Category: Daily Cryptic

Solving time : 13:45 I solved this in an anti-clockwise direction, rushing down the left hand side, filling in the bottom half, then gradually working up the right to finish with 4D (gasoline), which took … Read more “23472: clever stuff”

Solving time 8:00 One or two clues here could have people struggling. Across 1 HEAD,STREAM – tempted by MAINSTREAM, with “current school” as iffy def, but M??? for 1D looked unpromising so the “main” bit … Read more “23,471 – a few tricky bits”

Solving time: 12:34 Sometimes, if you do something regularly at a particular time in the day, and you then try to do it at a different time of day, it’s harder to get into the … Read more “23,470 – True Blue”

Solving time : 1 hour 6 minutes A good range of clues with straightforward wordplay to get the more difficult answers. Lots of crossword terms featured that are quick to spot now I’ve been doing … Read more “23,469 – I lost the plot towards the end”

Solving time : 5m40s – remarkably just about my slowest this week, though it felt like a good time for this puzzle. Again almost a pangram (just K & V missing, and they’d have been … Read more “23,467 – some much-loved favourites”

Solving time : 11:27 Lots of interesting words in an almost pangrammatic grid. I suppose “bicycle quip” is not a common phrase. I am not very good at sporting references, but for some reason there … Read more “23466: no cricket, no queue”

Solving time: 5:08 This could, and probably should, have been a sub-5 time, but I was delayed by first writing AMEND at 4, and by initially guessing SA(LIE)NT at 25, with part of the wordplay … Read more “23,465 – hurrying too much? / Puzzle difficulty”

Solving time: 8:46 A mixed bag today, including a few old chestnuts, but I seemed to look at the harder clues first – on two or three occasions I spent 10-15 secs on a clue, … Read more “23,464 – Not caught out; if only Flintoff, Jones et al could say the same…”

…did you get the picture of a gang of chimps reclothing Caratacus in old, perished underwear? Solving time : 58 minutes. Quite happy with that time. I was left with two to get and was … Read more “23463 – Gracious me…”

Solving time : 6m08s felt not particularly quick for an easy puzzle, but on reflection a lot of the answers were quite hard, even if the clues weren’t. For instance, I couldn’t have been confident … Read more “23,461 – Little to stir the old sweats (yes, I’m doing it again!)”