A pleasant enough challenge, not much tougher than a Monday offering I thought; with nothing I couldn’t explain. Twenty minutes all told.
Definitions underlined in bold, (ABC)* indicating anagram of ABC, anagrinds in italics
| Across | |
| 1 | Undesirable trade for jam-maker? (7) |
| TRAFFIC – cryptic double definition. | |
| 5 | What peer has, back from old country with retro-style fashion (7) |
| DUKEDOM – D (back of old) UK, MODE reversed. | |
| 9 | Going over part of Glinka score (3) |
| NIL – hidden reversed, as in a football score. | |
| 10 | Close case of burglary, with judge stopping disrespect by low criminal (5,2,4) |
| CHEEK BY JOWL – CHEEK (disrespect) (LOW)* = low criminal, with B(urglar)Y, J(udge) inserted. | |
| 11 | Beginner admitting learner is to have difficulties (8) |
| FLOUNDER – insert L into FOUNDER. | |
| 12 | Fatter? One’s cut out food here (6) |
| LARDER – take the I out of LARDIER= fatter. | |
| 15 | Advanced slowly, for the most part (4) |
| LENT – mostly LENTO. | |
| 16 | With sitar periodically playing sing out forte (6,4) |
| STRONG SUIT – STR (S i T a R periodically) then (SING OUT)*. | |
| 18 | Check energy in sweet food (4,6) |
| STEM GINGER – STEM = check, hold back; GINGER = energy, pep. | |
| 19 | Gnome eating large salad (4) |
| SLAW – SAW (gnome, saying) insert L. Coleslaw, one of the most inedible and revolting foods known to man, IMO. | |
| 22 | Feign problem in sea, swimming (6) |
| ASSUME – SUM in (SEA)*. | |
| 23 | Relieve pressure with everything consumed by me (8) |
| PALLIATE – P, ALL I ATE = consumed by me. Not a word I’d seen but obvious from the more common palliative (care). | |
| 25 | Inexperienced footballer is tender of course (11) |
| GREENKEEPER – GREEN = inexperienced, KEEPER = goalkeeper. Chap in charge of golf course maintenance. | |
| 27 | Evasive sort of scoundrel losing face (3) |
| EEL – scoundrel = HEEL, loses its H. Eels are slippery, so evasive I presume. | |
| 28 | Dismiss site in Yorkshire Dales with no beers (3-4) |
| RED-CARD – REDCAR is a town in Yorkshire, D(ales) = no beers. | |
| 29 | Name of Parisian in hat drinking tea, we hear (7) |
| ENTITLE – EN (French for IN) TILE (hat) with T (sounds like tea) inserted. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Appreciative, after leaving hotel, for some fuel (7) |
| TANKFUL – THANKFUL loses H for hotel. | |
| 2 | Cricketers in a game bagging a couple of fifties (3-8) |
| ALL-ROUNDERS – A, ROUNDERS (game) insert LL (two fifties). Cricketers who both bat and bowl well. | |
| 3 | City plugging financial resource that’s productive (6) |
| FECUND – EC (City of London) inside FUND (financial resource). | |
| 4 | Temperate miner wanting clothing for his daughter? (10) |
| CLEMENTINE – CLEMENT (temperate as in the weather), INE (mINEr unclothed). As in the American lament Oh My Darling Clementine. I only know the rude version. | |
| 5 | Day you will invest a thousand in bank (4) |
| DYKE – D(ay), YE (you) with K (1000) inserted. | |
| 6 | Cardinal left ship somewhere in Florida (3,5) |
| KEY LARGO – KEY (cardinal) L(eft) ARGO (legendary ship). | |
| 7 | Report of outstanding au pair (3) |
| DUO – sounds like “DUE, AU”. | |
| 8 | Spy desert rodent (4,3) |
| MOLE RAT – MOLE = spy, RAT = desert. | |
| 13 | Clad in jacket, a low-down participant in espionage (6,5) |
| DOUBLE AGENT – DOUBLET (sort of jacket) has A, GEN (low-down) inserted. | |
| 14 | Say more than enough after turning over of king (3,7) |
| FOR EXAMPLE – AMPLE (more than enough) after OF reversed then REX = king. | |
| 17 | Narcissist’s failing badly in a game to hold onto ball (8) |
| EGOMANIA – (IN A GAME)* with O (ball) inserted. | |
| 18 | Many fleeing country with ill-gotten gains act confidently (7) |
| SWAGGER – SWAG (ill-gotten gains) GER(MANY). | |
| 20 | Thrilled comment about priest’s riding trick (7) |
| WHEELIE – WHEE ! I’m thrilled, with the usual priest ELI inserted. | |
| 21 | A little bloomer from news source without knowledge (6) |
| FLORET – FT (Financial Times) with LORE inserted. | |
| 24 | Interpret article penned by Marx or Engels? (4) |
| READ – RED (as Marx and Engels) with A inserted. | |
| 26 | Tip, either one from Eve, Norman and David (3) |
| END – either the first or last letters of each of EvE, NormaN, DaviD. | |
I thought this was tough, especially with CLEMENTINE and STEM GINGER crossing. The intersecting SWAGGER and RED-CARD may also cause problems, especially to non-football fans. 42 minutes.
17:36
As Pip says, not much different from a Monday. DNK ALL-ROUNDER as a cricket term. Biffed DUKEDOM, CHEEK BY JOWL (from the C, Y), and EGOMANIA, parsed post-submission. It was nice to see ‘energy’ as something other than E. FLORET was my LOI; it took me a while to see how it worked. I liked SWAGGER.
15:13
Clearly on the wavelength for me, with one of my top-10 times. So, I liked it and was surprised not to see a lower SNITCH rating. I did biff SWAGGER with most of the crossers in place. Thanks, Pip, for the as-usual-excellent blog.
I have a pair of sandals called All-Rounders, parent company the excellent Mephisto, sounded like it could be cricket.
LOI GREENKEEPER.
I had biffed secret agent, which held me back for quite a while. Then I got into a bit of trouble, trying to make all-counties work, thinking of county cricket. But I realized it must be stem ginger, erased everything, and saw the answer at once. The other hard part of the wheelie/slaw crossing, but just following the instructions once again proved useful.
The clue for Clementine was pretty clever, leading to an answer that was not at all what I expected.
Time: 41 minutes
Way off the wavelength… found it very tough, continually not seeing the correct synonyms.
COD to duo for the au pair.
40 minutes. Several clues like SWAGGER and FOR EXAMPLE only half parsed and I was stuck at the end on CLEMENTINE, my COD; I’m probably the last person to know, but I didn’t realise the song was considered a parody. Other highlights were the surface for LARDER and the parsing of DOUBLE AGENT
Pip – if you don’t like coleslaw, this clue may apply to you:
I’ve had enough of salad – but this means I’m bound to get some! (4,3)
Thanks to setter and Pip
So far the blogger and commenters seem to be divided into two camps with regard to the level of difficulty, and I’m with ulaca and isla in finding it hard.
I struggled to get a foothold, eventually finding one in the SW quarter where I started to make good progress, but almost everywhere else in the grid I had problems and at one point about 25 minutes in, I was on the verge of giving up for the night and coming back to it fresh this morning. Getting CHEEK BY JOWL at just the tight moment prevented that and gradually things picked up again and the end was in sight.
45 minutes.
45m 07.
I’m in the ‘not-too-hard’ basket but I must have spent 15-20mins on PALLIATE.
However I thought there were some very clever clues. I particularly liked EEL, RED CARD, CLEMENTINE and DUO.
Thanks, Pip!
Usual time. Liked CLEMENTINE.
A game of two halves – 5 or 6 minutes for the top half, then a crawl to crack the bottom half. SLAW was my LOI as I had no idea what the gnome was all about. Didn’t parse RED CARD which took an age to come to me once the two Ds were in place (and it’s horrible anyway: a noun being used as a verb – I hate it just as I do when my nephews and niece, upset again at my having missed some important event, claim to have ‘texted’ me about it). Anyway, just shy of 45 minutes today, almost all spent in the nether regions.
And if a dog should tree a squirrel, a boxer floor his opponent, or a kind soul house a refugee—if anyone so much as butters their bread or sugars their tea… you must be in agony.
You make a fair point, Sir! Still don’t like folks redcarding people or texting me about it, but maybe give me a couple of decades and I’ll get used to it.
Don’t worry, by then there’ll be a whole new collection of verbed nouns (to borrow Jerry’s expression below) for you to get annoyed about!
“There ain’t no noun that can’t be verbed..” (anon)
Verbing weirds language.
14:21. I found this of about average difficulty, though I was totally stumped for a short while when I reached my last entry, DUO. I thought I was looking for a word that sounded like due and meant “au pair” and was close to concluding that I needed an obscure strangely spelled word. Then eventually the penny dropped. Lovely clue.
I was there, too. A friend of a friend here is a doula (from Greek doule “female slave” apparently) and I was wondering if it was some variation on that.
42 minutes, so in the ‘hard’ camp. It was a puzzle I took ages to get started. LOI STEM GINGER. COD to GREENKEEPER. Fortunately, as well as singing it at primary school, CLEMENTINE came back to me from sources as diverse as Huckleberry Hound and Bobby Darin. Thank you Pip and setter.
Wavelength day for me, 12′ 03″.
CLEMENTINE in quickly (I only know the original, with the word ‘forty-niner’ commemorating the Gold Rush). EEL and SLAW last in. Thought ‘score’ for NIL was weak.
Thanks Pip and setter.
90% easy then stopped in my tracks by the palliate/floret crossing. I really wanted 1a to be ‘jarring’!
Thanks for another excellent blog.
Thoroughly enjoyed this, thank you setter. Slightly harder than average for me at just over forty minutes, with lots of satisfying solves relishing the clever wordplay and good surfaces – COD to DUO, which defied all efforts for ages.
15 minutes, quick by my standards. Didn’t know the CLEMENTINE reference but the clueing helped, and likewise STEM GINGER was clear enough despite ginger=energy being new to me. Didn’t fully parse DUKEDOM either. Very enjoyable stuff – thanks setter and blogger.
FOI Nil
LOI Dyke
COD Au pair
33 mins. Found this harder than yesterday. Puzzled over DUO and DUKEDOM for the longest time, and CHEEK BY JOWL was thereby also delayed.
Liked FLORET and TANKFUL. And FECUND is just a lovely word.
12:24
My time suggests this was easier than average but while solving I was conscious that I was making correct connections / assumptions straight away so I can understand that others might have struggled.
Nice puzzle.
16:15. If hard is “well done” and easy is “blue” then I found this to be “medium rare”.
COD: DUO.
Not too hard, I thought, but noticebly more so than Monday’s.
Some neat clues, loved Clementine.
Unlike our esteemed blogger I also love coleslaw, preferably when made by me.
46 minutes which looked like being far less, when most of the LHS went in easily. But the clue for 5ac was annoying: A ‘DUKEDOM’ shouldn’t be defined as ‘what peer has’, but as ‘what some peers have’, or ‘what peer may have’, or some such; this clue held me up for a long time and I missed the excellent DUO for a while. It didn’t help that I’d never heard of a MOLE RAT. Nor that at first I very stupidly put in San Diego, not KEY LARGO, based on the O, its being in the USA, and the enumeration, so the top R corner was unnecessarily slow to fall.
7:47. This seems to have been a wavelength puzzle, by which I don’t mean any sort of mystical woo thing, just that some people find it hard and others find it easy, for no obviously identifiable reason.
I also dislike coleslaw, but my wife loves it. Fortunately this is one difference in preference that is very easily addressed.
Very good. That’s how I like my coleslaw too.
11:04, and yes, in the camp where I found this much tougher than the time alone suggests – I realised pretty quickly that I needed to dismantle the clues and not make assumptions, the “lift and separate” in au pair being the best example. Nice work.
I found the top half relatively easy, then slowed right down for the bottom. The SLAW/WHEELIE crossing took some time to tease out. I think of coleslaw, rather than the Americanised (?) slaw and then wouldn’t exactly think of it as a salad, though technically it is, of course, and quite delicious imho, Pip and Keriothe. But my last two in, 21D and 29A took forever to work out. Even then, I bifd both, with a MER for T sounds like tea, which it doesn’t in the word ‘entitle’ – that would be pronounced ‘entiteele’! I never did parse FLORET – I failed to find a word for news source missing ‘gen’ and couldn’t see beyond that. Liked CLEMENTINE a lot – I only know the straight version that my father used to sing us on car journeys.
Lift and separate also applies to bits of wordplay so the homophone of “tea” is there to give us the letter T but doesn’t have to sound like that in the answer.
A major eyebrow raise by seeing the ugly word “onto” in 17 down. Standards are slipping.
27:47, which by my standards seems to put me in the “wavelength” camp. Struggled to get much on the first pass of across clues but the top half came together with ALL-ROUNDER, CLEMENTINE and KEY LARGO coming readily to mind. I found the bottom left quite tough, mainly because I failed to parse SWAGGER for a long time. Had to think very hard to find the right place for my LOI RED-CARD.
Overall a fun puzzle I thought, nothing too technical but quite playful with PALLIATE and LARDER raising a bit of a smile. DUO made me feel a little queasy for some reason – something about “au pair” being separated into wordplay and definition, particularly as “au” doesn’t make sense on its own. But I think it’s fair enough on reflection. CDs often leave me cold but I quite liked TRAFFIC – I suppose it’s not truly a CD, more a sneaky DD.
Thanks S&P.
I certainly found this harder than the last two days’ puzzles. I did start off quickly, with half a dozen answers entered in the first few minutes (FOI TRAFFIC), but thereafter I elevened a bit. Even when I thought I had the correct answer it took up to a minute to see how to parse the clue. In the NE, DYKE, DUO and CHEEK BY JOWL were my last entries. In the SW, SWAGGER and STEM GINGER. I’m not sure why I took so long to see either of those.
37 minutes
24:55 I found this quite tough and thoroughly enjoyed it, though I did think “Evasive sort” for EEL seemed a bit thin.
CLEMENTINE and CHEEK BY JOWL the pick of the bunch for me. I knew the latter from the excellent theatre company of that name.
Thanks to Pip and the setter
24:36. Fairly MOR in terms of difficulty with some nice touches to keep the interest up. Liked GREENKEEPER, though I think we have seen the tender device quite recently.