Author: plusjeremy

36:40. I found this quite difficult, although several times I had the correct answer, rejected it, only discovering later that I’d been correct. The lower-right corner was particularly tricky.

21:31. Often a puzzle will be obviously easy or hard. This was not one of those puzzles for me. It started very easy and I thought it might be one of my fastest solves yet. But then things got more difficult, and I don’t know if that reflects my fatigue or the true nature of the puzzle. In any case, I finished in a decent time, although some clues I didn’t fully parse while solving.

23:15. This was a very fine puzzle, with some real head-scratchers for me. I feel I was at a definite disadvantage being from the US, so I’m interested to hear how you all got on.

15:09. Every once in awhile, a puzzle comes along that is so good that you almost can’t believe somebody created it. Like a great piece of music you can listen to over and over again, or a gripping novel you can’t put down. For me, this was one of those puzzles. I would solve one clue and marvel at the witty wordplay — only to find the setter outdid themselves on the very next clue. All I can say is, bravo.

54:45. This is the first puzzle I’ve done in a long time where I really had to turn over the meanings of words multiple of times before I found the required meaning. Very subtle, very sneaky, and very satisfying to finish. I am sure I am not alone in having found much of this puzzle fairly easy, but the hard bits were especially chewy.

Yes, I took a nap in the middle. Most of this puzzle went fine, but by the end I was shouting unspeakable vulgarities at the computer, trying to get my brain to come up with the right synonyms. I finally got there in 37:56.

DNF. I did well here. Fell asleep at one point, woke up re-energized and finished all but one. Lots of clever clueing here and tasty answers. In the end, I was stumped by a clue where I knew neither the definition nor a relevant piece of wordplay.

38:00, with the last four or five clues taking 10–15 minutes! I worked on this one with my seven-year-old son, who had several good ideas, and was racing alongside me, trying to figure out how these things work.

The puzzle started easily enough with 1 Across, but I got bogged down on the right-hand side towards the end and had to grind it out a letter at a time. Still, I imagine others will find this on the easier side.

DNF. I finished more than half of this one, and then started falling asleep uncontrollably for five minutes at a time. Very very tired coming out of a bout of Covid in our family, so I’ll have to count this one as a loss!

33:24. Not bad for a barely functioning brain! First week back in the classroom, alongside my own research and my kids’ hectic schedules meant that I couldn’t really focus on this one. It seemed like a solid puzzle; nothing jumped out at me.