Author: mctext

Solving time: 27 minutes. The Pardoner dogs me yet again on my blogging day.A straightforward solve apart from the complications of 17dn. Yet another A-Level text.   Across  1 NO SPRING + CHICKEN.  9 GL(AS,SW)ARE. … Read more “Times 24876: Radix malorum est”

Solving time: 49 minutes. A more difficult puzzle than the previous three qualifiers I thought. Or maybe this was because I did it after the substitute puzzle from 1951 which had me in entirely the … Read more “Times 24864, 4th Qualifier, 1st June”

Solving time: 18 minutes. By no means difficult this morning; though it was hard to know which answers to omit. Thought there was some complex math(s) going on at 15 but it turns out to … Read more “Times 24870: Every 18 has a cloud … 1ac 21 that!”

Time taken: 1hr & 14m First of all, apologies to Tim for not posting yesterday. 24857 was a great puzzle I thought and I had much to say; but the blog was up a bit … Read more “Times 24858: Lifts bowler, scratches head”

Solving time: 14 minutes. Looks like I scored the dreaded frugal cluer again. So one of those puzzles where you can’t see much to start with but which falls into place quite quickly. The five … Read more “Times 24852: Why did the two chooks cross the M1?”

Solving time: 22 minutes. Another straightforward Qualifier, bolstering suspicions that they’re after a goodly pile of £15 15-acrosses. Had to look up ‘existence’ for ENTITY and check on the material constitution of the RUCHE.   … Read more “Times 24840, 3rd Qualifier, 4th May”

Solving time: 28 minutes. Music (apologies to Vinyl): as above. Several cases of fill in the answers, then puzzle over the parsing. The problem with this approach is (as I did) to scrawl in SUBTITLE … Read more “Times 24846 — Bo-de-O-doh!”

Solving time: 16 minutes. Went through this pretty quickly while hanging around in a waiting room. The only real problems were in the SE corner where I almost failed the Turing Test and nearly became … Read more “Times 24834: L’eau ebb?”