Author: Zabadak

Certainly not as tough as yesterday’s, and I stopped the clock at 17 minutes dead. You do need a tiny bit of history awareness for the battleground and there are a couple of archaisms that … Read more “27358 Thursday, 23 May 2019 Drag night?”

How anyone expects a coherent blog from me this evening after the ridiculously improbable progression of Spurs into the Champions League Final I cannot tell, but I’ll try. I polished this off in 17.09, which … Read more “27346 Thursday, 9 May 2019 Keep taking the tablets”

I made rather a dog’s brexit of this one, badly mis-entering 5d and thus rendering 13ac as vaguely plausible AMNESTY and making 6d impossible.  Dozing off didn’t help this fluffery, so a not-difficult crossword stretched … Read more “Cryptic No 27334 Thursday, 25 April 2019 This be the verse”

Not as much “fun” as George had last week, which is probably just as well. I didn’t initially get much at the top end, and bumbled through the lower clues steadily enough before discovering that … Read more “Times Cryptic No 27322 Thursday, 11 April 2019 Definitive”

An amiable piece of work, with pleasures to be found on the way and enough misdirection to keep it interesting. The right side went in quicker than the left for me, possibly because 1 across … Read more “27310 Thursday, 28 March 2019 Look for the bare necessities”

I found this quite sticky and, even allowing for time taken to lovingly extract the full measure of each clue (except the troublesome 27 across), my 32.48 is unlikely to set the world on fire. … Read more “Cryptic No 27298 Thursday, 14 March 2019 Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate”

I am away for the next two weeks floating around the Caribbean with Mrs Z and suspect a lack of reliable communications, so George has kindly swapped dates with me, which means you get both … Read more “27280 Thursday, 21 February 2019 In our district yaks are quite rare”

Well now, if I say this took me 13.58, including checking for typos and making sure all my wordplay worked, you’ll understand that, in my opinion, it’ll show up in the greenest green of the … Read more “27274 Thursday, 14 February 2019 Be mine, just for today..”

Thursday, 31 January 2019 Another pleasant Thursday stroll accomplish in 15.47, making sure of the wordplay elements perhaps marginally extending the time. I abandoned that search for certainty with the very last clue, though it … Read more “27262 Thursday, 31 January 2019 Can I do you now, sir?”

There’s rather a pleasant spread of general knowledge in this one in the sense that you probably have most of it knocking around not too far from the surface: places, people, flora, fauna, astronomy and … Read more “Times Cryptic No 27250 Thursday, 17 January 2019 Pick any one of two”