Author: branch

I saw 1ac and thought this might be the Cardiff Times crossword. Oh wait – the Cardiff Times doesn’t exist any more, I gather! Anyway, lovely clue, but not necessarily Welsh.

This week had a mix of quite easy clues and quite hard ones, but happily no obscurity. I loved the thought of harlotry flourishing in a place like 28ac! My LOI was 20dn, where I imagined an answer of the type ‘Model describes his work as impressive’ = I’M POSING. Not close!

This grid looked odd to me until I realised it has mirror symmetry about a diagonal, not the vertical axis. Happily there was nothing crooked about the puzzle.

Not everyone may agree, but for me this was less unsettling than the week before, with less need to take the definitions on trust. I admit 25dn caused a bit of head-scratching! My LOI was the clever 26ac, which put me in mind of Hamlet.

I looked at the long clue across the top and saw the second word immediately – quickly confirmed by looking at 6, 7, and 8dn. The rest of the letters didn’t look remotely like any part of London that I could think of.

Nice to see a reference to ABBA, while they are making their virtual reappearance on stage, even though our household would rather you gave us that old time rock ‘n roll! This puzzle had things that needed reflection – overnight, if not actually after midnight.

This was a smooth solve, until I hit a block trying to explain 17dn. The answer seemed obvious but the poetry of the wordplay was prose to me. Finally it jumped out at me, and there we were!

I struggled a bit with this, although I think it was good clueing rather than obscurity that troubled me. I didn’t know the worm at 1dn, though it may be familiar in Britain. I eventually dredged up the tea at 16 dn – luckily, since I’d never heard of the battle! The wordplay of 5dn was pretty. 

An easy Saturday for me. Luckily the unfamiliar native American had come up earlier this month, generously spelled out on that occasion.

This was a struggle, full of clues that needed careful examination and littered with unfamiliar things like the racehorse and the Polish statesman, and some very long IKEA assembly clues like 9A and 12D. It all came out in the end, with a little help from a friend and more than one “aha” moment.