Times 27225 – TCC Heat 2 third puzzle. Climb every mountain…

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I began this with some trepidation, having read in previous weeks that it was harder than the other two in this heat. I was surprised to find, IMO, it was not so hard. Apart from 1d and 7d, which required some GK but were also deducible from word play, there’s nothing obscure. There are four straightforward anagrams and one compound one, to get you going, and a couple of nice ‘sounds like’ clues. It took me around the twenty minutes so I’d have nearly had time to do all three in this heat, the one I blogged 2 weeks ago being the hardest and taking me over time.
Next week I presume we’ll be into the Finals puzzles, so perhaps things will get tougher.
Merry Christmas to all who visit and contribute on Wednesdays. Or Merry Winter Holiday if you’re a snowflake.

Across
1 Hymn may be amusing when king is deposed (8)
CANTICLE –  CAN TICKLE = would be amusing, remove the K for king.
5 Traditionally they’re beaten in spring (and summer originally) (6)
BOUNDS – BOUND = spring, S first letter of summer. Beating the bounds is an old custom in English and Welsh parishes, where elders would walk aorund the boundary checking for incursions or moved stakes; still occasionally observed but less necessary in the days of maps and GPS.
10 About time animal is nobbled (3,2)
GOT AT – GOAT has a T inserted.
11 Tree, say, hugged by British eccentric (9)
BUTTERNUT – B = British, NUT = eccentric, hugs UTTER = say. Butternut is a large tree, a.k.a. White walnut, as well as a squash we like to grow.
12 Evil One stopping poet’s game (9)
BILLIARDS – BARDS = poet’s, has ILL 1 inserted.
13 Irishman back home meeting everyone (5)
NIALL – IN = home, reversed = NI, ALL. A common Irish first name.
14 Time to be off: vagrant strayed (4,3)
REST DAY – (STRAYED)*.
16 Acolyte is cut off crossing river (6)
SERVER – R inserted into SEVER.
18 Copper reported cheers (3,3)
SEE YOU – Sounds like C U, or Cu, the chemical symbol for copper.
20 Crazy festival venue found by conductor? (7)
HAYWIRE – HAY festival as in the Hay-on-Wye book festival, WIRE = conductor.
22 Moderate beheaded in many cases (5)
OFTEN – SOFTEN = moderate, as a verb, is beheaded.
23 A plant that’s cultivated like this gets new twigs (7,2)
COTTONS ON – COTTON = plant cultivated, SO = like this, N = new.
25 Put up with a band on cloud nine (4-1-4)
COCK-A-HOOP – COCK = put up, A, HOOP = band.
26 Putting name to river is futile (2,3)
NO USE – N = name, OUSE = the river. there are apparently five River Ouses in the UK.
27 Engine driver stops working with European line (6)
DIESEL – DIES = stops working, E(uropean), L(ine).
28 Harriet’s novel is cheaper (8)
TRASHIER – (HARRIETS)*.

Down
1 Composers modern and ancient — the latter heard canary? (4,4)
CAGE BIRD – Two composers, John CAGE and sounds like William BYRD.
2 Girl that is abandoned at birth (5)
NATAL – NATALIE loses her I.E. = that is.
3 Now and again stay hidden in ruins (2,4,3,3,3)
IN THIS DAY AND AGE – (AGAIN STAY HIDDEN)*.
4 One boy in Lyon, not on shore leave (7)
LIBERTY – LY = Lyon, not on; insert I BERT = one boy.
6 Fast ships reached young son at sea (5,10)
OCEAN GREYHOUNDS – (REACHED YOUNG SON)*.
7 With grandmother and father, I have to climb a mountain (5,4)
NANDA DEVI – IVE = I have, DAD = father, NAN = grandmother; reverse all that (to climb). I recalled vaguely the Nanda Devi national park was in India; Nanda Devi is the highest mountain wholly in India, (Kangchenjunga is a bit higher but straddles the border).
8 Light piece of furniture (6)
SETTLE – Double definition. Light as in alight.
9 Old police sergeant’s first arrest (6)
STASIS – STASI the old East German police, S first letter of sergeant.
15 Accepts unusual French article that’s visually striking (9)
SPECTACLE – (ACCEPTS)*, LE.
17 Animals extremely ruminative, certainly, not quite right (8)
REINDEER – RE = extremes of ruminative, INDEE(D) = certainly not quite, R.
19 Turn up after relative almost gets clear (6)
UNCLOG – UNCL(E), GO reversed = turn up.
20 Percy is in demand on branch line (7)
HOTSPUR – HOT = in demand, SPUR = branch line. Henry Percy a.k.a. Hotspur was the first son of the Duke of Northumberland and is also a major character in Henry IV part 1. I knew that but didn’t know that the football team received its name from the fact that the Percy’s descendants owned the land at Tottenham marshes where the club’s first ground was located.
21 Artificially produced waterfall at head of dale (6)
FORCED – A FORCE is a name for a waterfall, e.g. several in the Lake District of England. D = head of dale. Forced as in e.g. forced rhubarb.
24 Arab, retaining uranium, depressed leader in Iran (5)
SAUDI – SAD = depressed, retains U, then adds I(ran).

55 comments on “Times 27225 – TCC Heat 2 third puzzle. Climb every mountain…”

  1. I found a lot of the definitions obscure/hard: bound, settle, force, hotspur, hay; similar feelings about some of the answers: canticle, ocean greyhound, Nanda Devi
  2. Very happy to fnish in a little over an hour. My thanks to all of you whose comments and explanations have slowly, slowly taught me to unravel these conundrums. I’ve been silently following you for years!
  3. I did not realise this was a Championship puzzle so I agree with Pip that it wasn’t too trepidatious.

    However, I reached 55 mins but failed the summit at 7dn (7up technically speaking) by plumping for NANWA PEVI – I never even thought that father might be DAD! So I used PA W=with, slipped and hit a mogul. On reflection NANWA PEVI might well be the thirteenth largest mountain in India! (NANDA DEVI – another foreign object defined by a partial anangram!)

    FOI 28ac TRASHIER

    COD and WOD 6dn OCEAN GREYHOUNDS I have a vague recollection of a set of 50 cigarette cards entitled ‘Ocean Greyhounds’ from Wills, back in the day. Remember cigarettes?

    Edited at 2018-12-19 07:22 am (UTC)

  4. As I mentioned last week, this was my downfall on the day, and looking at it again I can only think that was because it was the third one in the book, so didn’t get started on till close to the halfway point.
    Particular frustration around getting NANDA DEVI and the ships, even parsing 1a as FOI, but missing simple ones such as STASIS and REINDEER.

    So all in all I ended up with 7 wrong not filled in so a less-than-spectacular 82 points overall resulting in mid-table anonymity in =50th for the prelim.

    Ah well there’s always next year…..

  5. 49 minutes, so not too bad for me especailly as I was unable to get started at the top so I began with 28ac and worked upwards all the way from there. Had no idea about LIBERTY for ‘shore leave’ but what else could it be? I was delayed for a while by having CATCHES ON at 23ac but suddenly remembering OCEAN GREYHOUNDS got me out of that hole. LOI NANDA DEVI, unknown but it seemed the most likely answer to fit the wordplay once all the checkers were in place.
    1. LIBERTY for shore leave comes from US Marines. Watch out too for “liberty boat” used to transport them ashore.
      1. Thanks. So ‘liberty boats’ were different from ‘liberty ships’ (which I’d heard of) built in the US to replace British ships sunk by torpedoes. One lives and learns!
  6. A few clues required more time than I could have afforded, like 1ac; and I had to assume that HAY is a venue for a festival, but (having finally remembered FORCE from a cryptic of a couple of years ago) nothing except 7d was unknown to me, and the wordplay (given the checkers) was helpful. What wasn’t helpful was my typing; I put in FROCED, and didn’t notice, giving myself 2 unforced errors.

    Edited at 2018-12-19 07:51 am (UTC)

  7. Oddly, I knocked off the ones others found harder—NANDA DEVI, CAGE BIRD, so forth—but failed to get 22a OFTEN (I thought the beheaded moderate was going to be (W)ET and confused myself) and 21d, where I didn’t know the waterfall and FORCED was a long way from my mind for “artificially produced”.

    Also hadn’t heard of beating the bounds or ocean greyhounds, but at least I pieced them together.

    All in all a DNF in about an hour and ten, though I had all but two done in the hour. I won’t be entering the championship for a while!

  8. 50 mins with yoghurt (full fat), granola, banana, blueberry compote – and Lavazza coffee.
    LOI DNK Nanda Devi entered with fingers crossed.
    I spent far too long not seeing: Billiards! Butternut and …Greyhounds.
    Mostly I liked: Cottons on
    Thanks setter and Pip
    1. Did you think “liar” for the Evil One in 12a? That’s what got me stuck on the parsing…
      1. I entered BADMINTON: BAD for evil and a vague sense that you could probably derive the rest from MILTON somehow!
        1. I thought of Billiyron and Billiurns before I realised Billiards!! Billiyron does sound like it could be a game.
  9. NHO NANDA DEVI but the wordplay was exceptionally kind. So, in total, about 11 minutes longer for the Heat 2 puzzles than for Heat 1. Like Pip (and the SNITCH) I found the first of the three the most difficult.
  10. 29 minutes, not quite fast enough to give me fresh delusions of adequacy. I didn’t know BUTTERNUT as a tree but deduced the BNUT component and then remembered that ‘say’ is often UTTER. I did the OCEAN GREYHOUNDS anagram in two stages, having got the OCEAN from crossers. Having constructed the unknown NANDA DEVI, I kept my fingers crossed. The CAGE BIRD fell off his perch and then I was tickled by COD CANTICLE. When the STASI was wound up, did the German government retrain the operatives to become GP receptionists and send them here? LOI SERVER. Thank you Pip and setter.
    1. I did exactly the opposite with OCEAN GREYHOUNDS: the dog bit from checkers and the OCEAN bit deduced from the anagrist.
  11. 11:18, but with a silly typo: GOT IT. I parsed this one fully before putting it in so I like to think I wouldn’t have done this in championship conditions. One of those mistakes you won’t spot even if you check all your answers.
    A couple of bits of knowledge here that I owe entirely to doing crosswords: that FORCE is a word for a waterfall, and that beating the BOUNDS is a thing. And a couple of bits that I didn’t have at all: OCEAN GREYHOUNDS and NANDA DEVI. I was a bit nervous about the latter because there are lots of short words for ‘grandmother’ and ‘father’.
  12. A bit of a disappointment after the build up. Well constructed puzzle but nothing like as difficult as I was expecting. I knew all the required GK – mostly from doing crosswords!
  13. 46 mins. Held up for a long while with the fast ships anagram, because, like others here, I’d erroneously biffed CATCHES ON. Biffed CANTICLE, too — thanks for the parsing, Pip. But my Shakespeare knowledge made HOTSPUR a write-in, years of Yorkshire Dales holidays (in the vicinity of Hardraw Force) made 21d easy and I had vaguely heard of the Indian mountain (and the wordplay was very supportive). My COD nomination to CU=’see you’.
    Great blog, Pip, including the fascinating info about Tottenham. Thank you.
  14. Same as Pip – I was expecting a brute and this wasn’t. My 22.33 still not good enough though. I think I knew shore LIBERTY from On The Town and the GREYHOUNDS from a description of a German submarine in Childers’s Riddle Of The Sands. The one I had trouble with was SEE YOU – staring at *e* and thinking it can’t be “sez you” can it? No it couldn’t. P.S. REINDEER was a write-in – over the weekend my 7 and 5 year-old grandsons gave us a rousing rendition of Rudolf with all the grade-school additions as accompanying chorus.

    Edited at 2018-12-19 10:19 am (UTC)

  15. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that OCEAN GREYHOUNDS had come up before, and sure enough… not as an answer but in a clue in puzzle 26803 (14 August 2017): ‘Circumnavigating America, be at helm of ocean greyhound?’ for STEAMER.
  16. ….seems quite apposite on the run-in to Christmas (DIESEL’s moniker was Rudolf for those who don’t know.)

    I did this in a straight sitting on the day, and I’d guess it was around 11-12 minutes. As we rose from our desks at the end of the hour, we turned to each other and said “NANDA DEVI ???” almost in unison ! It was the only worry I had about qualifying.

    16A made me smile, as I’d been chatting to Tony Sever minutes before hand.

    FOI BOUNDS
    LOI NANDA DEVI
    COD SEE YOU

  17. But with more ignorance, not least never having heard of the conductor (Bert?) Wire. Didn’t see wire=conductor, and I’m an electrical engineer. Lacking lots of GK – canticle, beating bounds, ocean greyhounds (though I live with two such dogs), Nanda Devi – Nanga Parbat known/seen from Gulmarg, so thought the first word might be Nanga. Remembered Hay, Cage, Byrd, Ouse, Hotspur (all proper nouns!) from previous puzzles. Still despise random names – Natalie and Bert.
    27 minutes, well over the hour for the three, so no champs any time soon for me.
    Having visited northern parts of the UK I would have guessed “See you” meant not cheers but “I wish to plant my forehead on the bridge of your nose with great vigour”. “See you later” is more common here.

    Edited at 2018-12-19 11:23 am (UTC)

  18. Took a long time to get to grips with the NE corner, where most of my blind spots were located. I’ve eaten plenty of butternut squash, but didn’t know the tree, so I toyed with lots of wrong answers along the lines of BRAVERRUM before it all fell into place. All there when you see it, though, which is what you hope for in a puzzle.
      1. About 42 minutes (with the obvious caveat that we all know how solving times can change when you’re sitting at a desk in Times HQ in front of a ticking clock, rather than at your kitchen table)…
  19. 35 minutes, with problems in NW, having at first tried LIT ON at 10ac & BADMINTON at 12ac (as noted above). Was glad that wordplay at 5dn was sufficient to confirm my hazy memory of its spelling.
  20. Strangely I saw the anagram, but thought that the letters for GREYHOUND weren’t there until I had a second look later. Might have been much quicker otherwise as I got bogged down in the NE. Nearly played UNCLOT LOI as the G wasn’t immediately obvious to me. Also never heard of a SETTLE though it seemed pretty likely.
    1. SETTLE’s in my list of crosswordy words, but it turns out that’s because it was in a Chifonie in the Guardian last month, not here. Probably why it sprang to my mind so readily.
  21. A time which once again makes me think ‘maybe, just maybe one day…’, until rational thought intervenes. Didn’t know the mountain, liked HOTSPUR. Have been to Northumberland and Alnwick Castle several times, where, not surprisingly, there is a lot of information about the Percy family, including a campaign to get a family member, condemned for treason centuries ago, rehabilitated, or found not guilty or some such. Look out for 2d over the coming period.

    Thanks pip and setter.

    1. Ah! I might’ve been a bit faster on this one if I’d chosen Alnwick Castle instead of Lindisfarne for one of the trips on my week in Northumberland this year. I did wander past the Castle a few times—looked like a splendid backdrop for the cricket matches that were on—but didn’t venture in.
      1. It’s also famous for Harry Potter scenes, we were once stuck behind a coach on a Harry Potter tour….
  22. 23’45. Exactly as Rob above’s first thought … and second. Could never compete with those ocean greyhounds.
  23. No time today, solved piecemeal as time became available, but I don’t think I’d have made the 20 minutes: the mountain was a bit steep.
    Not much went in at all until I started working up from the bottom. Like others, I essayed BADMINTON on the assumption that Milton was in there somehow, and when I finally managed BILLIARDS I was so relieved to see the Father of Lies emerge that I forgot to work out the rest of the wordplay.
    I’m still not clear whether FORCE is a particular name for a waterfall, or a thesaurus entry. Perhaps I should look it up!
    Mrs Z is a fan of the BUTTERNUT squash, so its arboreal existence was a surprise.
    CANTICLE for most amusing clue of the day.
    1. In the Yorkshire Dales I’ve visited both Hardraw Force and Aysgarth falls (divided into Upper Force, Middle Force and Lower Force). High Force is somewhere north of there and as Pip points out there are a bunch in the Lake District.

      I don’t know how localised the term is or indeed whether it fits your interpretation of a particular waterfall of is generic.

  25. I don’t recall much from this one on the day, other than having fingers crossed on Nanda Devi (and joining Phil in the immediate post-solve conference on the matter). I had to solve the greyhound from checkers and was slightly nervous about server, with acolyte being one of those words whose meaning escapes one in the heat of battle.
  27. I started with NATAL and CAGE BIRD, so wasn’t tempted by BADMINTON. OCEAN GREYHOUNDS was delayed by a biffed CATCHES ON, and a wrong enumeration on the piece of paper I used to try and untangle the anagram. HOTSPUR and FORCE no problem for this northerner. There’s a picture of me sat on the rocks at the top of High Force before ‘elf and safety, here: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AtISbwJlBmVWpAbBN2nJjajo5cUu
    The NE corner accounted for a long delay as BUTTERNUT, SETTLE, NANDA DEVI and finally BOUNDS were teased out. Enjoyable puzzle though. 47:13. Thanks setter and Pip.
  28. 34:08 not too shabby given that these prelim puzzles seem to have been harder than in recent years. I paused a bit at force for waterfall but couldn’t see anything better than forced. Took a while to construct 7dn but once done it rang a faint bell. Can tickle raised a smile. I enjoyed this one very much, pitched at about the right level for me, a decent challenge without being particularly fiendish.
  29. … as the Liverpool shop assistant said. Correctly guessed at Nanda Devi so finished OK (with a little nap halfway through). I “beat the bounds” every year in Dacre (SE London).
  30. Obscurities and the obligatory Americanism to catch you out are no substitute for ingenious wordplay. And indeed that lack of knowledge was my downfall, so obviously a bit of sour grapes on my part. I realise that not every crossword can be a gem, but at least at the Championships I thought they might have used their very best, most entertaining puzzles, as a celebration of what should be great about solving crosswords, and I was looking forward to their publication as a weekly treat. It IS possible to fail and yet still be entertained! But this one was basically a general knowledge test with some reverse parsing. And they’ve all been a bit ‘run-of-the-mill’ to be honest. Mr Grumpy
  31. Put me down as another who threw in Badminton for a mixture of the reasons already mentioned (despite spending around 3 hours in my local snooker club before solving!). Managed to get an “all clear” with a fingers crossed for Bounds and Settle. Another DNK for the mountain but fairly confident with my guess having all checkers in place. I found this pleasantly hard but fair. Exactly what one would expect from a Championship crossword. Regards to all.
  32. Pretty quick solve; didn’t time it as watching TV at the same time. GK not too out there, so no complaints. Great blog, cheers.
  33. 21mins – so far and away the hardest of the 6 prelims for me. Still, I’m pretty happy with a total time of 49mins for the second heat.
  34. About an hour. Some thought required – stuck on OCEAN GREYHOUNDS mainly which proved to be the key to several I should have seen earlier –
    brain loosened by a Bengali IPA saw me over the finish line.

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