Author: piquet

An odd crossword, i thought. It took me around 20 minutes to do all but a few clues, mostly gaps in the top half, where I could see an answer but wasn’t clear about the … Read more “Times 27651 – time to brush up your schoolboy Latin”

I took a gentle 29 minutes for this pleasant puzzle, parsing as I went along. There were no real unknowns, although 7d is not a word I’d often seen and 15d is a word that … Read more “Times 27645 – one term or another”

Well, last Wednesday we had one of the hardest on record, and this week I’ll be surprised if our SNITCH gets halfway to last week’s dizzy heights. I polished this off in a steady 18 … Read more “Times 27639 – one coffee was enough.”

Phew! that wasn’t too hard to get finished, but deciphering the nitty gritty of my ‘must be that’ answers for the blog took longer than the solving. For some reason I couldn’t get started anywhere … Read more “Times 27633 – easier to solve than to explain, perhaps.”

Well, this is a fine puzzle, and I suspect not as far up the SNITCH as last Wednesday’s stinker; it took me about half an hour, plus a few diversions into Wikipedia and elsewhere for … Read more “Times 27627 – “the first thing I do of a morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue”.”

I don’t mind hard puzzles, they can be more satisfying even if you don’t quite finish. But I found this one hard to enjoy, even if I did learn a couple of new words. It … Read more “Times 27621 – I needed a wee dram from the closed shop after this”

After ten weeks of blogging the 2019 TCC puzzles retrospectively, each of which many of our community had seen before (if not remembered!), I’m now back on track with this quirky and medium difficulty midweek … Read more “Times 27615 – back to normal, unlike my life.”

Here we are in mid March (almost) and, three months on, I’m blogging the last of last year’s TCC puzzles, the one which finally decided that Mark Goodliffe a.k.a. magoo once again held the big … Read more “Times 275609 – the Final final one, finally.”

Well, the first semi-final puzzle I blogged was easy enough, last week’s was a stinker, and this one I thought was just a bit peculiar. As if set by someone not on our usual radar, … Read more “Times 27603 – third TCC semi-final puzzle. Extra fruity?”

I’m surprised 42 of 80 got this all right, I struggled with some of it for quite a while, taking well over my permitted 20 minutes, and the parsing was tricky. Maybe people had more … Read more “Times 27597 – second TCC semi-final puzzle”