Author: jackkt

This took me 35 minutes with the last 5 spent on 22dn and 29ac. It felt more like a Monday puzzle (until recently) rather than a typical Friday and the setter kindly provided four easy … Read more “24890 – The New Monday?”

My solving time was off the scale even with generous use of aids after 60 minutes in order to get the thing finished and the blog started. I began well with 1ac and 1dn going … Read more “24878 – Hope I’m not alone…”

This took me 40 minutes but I think I can knock off 5 of those for being on blog duty and feeling the need to double-check everything before committing to paper. Certainly it felt like … Read more “Times 24866”

Time taken to solve: 45 minutes with one cheat on the final answer. This was mostly fairly straightforward  with one notable exception. In many cases I solved the clues from definition alone but the wordplay … Read more “24854”

After a good start I made rather heavy weather of this and took the best part of an hour to complete it. The RH side and most of the NW (excepting the elusive 9dn) went … Read more “Times 24842 – A Lion Called Wallace”

My time taken to solve this was off the scale for the third consecutive day. I made a good start in the NE corner but quickly ground to a halt and after that it was … Read more “Times 24830 – Could have been worse, but not by much…”

I completed all of this bar three in 35 minutes but took another 20 to finish it off. The sticking points were the interlocking obscurities at 1ac and 2dn and having only vowels as checkers … Read more “24818 – Gone to the dogs?”

This took me a good hour and left me with several things to look up and check before writing the blog. As so often recently I’m not sure whether it really was as hard as … Read more “24806 – Not so glorious 25th March”

This took me 31 minutes which is pretty good by my standards so I doubt it will have detained the speed-merchants for too long. I scanned through the first five or six clues both Down … Read more “24794 – Marie’s the name…”

Unaccountably this took me 40 minutes to solve and having now written the blog I am completely baffled as to why. Apart from 16ac which has relatively complicated wordplay and the answer is an unfamiliar … Read more “24782 – More like DT”