Times 26005 – Let’s Take a Walk Together

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I am just returned from Down Under, where my wager that a Brit would still be left standing in Melbourne Park long after the last Aussie had departed to the loneliness of the locker room looks set to put me in clover, even if that Brit was possessed of a temporary aberration when a recent plebiscite was held in his bonnie land.

A nice gentle (if slightly quirky) one to ease me back into the Monday saddle, even if there is one I am yet to parse. 26.5 minutes.

ACROSS

1. BUCCANEER – a homophone (‘talked of’) of John Buchan (BUCCAN) the author of The 39 Steps – so masterfully translated to celluloid by Hitchcock – + E’ER (‘always’ to Keats and co.).
9. ACHATES – ACE’S round HAT gives you Aeneas’s mate, not to be confused with Anchises, his Dad.
10. AILERON – AILER (what you might call someone who’s a bit of a worrier if you never got out but spent all your time doing crosswords) + ON (‘about’) for one of the few bits of a plane that stuck the first time I heard it.
11. VOWEL – ‘eg A’ is the definition (boom, boom!), VOW + EL the wordplay.
12. TRANSIENT – ‘passing’; from A + NS + I in the river TRENT.
13. RELAPSE – ‘deterioration’; from RE (‘concerning’) + LAPSE (sounds like Lapps).
15. VODKA – initial letters of the first five words in the clue.
17. DROVE – ‘crowd’; from DOVER with the R brought up to second position.
18. CORNY – ‘trite’; Admiral Corn sounds a good partner to Horatio Hornblower, but sadly it’s just prosaic old CO (Commanding Officer, RN (Royal Navy) with the most versatile ‘unknown’ quantity (Y) stuck on the end.
19. TOKYO – TOO around KY (Kentucky).
20. CHERISH – there’s a song by this name that still haunts me from the 80s; CH (Companion of Honour) + [p]ERISH.
23. YORKSHIRE – counties have changed so frequently in the old country since Heath started mucking about with boundaries that I suppose this refers to the time when the White Rose county had three ridings (North, West and East), but a Tyke is sure to set me straight if I’m amiss. Anyway, I take the literal as ‘county once’ and the wordplay as an anagram* of HIKER and ROSY.
25. NURSE – I’m not a massive fan of (the consequences of) unionisation, but I still remember the days when the aptly named Sid Weighell (pronounced ‘wheel’) was the boss of Britain’s largest rail federation, the NUR, which is followed by two more points of the compass (SE).
27. BRISKET – ‘joint of meat’; BRISK + TE (think Maria in The Sound of Music) reversed.
28. ELITISM – ‘dominance by select group?’ is the literal, arrived at by putting ELI’S (the priest who ‘discovered’ Samuel) around IT and chucking M[oan] on the end.
29. BRIDEWELL – a nick in London for 300 years, so well known that it became the generic word for gaol for a time; B[osses] + RIDE WELL (yeees).

DOWN

1. BEAUTY – this setter loves his/her wordplays; here ‘fine specimen’ is clued by association with Miss World, or Little Miss Sunshine, as you prefer – both beauty queens.
2. COLLAR BONE – COLLAR (like ‘nab’ a slang term for steal) + B (‘note’ – or TE in Maria’s scheme of things) + ONE (‘individual’).
3. ABRASIVE – SI in A BRAVE.
4. ERNIE – I (‘island’) in ERNE (‘sea eagle’, especially in crosswords).
5. RACE+TRACK – ask, or Google, if you don’t get it.
6. SHOVEL – ‘scoop’; the final letters of [journalist]S and ]wil]L around HOVE, a town best known for being part of a football club beaten by Arsenal in the Cup yesterday.
7. STOW – literal ‘pack’; hidden up there in NE Scotland and in the clue.
8. PSALTERY – ‘old instrument’ foreign’, as Yoda might put it, is the literal, as this ‘mini harp’ is believed to hail from the Middle East; PSY (SPY ‘used’ in ‘foreign’ mode, ie anagrammatised) around ALTER. on edit: no Yoda, sadly, ‘foreign’ is the anagram indicator, and ‘used’ should be taken with ‘to secure’ to indicate ‘surroundication’.
14. PERIWINKLE – I (‘one’) inside (AKA ‘consumed by’) PER (‘a’) + WINKLE (one of Samuel Pickwick’s three mates in the picaresque classic penned by Dickens when he was just 24).
16. DITHYRAMB – [e]DITH + YRAMB (BARMY*) gives the bawdy ditty.
17. DECANTER – that setter’s at it again! If you change down from 3rd to 2nd on a gee-gee, you might be said to DE-CANTER (boomity, boom!)
18. CONSPIRE – CON’S (‘prisoner’s’) + IRE around P[opish].
21. IBERIA – ‘Where Juan possibly lives’; IB (= IBID = on the same page as the quotation just cited) + AIRE (a river in 23a) reversed.
22. VESTAL – ‘chaste woman’ – the Vestal Virgins always put me in mind of Up, Pompeii! – titter ye not; ST in VEAL.
24. RABBI – BAR reversed on B[ishop] and I[sland].
26. REIN – just parsed this one, and of course it’s another boomtity, boom one; [on edit] Um, no actually… the literal is ‘order regularly’, which is close enough to the verbal meaning of ‘control’ or ‘restrain’, which is achieved on horseback (see 29a) by means of a ‘leading article’ attached to the bridle of the same name. it’s, as Kevin says, alternate letters of oRdEr + IN for the ‘leading article’ attached to a bridle.

68 comments on “Times 26005 – Let’s Take a Walk Together”

  2. I think I spent the last 5′ working out 17d and (LOI) 26d; all I could think of was ‘gallop’, which clearly wasn’t going to help. Several of the downs went in on checkers and definition, although the wordplay was clear enough once I looked for it. DNK Hannay, CORN, or Brands Hatch, and stupidly tried to get BR to fit into 25ac, even though it clearly said ‘railwayMEN’. Liked VOWEL.
  3. Where the plus is the time spent working on REIN. So sympathies to Ulaca. All I could see was that “Regularly Observed In Leading” suggested ROIL — which made no sense at all.

    Let us bring back the DITHYRAMB and the PSALTERY.

  4. Happy Australia Day to one and all! A particularly gratifying upside of this celebration of all things ‘strine is a day off from the factory, allowing me the rare luxury of having a crack at a weekday 15×15. And if the thought crossed your mind that spending a chunk of Australia Day doing the Times crossword might be a tad counter-cultural then, well, you’d probably be right… I shall make amends later with a spot of tuna tossing and beer drinking on the heroic scale.

    Completed, but with one wrong (REIN – could not get it and had ROIL without – obviously! – being able to parse it). Also needed to phone a friend (well, do a Google check) on DITHYRAMB.

    Grand to see you back Ulaca – missed your wit and wisdom these last few weeks. Your cryptic intro is far more puzzling than anything in the puzzle itself, but I’m working on it…

  5. Was starting to wonder where you’d got to. Thanks for dropping in!

    Very wise to focus your betting efforts on the tennis, imagine if you’d been backing your cricketers! Ho ho, he he.

    Anyway, the temporary intellectual upgrade obviously worked, as you’ve posted a good time and a good blog. Come back any time you like.

    As for the puzzle, DITHYRAMB and ACHATES were supreme tests of trusting the wordplay and the checkers, whilst REIN took a while to parse. Good holiday fun.

    1. Mock not! I reckon our cricketers might spring a surprise at the WC. At least Cook has been jettisoned, so their approach to the 50-over game is only 10 years off the pace rather than 20 as before.
  6. Just scraped in under my 30-minute target with this one but there were three clues, all in the SW, that put this in jeopardy for a while. I never heard of DITHYRAMB, had forgotten (if I ever knew) that ‘ibid’ can also be ‘ib’ and 26dn proved to be quite a lengthy going-though-the-alphabet affair to find something that worked as a definition and fitted the wordplay.

    I noted right from the off (i.e. 1ac) that a lot of rather specific GK was required which was fine if you happen to know it but otherwise might cause some problems and need looking up to understand all the references.

    For a while I was planning to add a note to today’s Quickie blog recommending this as an easy solve for those who fancied having a go at it, as this is something that has been requested by some of the newer solvers, but in the end I decided it might be just a bit too tricky and I wouldn’t want to mislead people.

    I wasn’t too keen on ‘spelt out’ in 11 and wonder if I’ve missed something. Simply ‘pledge by the Spanish’ might have been better.

    Edited at 2015-01-26 05:40 am (UTC)

    1. My take on this is that ‘spelt out’, belonging to the same lexical field as ‘vowel’, is a nice bit of ‘internal referencing’. It also seems a slightly more natural surface – if still a little strained – than the alternative you suggest.
  7. 13m. No real problems this morning, helped by knowing some of the obscurities like PSALTERY and DITHYRAMB. I didn’t know the Dickens fellow but he wasn’t really needed.
    I wasn’t particularly happy with the definition of AILER, but no doubt it’s in a dictionary somewhere.
    At 15ac you can either use all the first letters, or treat V, O and D as abbreviations. I’m not sure which I did.
    I took 23ac to be a reference to the fact that the counties are now North and South Yorkshire.
    In 8dn the definition is just ‘old instrument’. ‘Foreign’ is the anagrind telling you to mix up the letters of SPY.
    1. Re 23a, having done a spot of Googling, it seems that East, North, South, and West Yorkshire are ‘unitary authorities’, so I’m sticking with my hunch that the ‘county’ of Yorkshire in t’ good old days comprised West, North and East Ridings.

      Will change 8d – got too intricate for my own good. 🙂

      1. Happen as that’s as may be, but the clue says ‘county once’, which only works if Yorkshire was once a single county but is no longer.
    2. I can’t find any evidence that the word exists, but having said that I’m not sure that it needs to as it’s only part of the wordplay. I’d take it as tongue-in-cheek as indicated by “perhaps”.
      1. It was the ‘worry’ bit that bothered me. ‘Ail’ is a synonym for ‘worry’ (sort of: ‘Oh what are you worried about, knight-at-arms?’ doesn’t quite seem the same) but it’s a transitive verb and a ‘person who’s worried’ is not the one doing the ailing.

        Edited at 2015-01-26 11:01 am (UTC)

        1. I think “ail” can also be intransitive – as in “My brother is ailing.” Not that I would ever use the word myself.
          1. When it’s intransitive I think it means to be ill rather than to worry. And in the phrase ‘person who’s worried’ it’s meant in the transitive sense… whatever that is!
            1. I take your first point about the ill/worry.
              That said, “person who’s worried” can be either transitive or intransitive.
              1. I struggle to see ‘worried’ as intrasitive in that phrase: the person in question is the object. Or am I missing something?
  8. Some nice clueing here. I thought 18a was particularly tricksy and had me on the wrong track for ages: HARDY & COOK-Y were early candidates until I finally got the shellfish that curiously is also the name of a rather attractive flower.
    Pleasingly just under the half-hour mark to complete.
    Don’t get me started on the “modern” counties that were devised by faceless civil servants without any sensitivity regarding history or culture or indeed the wishes of the inhabitants: Yorkshire is Yorkshire.
      1. My point being if you ask those in East Lancashire whether they are Lancastrians or from Yorkshire, I think I can pretty well predict the answer. Similarly people in Weston-Super-Mare strongly believe they should still be in historic Somerset rather than the artificial “North Somerset”. And the residents in Hartlepool cling to their traditional identity as part of County Durham instead of the monstrosity known as Cleveland.
        1. It’s a variation on the Tebbit cricket test, isn’t it? I used to live in Enfield, so my county then was Middlesex. While living in Bristol, I could take my pick between Gloucestershire and Somerset, and did as often as I could. I grew up in Hertfordshire, so naturally supported – um – Tottenham.
          1. As a proud Bathonian (nb yesterday’s nailbiter against Glasgow !!! ), I welcome your support for Somerset – but Bristol is firmly part of Gloucestershire (GCC have a cricket ground there).

            Weston may be in “North Somerset” and Bath may be in “BANES”, but they’re both still part of Somerset

            1. I lived in Bishopston a bare quarter mile from the Gloucester ground, but also watched Somerset v Gloucester at Somerset’s Imperial Athletic Ground in 1976: IVA Richards 126 n.o. Sadiq Mohammed 131, and considered myself a Somerset fan at that time. I fear my cricketing support has been more fickle over the years than my footie.
  9. 13:46 … probably what a Monday puzzle should be — not difficult, but there wasn’t much that went in from definition. Took me a while to cotton on to VODKA, and REIN was last in after a couple of minutes of frowning at it. DECANTER is very cute.
  10. 14.15, which includes a brief emergency hiatus. Relatively easy then, but by no means trite. Having the GK helped, but the genius of this puzzle was that you could get by if you didn’t have it. So Brand Hatch was a gimme for me, but even with the K to help I couldn’t call to mind which the Bluegrass State was. I sort of knew ACHATES (though I’d almost certainly pronounce it/him/her wrong) but the wordplay was gracious. I remembered Nathaniel WINKLE in time to finish the clue, but you could manage without. DITHYRAMB is one of those words that sticks in the memory long after you’ve forgotten what it means. So a puzzle that achieves the remarkable feat of letting you feel cheerfully smug without actually requiring you to know anything much.
    Perhaps indicating that my grandfatherly experience far outweighs my equestrian, my image for rein was the toddler version, delighting in the “leading article” definition while simultaneously thinking “leading? You must be joking!”
    So thanks to setter and welcome home and thanks to Ulaca for an amusing grid and blog respectively. I appreciated both the boom-booms and the wordplay that elicited them.

    Edited at 2015-01-26 09:23 am (UTC)

  11. 10 mins. Fortunately I saw the parsing for REIN fairly quickly, and CORNY was my LOI when I finally saw how it worked. Thanks to having done crosswords for several years I had the necessary GK for PSALTERY, ACHATES and DITHYRAMB so the clues for them were easier to crack than they may otherwise have been.
  12. Nice puzzle, completed and parsed in a little under the 60m. I did have one difference of opinion with Ulaca’s otherwise excellent blog, and that is in 7d, where I took the definition to be “pack”, answer STOW (hidden), as in “stow your hammock”, making it almost a triple definition as STOW is also a place in Scotland as pointed out by our blogger.

    I did not know DITHYRAMB or ACHATES but they were gettable from the wordplay.

    Thanks all.

    1. Ah, but Stow is in the borders near Galashiels, according to Google. My reference to NE Scotland refers to the fact that if you go from Inverness to Wick – as I did by slow train in 1987 on my way to Orkney, at a time when many of the firths were unbridged – you travel through the old counties of Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland and Caithness.
      1. Sorry, I wasn’t quibbling with your reference to NE Scotland, but that your blog appeared to ignore what I took to be the definition, i.e. pack. If pack isn’t the definition, then what is it doing there?
        1. Ah, I was being a tad too elliptic, perhaps. I have amended my already flawed blog accordingly.
  13. 20.35 after not being able to see ‘beauty’ at the end for some minutes. Still don’t understand its clue. Oh. Seems slightly odd though.
    1. Perhaps it’s from Snow White – “Mirror, mirror on the wall”. In the version I remember from my childhood, the mirror actually shows the Wicked Queen first and then Snow White. I’ve never seen the cartoon so I have no idea what line Disney took.
  14. You are surely not talking about ‘Cherish’ by Rachel Morrison and Bliss? Only a handful of people know that song and justifiably remember it! Who are you? Is it possible that I know you?
  15. … with much time at the end on DECANTER and AILERON.

    DITHYRAMB, a funny-looking (and funny-sounding) word, went in on wp. As did BRIDEWELL, I’d not come across that either.

  16. I think Beauty sometimes comes before Queen in the phrase admittedly far more popular in the 70s ‘Beauty Queen’.
  17. A nice gentle first puzzle on returning from foreign climes: 10:49 despite not knowing dithyramb, Achates (bless you) and Pickwick’s pal.

    Penfold, somewhere in Yorkshire.

  19. Completed in midair in transit from Gatwick to Toulouse. Estimated solving time around 25 mins with REIN as LOI. My classical education allowed me to bung in ACHATES and DITHYRAMB from definition thus demonstrating that some good came from the money my parents lavished on my schooling. No self-respecting Yorkhireman recognises the 1972 Local Government Act which I believe was implemented most aptly on April Fool’s Day 1974. For me Yorkshire is still a county within its pre-1974 boundaries regardless of the tinkering of our esteemed policitians.
  20. Best Monday one in a while, I think. I didn’t time it, but the three of us at work got through pretty quickly. DITHYRAMB and faithful ACHATES were both things I just managed to drag from some obscure corner of my brain, although they were definitely in the ‘I-know-this-is-a-word-but-I-forget-what-for’ category.

    Really liked DECANTER!

  21. 25m today so slightly easier than average but hard for an easy Monday sort of puzzle. I had BIFD 26d as the likeliest candidate so thanks for blog and entertainment. Some challenging vocabulary and general knowledge made this an enjoyable solve for me with DECANTER the pick of the bunch.
  22. I couldn’t time this as I was interrupted too much, but it all went in without too much trouble, ending with REIN. DNK ACHATES, DITHYRAMB or Pickwick’s pal either, and certainly DNK Brand Hatch. But got there eventually. COD to CORNY, which had me scratching my head for a bit. Regards.
  23. A manageable and gentle start to the week. I thought DECANTER was excellent and the definition for REIN cleverly disguised.

    i agree with others above that “ailer” in AILERON at 10A is not a real word, but then if we allow a river to be defined as a “banker”, among other weird coinages peculiar to the world of cryptic crosswords, I guess we can’t really complain.

  24. After 12 days of drips and no sleep. Still a delicate couch potato for a while but should be OK for Wednesday thanks JerryW for filling in. Managed this in dozy state in half an hour, LOI REIN. Nice to be alive and have beaten the big C.
    1. Welcome back and here’s hoping for a speedy recovery. Puts crosswords into perspective!
    4. Good to hear from you. Stay snug and get some zzzz. We’ve got a blizzard in these parts. I think I know what Kevin will be doing in Poughkeepsie before too long and it involves a 6d.
  25. 6:34 Even for. Monday, which is usually a bit easier it seems, I’m very chuffed with that!
  26. Two short solving session, so no great holdups with REIN the last in. I knew BUCHAN but not the reference, thankfully the definition left no doubt as to the answer.
  27. Solved this on the train to London. All correct in about an hour. Unknowns Achates, Dithyramb and Bridewell all gettable from the wordplay. Yorkshire reminded me of my mother-in-law, an exiled Yorkshirewoman. As the saying goes: you can take the lass out of Yorkshire but you can’t take Yorkshire out of the lass!
  28. 11:23 for me, not on the ball at all. I had a panicky moment with 1ac trying to remember how to spell BUCCANEER – fortunately it looked better than BUCKANEER! With B and A in place, I wasted time trying to fit BRANDY (= “fine”) into 1dn. And (like others) I took ages to come up with REIN.

    As far as 23ac is concerned, I’m with yorkshire_grey. As a Yorkshireman born and bred, I regard the inclusion of “once” as gratuitous to the point of being offensive!

  32. Less of a stroll for me than for some others – a whisker short of 30 minutes, with REIN and IBERIA my LOsI. I never did manage to parse IBERIA.

    Never heard of a DITHYRAMB. If I ever encounter a Bacchanalian song and need to report this fact to someone else, I shall simply say “I’ve encountered a Bacchanalian song!”, rather than resorting to Greek. Unless the person I’m talking to happens to be Greek, perhaps. In any case, I can’t see the Greeks having much use for dithyrambs in the foreseeable future.

    I failed also to parse STOW, mainly because Scotland is one of those parts of England whose geography is a closed book to me.

    Injury of the day: spanner ingestion. If I were going to swallow a 1/2-inch combination chrome-vanadium spanner for a bet, the stakes would have to be considerably higher than they were in this case. Still, nice to see that not everything’s gone metric.

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