Author: Penfold

This week’s puzzle was largely straightforward I think, taking me comfortably under 45 mins to complete.  Maybe the preponderance of fairly straightforward charades & insertions helped.

I’m calling this another puzzle of average difficulty, but with some clever tricks to keep things interesting

Probably of average difficulty.  On review there’s little in the way of obscure vocabulary and while there are some neat touches none of the wordplay is too complicated.

I needed over an hour to plough through this but looking back on the clues while writing up the blog I’m not sure what held me up.

I thought this was pretty straightforward for a holiday season puzzle, breezing through in one session in under 40 minutes.

I toiled with this for about 75 minutes over three sessions but was watching World Cup football at the same time.  It took a while to get going as none of the early acrosses jumped out at me (although with hindsight some of them are very straightforward).

An unremarkable, but perfectly acceptable, Jumbo.  Nothing too easy, nothing too hard.

Tricky, what?  I was struggling through this, thinking I was glad that someone else would have to explain everything in a blog, when my eye was drawn to the puzzle number and I realised that poor individual was me…

Hello once again.  I think we’re in average Jumbo territory here in terms of difficulty.  The usual smattering of GK needs and advanced vocab are here, along with trademark Times well-disguised definitions…

This was a sub-30 minute breeze with no unknowns or anything else to scare the horses, but there were some very good clues, I thought…