Sunday Times 5162 by David McLean – I Want to Hold Your Hand

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic

11:59. A really fun puzzle from Harry this week. I didn’t find it terribly hard but I did get a bit bogged down in the middle of my solve for some reason. How did you get on?

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, deletions like this, anagram indicators are in italics.

Across
1 Some say Trump is one angry at a court (8)
AUTOCRAT – (AT A COURT)*. No comment.
5 Musical composition used in Rastafarianism
ARIA – contained in ‘Rastafarianism’.
8 Buzzer and foghorn at front create complaint
BEEF – BEE, Foghorn.
9 Crime Republican admitted to popular splinter group
INFRACTION – IN, F(R)ACTION.
11 One often battered and put down around India
PLAICE – PLA(I)CE.
13 Eat in or out around noon or not fussy?
INORNATE – (EAT IN OR)* containing N.
14 Do with girls putting away English cakes
CONGEALS – CON (do), G(E)ALS.
16 A precious metal coating Eastern antique
AGE-OLD – A, G(E)OLD.
17 American cars or SEATs valets picked up?
SEDANS – DD, the second mildly cryptic. Great clue!
19 Head to barbers to have little off top
BLOW AWAY – Barbers, LOW, AWAY (off). Top as in ice.
21 Cards constituents of a ward delivered
PATIENCE – sounds like ‘patients’. Some will no doubt object that they pronounce the T, but many people don’t, including no doubt some who think that they do. For the last few years I have worked with someone who takes great care to pronounce his Ts in words like this and it actually sounds really weird!
22 Chubby? Getting curt digs? Work out!
FATHOM – FAT, HOMe.
23 Can’t air act differently in a cold place?
ANTARCTICA – (CANT AIR ACT)*.
24 Those likely to embrace fighting
ARMS – DD. As in A Farewell to Arms.
26 Retrospective study about European poverty
NEED – reversal of DEN containing E.
27 Bank taking in little coin of late
RECENTLY – RE(CENT)LY.
Down
1 Primate in NHS unit is essentially kaput
APE – A&E containing kaPut.
2 Some stiff in gait rowing at gentle pace?
TIFFING – contained in ‘stiff in gait’. I’m not sure that the pace is what distinguishes a tiff from a fiercer argument but you get the idea. When I entered this I did wonder if this might be a little-known word for gentle oarsmanship.
3 Ring that bloke’s taken into church
CHIME – C(HIM)E.
4 Fine to be a part of wild safari romances
AFFAIRS – (SAFARI)* containing F.
6 Regret screening Alien on hot train
RETINUE – R(ET, IN)UE.
7 I’m told a loan must be taken out to get a drink
AMONTILLADO – (IM TOLD A LOAN)*.
10 Green leader abandoning confusion and commotion
AVOCADO – hAVOC, ADO. The colour of many bathrooms in the 70s.
12 Promiscuous cleric, I hear, is reckless type
LOOSE CANNON – LOOSE, homophone of ‘canon’.
15 As cares piled up, one man ultimately broke
ARSENIC – (CARES)* containing a reversal (up) of I, maN. ‘Piled’ seems to be an anagram indicator here: an odd one.
18 Cheer up a flipping wearing husband
ANIMATE – A, reversal of IN (wearing), MATE.
19 Bishop on drugs colony locks up for this?
BEEHIVE – B, E, E, HIVE.
20 Draw a model of car and vehicle with no men in it
ATTRACT – A, T, TRACTor.
22 Kind of plate covered by food for spread
FLARE – F(L)ARE.
25 Abrupt chap on Yes, Prime Minister
MAY – MAn, Y.

22 comments on “Sunday Times 5162 by David McLean – I Want to Hold Your Hand”

  1. I enjoyed the puzzle. For most the parsing was not difficult but I needed the blog for a couple.
    You certainly do pronounce the T in patient but it is quite difficult to pronounce it clearly in patients. When I try it is almost a stutter at the end, certainly not free flowing. It would sound weird. You tend to get a SUH sound after pronouncing patient.
    Thanks K.

  2. I remember being particularly amused by “locks up for this.”
    Figuring out what your title refers to is taking me longer than working the puzzle did.

  3. I had ‘ ARMY ‘ as those people likely to embrace, as an octopus might. It made good sense at the time. Haven’t we had this sense of the word in previous crosswords?

    1. I’m sure we’ve had jokey indications for ARMY, like “like an octopus” or “likely to embrace”, but those are adjectival phrases, and “those likely to embrace” is a noun phrase. “Likely to embrace those fighting” is a possible clue for ARMY, but not the clue we used.

  4. 48m 10s
    Like Corymbia I considered ARMY but, fortunately opted for ARMS but remained unsure it was correct till I came here.
    And like Guy I was amused by “locks up for this”.
    Thanks keriothe, especially for SEDANS, BLOW AWAY and ANIMATE.
    AMONTILLADO made me smile. I first came across it decades ago in a Telegraph crossword when it provided the solution to: “Wine waiters’ lament”!

    1. “sedan” meaning the same as “sedan chair”, which it conveniently does according to Collins. I suspect they were really carried by people other than valets, partly as two carriers were needed, but decided that entertainment was more important than strict accuracy.

  6. I was almost completely off the wavelength for this one and became discouraged by not being able to see the wordplay in several answers I knew to be correct. I gave up on it overnight as things were not going well and they weren’t much better on resumption in the morning. Eventually I resorted to aids to get the grid filled.

    I made some uncomplimentary notes in the margins, but a week later (and having read the blog) I have to confess that any failings were entirely my own and I was just having a bad day.

    And even after all that, I found I had an error with ARMY at 24ac. I wasn’t happy with it, but for some reason ARMS never occurred to me so it wasn’t as if I’d been faced with alternative answers and made the wrong choice.

  7. DNF, as I simply couldn’t make sense of the crossing pair of 10d and 19a. Although I guessed AWAY for the second word, the first, with initial B, eluded me. Unless I’m missing something, ‘low’ and ‘little’ are not interchangeable, nor is ‘to have little’. Can anyone supply an example? Had I got it, I think AVOCADO would have dawned on me eventually, though I thought the definition was commotion. However, not too irritated, since I would have failed anyway on ARMS, having spent ages debating whether it was that or ARMY, and eventually plumping for the latter.

    1. ‘Little’ and ‘low’ are both synonyms for ‘short’, although now that you mention it I can’t think of an example where they’d be interchangeable. You don’t refer to a low person, or a little stool.

      1. You can have little / low resistance to something perhaps? It’s hard, but ‘little’ is the very first synonym for ‘low’ in my Collins thesaurus. Having little / low regard for something may be a better example.

  8. DNF

    Similar to Alter Ego – couldn’t see LOW for little and flummoxed by the vg AVOCADO where I refused to believe the definition wasn’t at the end. I also had SUMO for ARMS which I thought was so great the consequential impossibility of ATTRACT and the fact it didnt parse failed to deter me in that enthusiasm.

    Also struggled with SEDANS. It is a great surface but almost impossible to solve from the w/p so had to rack my brains for the definition.

    Thanks all

  9. Went slightly further than keriothe for TIFFING by genuinely believing it was a word meaning to row slowly on a river. Doh. Otherwise I found this more straightforward than Sunday’s puzzles usually are.

    Thanks keriothe and David.

    FOI Aria
    LOI Avocado
    COD Retinue

  10. DNF, 3 blanks in NW…
    …NHO 12a Inornate. Added to Cheating Machine. Should have been guessable, but I didn’t.
    …19a Blow Away. No idea why I didn’t get this. Was in Cheating Machine. Didn’t spot off as kill.
    …10d Avocado, just couldn’t see it. Should have got the ado, then (h)avoc would have been easy. Bother!
    22a FatHom(e) LOI.
    24a Arms. I entered Army as in Uxbridge Dict. I think my answer is better, but clearly Peter B doesn’t.
    1d Ape COD. Or is it 12d, Loose Cannon. What a splendid picture, especially if you know a canon or two.
    15d Arsenic. Slow to see As=arsenic as usual. But yes, piled up is an odd anagrind. Train crash I suppose? I am inclined to think the up makes the anagrind better. That is how I took it, so.
    20d Attract was a bit complicated and took me a while.
    Thanks to keriothe and David McLean.

    1. ‘Up’ is needed as a reversal indicator so can’t be part of the anagrind.

  11. Not all smooth sailing, but a lot of fun. Got stuck on PLAICE, as we don’t have it here in Australia, and I’d forgotten the English way of covering it in breadcrumbs or batter. ( very tasty). Same problem with CONGEALS, where I even got as far as putting the E in GALS, but couldn’t align cakes with congeals. Only other problem was ATTRACT. Good puzzle.

  12. Had this one saved up for later. I had ARMS at first, but switched to ARMY, thinking it was a better answer, and I still do. Having seen both alternatives, and that there’s a genuine argument between them, it’s no skin off my nose! Enjoyable puzzle.

    1. The main objection to ARMY is that it renders the clue completely non-cryptic. Whether this invalidates it is an interesting question!

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