Category: Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 43:30 A lot easier than last week’s Tuesday and a lot harder than yesterday’s. I made quite good progress at first, so good that I thought another sub-30’ was in the cards, but … Read more “Times 23697/tough birds”

Solving time: 20:40Shaved 2 minutes off my previous personal best from last Thursday, but this time I did understand all the wordplay as I entered the answers! Almost – see 2D. I thought I was … Read more “23696 – easy Monday”

Solving time: 3:52 Howler of the week goes to 21dn. (If in fact this is my howler then apologies in advance to setter and readers; I probably won’t be able to reply to any comments … Read more “ST 4239 (Sun 26 Aug) – Water rabies”

I don’t usually encourage setter-naming here, as I don’t want to amend the anonymity policy of The Times on their behalf, but just occasionally, rules can be broken. In a posting last November, I mentioned … Read more “23691 Postscript – Congratulations Anax!”

Nothing too challenging today – a couple of unusual words that were easy to guess from the wordplay. Solving time – 8m22s ACROSS 1 SHOW-B(lue)OAT – The word length for this should have been (4,4) … Read more “23,694 – Showboating”

Solving time: 12:18 I enjoyed this puzzle. Interesting words but no particularly obscure ones, and good surfaces. Annoyingly, it took me a long time to get two easy-looking ones: the long anagram at 3D (BE … Read more “23,693 – a maze of twisty little passages, all different”

Solving time 6:20 Started this at high speed, filling in most of the NW and hoping for a clean sweep until I got to 6D, where I (a) looked for “catches up” to match ???S … Read more “23,692 – easy enough”

Solving time: 41:30 I was doing quite well on this for the NE, SE, SW quadrants only to spend 20 minutes on the NW. And I’m from the Pacific NW – very embarrassing. Some fix-ups … Read more “Times 23691/mixed results”

Solving time of 51 minutes Quite a straightforward start to the week. There were a few things that annoyed me slightly, such as the apostrophes in 21A and 26A, but it was all pretty soluble. … Read more “23690 – eh?”

Solving time: 20:44, one mistake (9ac) A disaster, mostly because 5dn (“An improvement on medical attention” (10)) took me nearly 15 minutes but also because having finally got there, and correctly guessed 24dn after some … Read more “ST 4238 (Sun 19 Aug) – Chicken pox”