Category: Daily Cryptic

I seemed to click with this one.

  17.58, but as I was going through this write up, I was increasingly convinced that it should have been quicker. Lots of clearly telegraphed first, last and middle letters, and a compendium of very … Read more “29338 End of a (brief) era.”

I am standing in for Piquet today and will be blogging every other Wednesday for a while. Fortunately, a fairly benign offering to start things off with..

A very slow solve

I thought his puzzle was going to give trouble, so I picked off some of the easier clues to get started.   The setter offers some novel constructions, and is definitely fond of removing letters from words. 

DNF! This was very difficult. I have a mild case of COVID, which did mean I fell asleep for a few minutes while solving, but that’s hardly an excuse. I managed maybe half of the puzzle, but was thoroughly defeated here.

Time taken: 11:41. Ground to a halt for a while and had to bring out some paper to work on some longer answers and anagrams.

A pleasant workout with a nice balance of wordplay types.

Delayed at the end by two clues.

Possibly, a good one in terms of constructions for those contemplating a move to the main cryptic from the Quickie, but with some tricky vocab. So, don’t despair if you have a go, but can’t lick it!