Times 25970 – Staines-upon-Thames: from Ghetto to Cathedral Town?

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Having come a cropper on Dean’s puzzle yesterday by dint of my shaky Dutch, I was glad to be back in the company of Classical deities today and thought I was on for a time that might frighten a few of the championship folks. Sadly that was not to be, as I struggled with a couple of riverine clues in the bottom half, not to mention a couple of crossing answers neither of which I was familiar with.

And that is not even to mention a 110-year-old song clued by a German song that I can never spell right, even though I know the phonological rules. It’s just like Riesling, except, in addition to being unable to spell that one right, I can never say it right either.

Which reminds me of my most embarrassing moment of the weekend. I have recently been watching a few films by the French auteur Loius Malle, and this emboldened me to hold forth about his work at a party I attended on Saturday. Having caused several sets of eyes to glaze over as I contrasted the darkness of Le Feu Follet with the lyricism of Les Amants, I moved on to a critical consideration of his favourite work, Phantom India, a series so accurate in its depiction of rural India that the BBC was barred from filming in India for several years after its release. I was in ‘le zone’, as the French say, but destined to come to earth with a bump when I was told that his name was pronounced Malle, not Mallé.

37 minutes (the puzzle – not writing all that).

ACROSS

1. QUADRUPEDS – An anagram* of SQUARED UP + D[ukes].
6. HEMP – HEM + P[atrol] for the plant which has many (legal) uses, including making rope and fabrics.
9. ATTACHMENT – cryptic, kinda double, definition.
11. ZING – N in ZIG.
12. WELLINGTON BOOT – the literal ‘rainwear’ is easy enough but the wordplay is quite cunning given the presence of TOO: WELLING (‘surging like water’) + N[ew] in TO BOOT (‘also’).
14. RUSSET – RU’S + SET.
15. FOREBEAR – FORE (warning heard regularly when I play golf) + BEAR.
17. SHOP TALK – literal ‘chat about working’; HOP (‘brewer’s plant’) in STALK, where the insertedness is indicated by the word order and the instruction to bring the S[mall bit] to the front of the answer.
19. DEMISE – hidden; literal is ‘end’.
22. PHOTOSENSITIVE – in case you have forgotten your O-level Science, this means ‘having a chemical, electrical, or other response to light’; PHOTO (‘still’, as in photograph) + SENSITIVE.
24. TWIN – T[emperature] + WIN for ‘double’; nice clue. The sort I can’t write, as the Turkey will make manifest.
25. JOURNALIST – with no first letter checked, this was quite tricky, until JOT for ‘write quickly’ emerged from the mists created by scrawl, scribble etc. The clue is a kind of semi &lit… possibly, I think, with the wordplay bit being JOT about URN (‘vessel’) + SAIL*.
26. HANK – a HANK, besides meaning a ring on a stay and a length of cloth or yarn, is also a coil or LOOP of hair/rope/yarn. De-tail a HANKY (‘square cloth’) to get it.
27. NELLIE DEAN – this song, written in 1905 and sounding rather like ‘Keep the home fires burning’, is here sung by some Poms under the shadows of the pyramids. It’s a bit indistinct at first (possibly an advantage) but warms up and is quite moving in a this-makes-you-proud-we-colonised-half-the-world-but-never-impacted-on-their-culture-very-much kind of way. NE + LIED (der deutsche Gesang) in LEAN (‘list’).

DOWN

1. QUAY – sounds like ‘key’.
2. ARTLESS – SALTS’RE*; not ‘realest’ as I had at first…
3. RE(-)COLLECTION – a tongue-in-cheek reference to passing the collection plate round at church – again.
4. POMONA – mmm, I’m not sure about this tipping of the cap to the Antipodeans, who took to referring to those who refused to emigrate with them from Britain/England by this epithet and then repeating it ad nauseam. Well, it’s that followed by ON (‘under the influence of’ – the hemp, for example) + A. POMONA was the Roman goddess/wood nymph of fruitful abundance, married to Vertumnus.
5. DONATION – DO + NATION; a denizen of the Antipodes might say that even a semi-4 could get this one. Whether he could get it himself, of course, would be the ‘1d’ question…
7. EPITOME – E[uropean – as far as I am aware, E is used to stand for ‘European’ only before numbers, to indicate the standardized EU system] + PI (Greek letter) + TO ME.
8. PAGE TURNER – PAGE (‘summon’ as in North by Northwest, where an innocent page started all the trouble for Cary Grant) + TURNER (as in JMW, whose biopic is just out, I believe – his work received the mother and father of shots in the arm from Ruskin’s masterly Modern Painters; the best line in the Hawking biopic A Brief History of Everything is given to Hawking’s dad, who says Turner’s paintings look as if they’ve been left out in the rain).
11. INTEREST RATE – INTER (‘bury’) + R[ex] inside ESTATE (‘grounds’). The king is kind of buried twice, which is rather neat.
14. CROSSPATCH – I know we’ve had this before, but I had completely forgotten it, it not being in my idiolect; CROSS (‘to reach other side of’) + PATCH (‘manor’ – as in ‘turf’).
16. BLUE NOTE – new to me: it’s ‘a minor interval where a major would be expected, especially in jazz’. Another tongue-in-cheek crypticky one.
18. OXONIAN – and there was I trying to think of all the cities on the Thames, apart from London. Henley – no; Goring – no; Addlestone – no; Staines – certainly not! Reading – not yet, despite its best efforts. Oxford, of course, but it doesn’t fit. But ‘from city on Thames’ does, d’oh! The parsing is a wee bit convoluted – not to mention Yodaesque – with O (‘ring’) + NI (‘Northern Ireland’) stopping (i.e. blocking up) O (‘old’) + X (‘times’) + AN (‘article’).
20. IN+VOICE
21. ASTRAL – AS (‘like’) + R[iver] in TAL[e], where the story is shortened rather than intrinsically short. Nice stuff!
23. STUN – my last in (‘hit for six’ as in shock with incredible news); S for SON is easy enough, but TUN for ‘butt’ as in beer or wine cask is a usage that will sort out the afore-mentioned championship types from, well, me.

49 comments on “Times 25970 – Staines-upon-Thames: from Ghetto to Cathedral Town?”

  1. Started quickly enough, with 1ac and 6ac in immediately, but I knew that wouldn’t last. POMONA took a while to remember, despite the POM-. As did the RATE part of 11d. HANK came to me when I unwillingly recalled ‘a rag and a bone and a hank o’ hair’ from ‘The Vampire’, which surely has to rank with ‘If’ as a Kipling poem. I hadn’t the vaguest idea who the hell NELLIE DEAN was, but if the song was written in 1905, I don’t think I want to be in a pub where they sing it, or at least when.

    Edited at 2014-12-15 03:46 am (UTC)

    1. Thanks for the ref. to this. Memorable (though not for me up with ‘If’). One of his wonderful ‘nod-and-a-wink’ yarns.

      Edited at 2014-12-15 11:19 am (UTC)

  2. about 15 minutes so close to a personal best for me. I had never heard of NELLIE DEAN so I had to reverse-engineer that one. And I didn’t know POMONA although there is a POMONA BEACH in California so I figured the name must come from somewhere
      1. Yes – one of the Pomonas is a very up-market private college situated in balmy Malibu California. Our next-door neighbour’s son in NYC went there but it was too laid-back for him and he transferred back East to Yale!
        1. I think you may be thinking of Pomona College in Claremont about 30 miles east of Malibu. I only say this because when we visited friends in LA County we stayed at the Sheraton in Pomona.
      2. Turns out even I was confused. Pomona is in California. Pomona Beach is in Florida.

        But Pomona in California is home to one of the two campuses of Cal Poly (the other is in San Luis Obispo, where my son went as it happens) which is the most famous college there.

  3. Back in crosswordland … but still sluggish.
    Had a chuckle at the HOP STALK.
    And … it’s a pangram.

    On edit: at 16dn, does our esteemed blogger overlook “depressed” (BLUE) + TONE*, with a question-mark for a semi-&lit? (Also one of the great record labels.)

    Edited at 2014-12-15 05:38 am (UTC)

    1. You’re right of course. It was just Roger O. Thornhill’s misfortune to leave his table at the wrong time. Will Hitchcock’s heroes never learn?
  5. 35 minutes but a technical DNF as I was unable to get past POM?N? without resort to aids; I simply never heard of the goddess. Other than that I enjoyed it a lot, which is more than can be said for the linked rendition of NELLIE DEAN where, apart from the drunken yowling, that banjoist seemed to be playing the accompaniment to a different song in a completely different time and key! I’m afraid I can’t see any resemblance between this and Ivor Novello’s very moving “Till The Boys Come Home” now better known as “Keep The Home Fires Burning”.

    On edit somewhat later: I’m amazed at the number of contributors new to BLUE NOTE as it’s employed in just about every style of popular music from the early 20th century to the present day. I can only say you’d know it if your heard it if not by name.

    Edited at 2014-12-15 11:39 am (UTC)

  6. 23:37, but had OTONIANS for some unknown reason, and HANG because I’m a software developer.

    Thanks to the setter, and to our wannabe Antipodean blogger. It’s not too late U, you’re already halfway here!

  7. With apologies to our Podean friends, 4 called to mind a snippet of a Barry McKenzie ‘poem’:
    “…and I felt like getting plastered
    but the beer’s crook and the girls all look
    like you, you Pommy bastard.”
  8. 9m, with a narrow escape at 1ac where I very nearly wrote QUADRIPEDS. Fortunately I noticed that there’s no I in ‘squared up’. I didn’t know the goddess or the loop, and the song was only vaguely familiar.
  9. Not a difficult one, but there were enough odd answers (POMONA – knew the city but not the goddess, CROSSPATCH – the wordplay may have admitted other possibilities, NELLIE DEAN – had to trust the wordplay, HANK – knew it was something to do with hair but not exactly what, BLUE NOTE – unknown) that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d had several wrong.

  10. About 45 mins, but with ‘nine’ at 26ac (for no other reason than it’s a square number, and it’s full of letters from ‘linen’), there was no way I could get CROSSPATCH. Should’ve got that one. Especially if we’ve had it before…

    dnk NELLIE DEAN, BLUE NOTE or POMONA, but they went in from wordplay.

  11. 17.04, helped by the emerging pangram with JOURNALIST and by guesswork on POMONA. One of those which looks easier when its finished. I liked the &lit that produced BLUE NOTE, though it took a while to unravel.
    I must be older than I thought. I occasionally find “there’s and old mill by the stream” running as an earworm, with variations on the “Nellie Dean” bit, such as jelly bean. Laugh? I could scream.
  12. WOE is me. One of those days when the solving muscles were awash with lactic acid. I got through it, but with a QUADRAPED at 1a.

    Further problems came from having confidently typed in FLAT NOTE, which made the bottom section interesting.

    All round, bit of a di-sah-ster, dahling.

    Edited at 2014-12-15 09:21 am (UTC)

  13. Never heard of it and my brain fixated on Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean – a song I specially dislike. Also very slow to get “crosspatch” because I was thinking along the lines of “unhand me thou dastardly varlet” and had forgotten the police-speak aspect of “manor”. Which was silly because I was just watching a re-run of Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect. I also thought it was Malle with an accent Ulaca. 17.43 and I’m about to sample the Turkey
  14. Just over 20 minutes. Thought BLUE NOTE had a very neat clue.

    I’ve never heard NELLIE DEAN actually sung in a pub, though I knew the words from my grandmother (a teetotaller and member of the Band of Hope). I otherwise associate the song with stage drunks and maybe Ealing Comedies.

    Knew POMONA as the name of a pub in Gorton, Manchester (perhaps they sang Nellie Dean there). Never appreciated the classical reference and presumed the pub was named after Pomona Dock or a local cotton mill (possibly the one by the stream).

    1. For me the Nellie Dean refrain goes down with Happy Birthday To You as the funereal groan in the Anglo-Saxon gullet.
  15. 11 mins. JOURNALIST was my LOI after STUN. I needed the wordplay for POMONA and it took me a while to see “under the influence of” = “on” even though it was there in plain sight. I thought the clue for DEMISE was very good because I was sidetracked, as I’m sure the setter intended, by trying to think of a word that began with M (end of tandem) that meant “somewhat” until the penny dropped.
  16. 25.50. Neat pangram. Didn’t know blue note. Good mixture of long and short words. Aha for the turkey!
  17. . . . assisted bigtime on the LYI 25ac by suspecting a pangram.

    I have to go back a few years but I have accompanied on the old joanna raucus pub singings of Nellie Dean a number of times as a stand-in pianist. Of the same sort of thing as ‘My Old Man said follow the Van’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. Think Chas and Dave if it helps.

    Am worried about the turkey as last year I failed to spot the clue that I set (although it was there)

    Edited at 2014-12-15 11:47 am (UTC)

  18. I was on for a sub-20 which is my mark for a quick solve, but 5 minutes spent on POMONA took me to 23 minutes.

    DNK Nellie Dean but it went in a lot easier than POMONA. I had a vague idea of a musical note being called a BLUE NOTE but knew the name primarily from the record label, despite having no penchant for listening to jazz.

  19. Undone by a careless quadroped. I blame The Who. I’ll take it up with Rog and Pete when I see them in June. Mind you, quadra-, quadri- and quadro- all look just as likely as quadru-, if not more so.
  20. No one’s mentioned the (for me) wry inclusion of the pun on “bound” in 8D, perhaps as it’s obvious. But it didn’t really need to be there and made me smile.
    And BTW, for those who claim they don’t know Nellie Dean, you may know it by it’s opening phrase, often wrongly taken to be its title – “There’s an old mill by the stream, N D..
    1. I really like clues with that added bit of cleverness, but mostly I miss it… like today… and learn of it from the blog. Two more favourites spring to mind:
      “Not a square meal (5)” for PIZZA, which apart from being a circular meal and not being a square=nutritional meal is also PIAZZA – a square – without an A.
      And “ABC TV (5,3)” in an alphabet jigsaw in Oz, where ABC is the Oz equivalent of the BBC. The answers for A,B,C were AMIN, BOTOX, CORRUPT, so the ABC led to IDIOT BOX. Brilliant!

      18:40, quite quick, with the last few minutes for CROSSPATCH/HANK and JOURNALIST.
      Rob

  21. Couple of interruptions and a nap but around 30m for what at first hinted at being a doddle but ended up a struggle. No unknowns today but dozily unable to spot pan gran and hidden word. Thanks for the blog. Turkey to come after dinner!
  22. 19 minutes today so no major hold-ups. I’m another who used to play NELLIE DEAN for a Saturday night singalong in my local. Also the parody “There’s an old stream by the mill, Fanny Hill. Where I used to take my pill etc” I’m amazed at folks who have never heard of BLUE NOTE but, on the other hand, I’m a person who knows nothing of cricket and golf.
  23. About 20 minutes, ending with HANK/CROSSPATCH. The unknowns came fairly easily from the wordplay, those being NELLIE DEAN and POMONA. Gentle start to the week. Turkey next on the menu for me too. Regards.
  24. 41 minutes. Really well clued with lots of misdirections – new rainwear had me trying get an anagram for far too long until the penny dropped. DNK the cloth definition of hank but figured it must be a loop from sailing hanks holding the sails to the mast or stay. I also confidently put in TALK SHOP rather than SHOP TALK which didn’t help until the checkers helped…. Great puzzle.
  25. 41 minutes (and everything under an hour is good for me, in fact just finishing fills me with delight). I seem to be getting better at using wordplay to decipher the frequent words I have never heard of (or which are unfamiliar because they come from the other side of the ocean, any ocean). In this puzzle these were the three mentioned by Vinyl: CROSSPATCH (good I didn’t guess CROSSPITCH), POMONA (and not POMINA) and NELLIE DEAN (not NELLIE DEEN).

    Has anyone else noticed how frequently somewhat obscure words or expressions will occur in one puzzle and then in several others within a short span of time? In this puzzle it was the FORE in FOREBEAR (as opposed to the “fore” in 17ac) — words one can go for years without using or thinking of, and then they appear several days running. Do the setters have brainstorming sessions, buy words on the black market and then share them around, or what?

    1. I notice it constantly, particularly as a result of solving the Telegraph most days in addition to The Times. It’s not unusual to see the same, not so commonplace word in both puzzles within a day or two, even on the same day. As for the reason? I like to think that in some trendily down-at-heel part of town there’s a setters’ commune where they all hang out, doodling clues on the wall and smoking Gitanes, living on coffee, absinthe and philosophical abstractions, sometimes conducting entire conversations in spoonerisms and anagrams.
  26. Enjoyable puzzle, successfully completed, but I didn’t try to record a time as I tackled in fits and starts between dozes. Stricken with man flu which leaves me prone to dropping …….
  27. 17:53 but…. I goofed on POMONA. I’d put in “pommie”, which then became “pommne” when I got 12ac, and then like a neejit I forgot to fix it. Ah well.

    “Churl” was new to me, though of course I knew “churlish”. I shall now have to look more closely at “admonish”, “diminish” and “squeamish”.

    Regarding {hydrochoos}’s comment on rare words turning up like buses – I’ve noticed this too. I can’t imagine it’s intentional, but then again it’s hard to believe that it’s some sort of subliminal influence on the setters – words are their business, and I’m sure they notice unusual words cropping up in other puzzles. Which leaves coincidence. Maybe.

    1. Trouble with that theory is is, all these puzzles are probably prepared 3 or 4 months before they’re published, and different papers probably have different lead times.
      Rob
  28. 11:04 for me, held up at the end by 17ac (SHOP TALK). I was a bit nervous of the L at first as BLUE NOTE was only vaguely familiar (I think the only time I’ve come across it before is in No. 23,943 from 18 June 2008, but I have to admit to being extremely ignorant of popular music – sorry, jackkt!), but then I spotted STALK and eventually managed to get my brain into gear to parse the clue properly.

    Nevertheless, an interesting and enjoyable start to the week.

  29. If you decide to enliven your next party with French references you may want to remember that ‘zone’ is feminine. The word itself leads something of a double life with some neutral uses (‘zone industrielle’) and some negative ones (c’est la zone’ it’s a dump, wasteland).

    It could be an interesting translation of T S Eliot’s title. The French poet Apollinaire has a famous poem ‘Zone’, in this case a reference to WW1 no man’s land.

    1. Absolutely. ulaca’s French is just terrible. He’s been told before. We should send him on a Berlitz course.
      1. If it makes you feel any better my French was good enough to get me a pretty decent French baccalauréat at a French Lycée in French France and after another twenty-odd years of speaking French more or less every day I still struggle with gender. I missed your ‘le zone’ error completely. It’s just a bit of elementary programming that English speakers lack. I’m trying* to learn Swedish at the moment and there is a similar thing with plurals. Why can’t they just add an an ‘s’ like everyone else?

        *fairly unsuccessfully. My advice to anyone trying to learn a new language: be young.

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