Category: Daily Cryptic

A curate’s egg in terms of difficulty, with more hard than not, but that in the end I was happy to nibble on, probably only because I managed to finish with no errors.

  I’m not sure about this one, and it took me over 30. Partly that’s because my guts are doing an audition for the remake of the Mr Creosote sketch, which is a shame because … Read more “28774 It’s not Advent yet.”

A really good, quite difficult test, I thought, with several unusual words and some lateral thinking needed.

I was a little surprised to find 55 minutes on the clock as I finished because I wasn’t aware that I had been solving particularly slowly.

I thought this was going to be an easy Monday when I saw a number of answers as the puzzle came out of the printer, but the some of the remaining clues proved rather formidable.   

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.

Time taken: 8:47.  I may have been on the setter’s wavelength because my time seems a little faster than the average of the early solvers.  I really enjoyed this one, there’s three unusual pieces of … Read more “Times 28768 – deja vu”

What an excellent Wednesday! I don’t know if this was the first of the three Championship semi-final puzzles; it took me just under half an hour to solve and parse, so beyond my 20 minute allowance; I thought it was great fun and very clever in places.

Solving time: 59 minutes with at least the last 20 of these spent on four clues.

No time for this very nice example of the art of crossword setting, as I bombed out on one of the downs, where I did my best with all the crossing letters, but still came … Read more “Times 28765 – Getting my knickers in a twist”