Author: piquet

Quite a lot of rather clunky wordplay in this one, with two homophones, and nothing unknown, unless you don’t know breeds of cattle.

This was a first-class puzzle with some devious misdirection and at times witty clueing; it took me around 35 minutes, with the SE segment the last to fall.

A much more enjoyable effort than last Wednesday’s test, taking me about 25 minutes with the SW corner putting up some resistance at the end.

I found this crossword to be of moderate difficulty, but for me it had too many “I suppose it works” clues to be as satisfying as our usual Wednesday offerings. It took me about 40 minutes and a bit longer to parse them all …

My first time blogging for the new site then copied here, as opposed to last week’s when that process was reversed. As it happened, I found this puzzle an easy one and set a new PB by completing it in 10 minutes and a few seconds. Afterwards I looked up 17a on Wikipedia, it was a word I’d heard of in a calendar context but didn’t know what or when it was. Not much else to add about this one.

Another masterpiece of misdirection from our Wednesday setter, it took me nearly 45 minutes in two spells with a break, to do this and parse it all.

This was fun. So many interesting words, I felt like setting the ‘write a short story using all these words’ test which we did once or twice before. My LOI was 27a EVENT – the … Read more “Times 28275 – look sharp, eh?”

For me this was a meatballs sort of puzzle; not exceptionally tasty but filling and quite acceptable. No unknown words, not much else to add; 30 minutes done and parsed. The long anagrams were fun. … Read more “Times 28269 – monkey puzzle, and a bridge too far.”

I really enjoyed this one; not especially hard, it took me half an hour to do and parse, but full of fun and bits of General Knowledge slipped in here and there. I know my … Read more “Times 28263 – a work of art.”

I think our setter was in a good mood when he put this together; I certainly enjoyed the wit and unusual nature of a few of the clues. A little GK was needed to fully … Read more “Times 28257 – what larks!”