABEL*) [sic] – alexia, more like.
3 DEC(R)EASED – I hesitated over this, but apparently ‘pass over’ can mean the same as ‘pass away’ (i.e. to die).
4 SEMI-PRECIOUS; (COPIES I’M SURE)* – the definition here is the wrong part of speech (‘gems’ is superfluous), which is a shame because the anagram is quite good.
6 RHONE; (HERON)* – the question mark here appears to mean ‘this clue doesn’t really make cryptic sense, but you should be able to work out the answer’.
7 PENTAGON; PEN (= ‘writer’) + TAG ON (= ‘dog’) – another dodgy wordplay, since ‘dog’ is transitive but ‘tag on’ needs to be followed by a preposition like ‘to’ or ‘with’.
8 DIAGNOSE; (IN DOSAGE)*
11 PRETENCELESS; (SLEEP CENTRES)*
15 TURBO-PROP; (TOUR BOPP[e]R)*
16 ABERRANT; (BEAR)* + R + ANT (= ‘social worker’)
17 READJUST; READ + JUST
19 ETHYNE; (THEY NE[ed])*
20 SCILLA; (C[attle] + ILL) in S.A. – a plant, hence ‘growth’.
22 RATIO (hidden)

13 comments on “ST 4390 (Sun 18 Jul) – Abelia bloomer”

  1. 48 minutes, so one of the more difficult ST puzzles for me which I put down to dodgy clues and several unfamiliar words. I can’t offer any explanation for BET in 35 across.
  2. I am a devotee of The Times crossword and relish its daily challenge. When it comes to Sunday though I don’t know where to turn. The Sunday Times crossword seems to me inferior in every way and, though I can complete it with reasonable facility, there is no enjoyment or satisfaction. The clues are generally pretty dire and, if they are difficult to solve, it is not often because of their cunning but their awfulness. Is it just me? Are the setters from a different place? Please advise, disagree or agree. I have meant to seek others’ views for some time.
    1. I agree, -I am and always will be a novice at solving the cryptic, being an foreigner,- it is not just you, the ST one does not get any better, today’s was abysmal, in my opinion. I do not understand why.

      And I will continue to have a go at it. Stubborn as the Dutch always have been.

      Isabel

  3. 9:00 for me, but with 1 wrong as I thought ALE-BIB (“bib” in the sense of “to drink”) would be a good dialect name for the honeysuckle. I suspected there was a duff anagram, but wasn’t quite sure about ABELIA.

    No idea about BET. Perhaps the setter thinks it’s the masculine form of BETTE.

    “I rather like bad wine,” said Mr Mountchesney; “one gets so bored with good wine.” (Disraeli, Sybil). OK, I’m not sure that I really get bored with the almost unremitting accuracy of the clues in the modern daily Times cryptic, but I liked the old puzzles from the 1940s and 1950s, and I find the ST puzzle entertaining for all its faults. Sometimes it’s actually quite good even by modern standards.

  4. I forgot to say: the online solution gives TRIROD for 5A and RENTAGON for 7D (Sigh!)
  5. I suppose that if I were a blogger-level solver, I, too, might find the STs amusing. But I’m not, and I’m also not British, so I find it all the more frustrating when the clues themselves are incorrect. With the other days’ puzzles, if I find myself thinking, ‘That can’t be right, can it?’, I can be confident that in fact it can be. Here, I never know; so I’m haunted by the feeling that, say, Bet is a Brit nickname (if Titch, why not Bet?). It’s a comfort of sorts to read the blog and find that my misgivings were well-founded; but I wish I could overcome my addiction to these things sufficiently to just skip the ST.
  6. I gave up solving the ST some weeks ago, for all the above reasons mentioned and now do the Telegraph Toughie which is a much better (and accurate) challenge.

    But I still visit the ST to see if it has, by any chance, improved. It hasn’t!

    1. I don’t know which version you solved, but it can’t have been the one published in The Times.
      2. I’d be interested to hear what “the Times” clue was. I too use the Toronto version. Couldn’t for the life of me figure out how/why you were trying to anagram “I Label”
        1. It was:

          Honeysuckle I label incorrectly (6)

          Not a difficult one to check/proofread, you might think!

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